VERDICT: Lore-crazed fans will devour this animated prequel that is, at the very least, slightly more intentionally funny than the Michael Bay live-action franchise.
“Do you want to know how Optimus Prime and Megatron went from being best friends to mortal enemies?” If you can answer that question with an unironic “Yes,” then Transformers One is for you. And perhaps only you.
An animated prequel that lays out the origin story for these two characters — originally toys, and then later the subject of cartoons, comic books, and crazily successful live-action movies — Transformers One fills in the backstory for the legendary “robots in disguise,” but there’s little here for viewers who come in with no investment in this universe, cinematic or otherwise. It proves that this mechanized world and its inhabitants are better suited to cartoon form than the headache-inducing Michael Bay movies. Still, it’s ultimately another piece of elaborate fan service that will bore the uninitiated.
Once upon a time, the two titans of Transformers were just lowly miners: Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth) is constantly hatching schemes to recover a lost power source, the Matrix of Leadership. With that powerful talisman, the planet of Cybertron would no longer have to send workers like Orion and his best pal D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry) down into the mines to obtain the precious Energon that fuels the planet.
After attempting to impress the planet’s charismatic leader, Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm), by participating in a city-wide race — miners Orion and D-16 compete at a disadvantage since they lack the inner cogs that allow them to transform into motorized vehicles — the two buddies find themselves exiled to sub-level 50, where they meet neurotic motormouth B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key) and discover a communication chip that might indicate the location of the Matrix of Leadership. The trio and Orion and D-16’s former boss Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) head off in pursuit, only to uncover secrets that will shake up everything they think they know about their planet and its heroes.
Transformers One is built on “aha” moments, wherein the viewer realizes that, for instance, D-16 will eventually become Megatron, and B-127 will evolve into Bumblebee; for anyone not “aha” -ing, the film succeeds not so much as an animated adventure — the faster the pace becomes, the more blurry the visuals — but as a comedy. This cast, which also includes Steve Buscemi as Starscream, is eminently qualified to swap one-liners, and the film is most effective when Johansson’s Elita grows irritated by her blustering peers or when Key’s B-127 nerds out about everything and nothing. (The live-action Transformers movies also loaded its ensembles with overqualified actors, including John Turturro, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich, to name but a few.)
The character designers haven’t figured out a way to make these metal-faced characters particularly expressive, and their visages exist in an unappealing limbo between rubbery and stolid. The 3D presentation doesn’t add much, although there are a few stirring sequences in which cars and trains travel through the city on pathways that appear in front of the vehicles and disappear behind them. Also not helping matters is the generic score by Brian Tyler; at times, the music resembles the sound bed under the pre-show announcements about locating the theater exits and disposing of one’s trash.
Screenwriters Eric Pearson, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari do, at least, attempt to build Optimus Prime and Megatron into more than simple good-guy/bad-guy figures; after they discover corruption at the heart of their planet’s leadership, a rage-driven Megatron wants to launch mass executions while the more sober-minded Optimus Prime favors something along the lines of a truth and reconciliation commission. But the writers also understand that viewers are here for the cool robots, like the treacherous Airachnid (Vanessa Liguori), a multi-eyed, multi-legged creature that can turn into a flying drone.
The elephant in the room (sold separately) of every Transformers adaptation, of course, is the fact that it’s an exalted toy commercial. Barbie may have found the sweet spot of both celebrating and critiquing a beloved line of products, but the Transformers have no desire to gaze into their own welded navels. On that level, a movie with aged-down variants of Optimus Prime and the gang exists to launch a new line of slightly altered figures, not much different than the people at Funko reissuing their statuettes of Superman or Strawberry Shortcake or Michael Scott from The Office, now covered in glitter for a limited time only. Transformers One is a collector’s item in the literal sense, in that it’s an item for no one else.
