The latest outing of the robots in disguise abandons its blockbuster credentials, and it’s all the better for it. Here’s our Transformers One review.
It’s strange to think that, of all the films based on toys we’ve had in cinemas since 2020 (Barbie, Tetris, The Beanie Bubble, et al), Transformers One is only really the second to be aimed squarely at a young audience. Even then, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (which is technically based on a comic book anyway) offered old folks a degree of respite with a grungy-Spider-Verse art style and the half-shelled heroes’ signature anarchism.
It’s equally strange that the Transformers franchise, eight feature films in, has spent most of the last 17 years appealing to teenage boys and your mate’s mate who you wish you weren’t obliged to keep inviting to the pub. 2018’s Bumblebee was the first film to break the series’ tradition of being both uncomfortably leery and headache-inducingly dull. A sweet, low-stakes buddy story of a girl and her cute robot pal, Travis Knight’s live action prequel nonetheless continued the series’ ongoing downward trend in box office returns – a trend last year’s Rise Of The Beasts (dull, not leery) seemed happy to continue.
Now, with Transformers One, we finally have a film that’s abandoned all its four-quadrant blockbuster ambitions to focus on the market the series should have been catering to all along. Depicting the early friendship of a young Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree-Henry) before they a) could transform and b) were called Optimus Prime and Megatron, the series’ first animated feature since 1986’s The Transformers: The Movie finds our young scamps toiling as mining robots on a vaguely dystopian vision of Cybertron before a series of mishaps send them hurtling up to a war-ravaged surface.
With a completely needlessly stacked cast also including Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi, Laurence Fishburne and Jon Hamm, there’s an argument that this is the most expensive episode of a Saturday morning cartoon ever made. It’s also likely one of the best. The animation, though lacking the same stylistic flair of Mutant Mayhem or Spider-Verse, is brightly coloured and rock-solid, helped by Josh Cooley’s direction which places the camera in interesting places often enough to distract from the characters’ disturbingly non-robotic faces.
The story feels similarly uncompromising in its loyalty to the huge quantity of Transformers lore that’s built up over the years. Characters throw words like Quintessons, Cogs and “The Matrix Of Leadership” at each other with an earnestness as endearing as it is occasionally baffling. As someone who never fell too deep into the Autobot-Decepticon rabbit hole as a child, One does sometimes feel a bit like sticking my head in a kind of audiovisual kaleidoscope.
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Still, as the enjoyable action-movie plot romps along with some genuinely inventive set pieces and a chuckle or two (Key’s Bumblebee is a particular highlight), it’s hard to leave Transformers One feeling short-changed. There’s not a whole bunch here for anyone with a mortgage, but then that’s what the series should have been all along. Your kids are gonna love it.
Transformers One arrives in UK cinemas from 11th October.
