I was always thought the origin of the Transformers involved Hasbro partnering with a Japanese toy company to import a line of miniature robots that could transform into various vehicles and gadgets. The new animated movie Transformers One offers an alternative fictional history for these characters -- one, bafflingly, set during a time before the main characters could transform. For most of the movie, they're technically not Transformers. They're less than meets the eye.
That's how we first find the franchise's stalwart hero and villain, Optimus Prime and Megatron -- or, as they're known here, Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry). Rather than leaders of a Transformer civil war for control of their home planet Cybertron, Orion and D-16 are lowly "no-cogs"; robots born without the "transformation cog" in their chest that would enable them to morph into an 18 wheeler or a tank.
Their inability to transform marks Orion and D-16 as lower-class citizens; they and their fellow no-cogs are forced to perform menial but essential tasks; mostly mining the "Energon" fuel used to power everyone and everything on Cybertron. Energon once flowed all over Cybertron, or so we're told (over and over -- if you took a shot every time someone talked about "flowing" Energon in Transformers One you would die of alcohol poisoning).
Then a devastating war with another planet 50 "cycles" ago killed all but one of the "Prime" Transformers who ruled the Cybertron, and cut off the flow (the precious flow!) of Energon. In the ensuing chaos, the "Matrix of Leadership" that powered the entire planet was also lost. Now only one Prime remains (Jon Hamm's Sentinel Prime) to police and protects Cybertron from further alien invasions.
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Orion Pax helpfully conveys all of this information to the audience in Transformers One's first few minutes by sneaking into an abandoned archive and watching what amounts to a Cybertronian PowerPoint presentation narrated by Laurence Fishburne. Fishburne's history lesson convinces Pax that he can find the Matrix of Leadership; he then convinces the reluctant D-16 to help him. Cue a quest filled with frantic chases, clumsy wisecracks, and several additional sidekicks, including a sanctimonious miner bot named Elita (Scarlett Johansson) and a motormouthed trash incinerator named B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key).
Although very little "Bee" says is actually funny, the sheer fact that he won't shut up is designed as an in-joke for hardcore Transformers fans, because B-127 eventually becomes Bumblebee, and in the previous (technically later) Transformers movies, Bumblebee is a mute who can only communicate through clips of songs he plays on his car stereo.
When I was six years old, I was one of those hardcore Transformers fans. I had several well-loved Transformers toys, including Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, and my other favorite, a little green and yellow bot that turned into a flying saucer. As I got older, I moved on to other interests, little realizing that I would spend a not-insignificant percentage of my professional career watching and writing about Transformers movies. (One is, somewhat ironically given its title, the eighth film in the franchise in the last 17 years.) Life is strange sometimes.
After decades of experience with the Transformers in various forms, I have come to the following conclusion: They make better toys than movies. As toys, you get the puzzling-solving pleasures of manipulating a jeep or a fighter jet into a cleverly articulated cyborg. As movies, you sit passively as endless reams of nonsensical mythology involving advanced alien machines wash over you. Transformers One, for example, firmly establishes that these aliens are "born" and not built, which raises all sorts of questions about the reproductive systems of robots that a PG-rated cartoon is not remotely equipped to answer. Transformers One also introduces the notion of a stratified Transformer society, including a working class that can't transform because of some physical defect in their design. While that could theoretically serve as the basis for a compelling story with social or political subtext, Transformers One doggedly refuses to go anywhere near those ideas.
Of course, Orion Pax and D-16 will eventually acquire the cogs they need to transform, but roughly an hour of this 100-minute movie passes before that happens. That means that for the majority of this movie's runtime, Transformers One can't even take advantage of the big thing it has going for it: The freedom afforded by the medium of animation to cut loose with really creative character designs. A Transformers toy is limited by the realities of physics and engineering. An animated robot can look like anything and turn into anything. But because of this movie's story, that freedom is severely limited. There's really only one distinctive Transformer in the entire film: A hovercraft surveillance drone that turns into a spindly spider-like bot named Airachnid.
The rest of the core cast is recycled from the Transformers canon and appear in familiar but slightly simplified form, at least until they get cogged up and begin to resemble their previous incarnations. Their traditional voices have all been replaced as well. Instead of Peter Cullen as the wise, thoughtful Optimus Prime, Hemsworth offers a slightly more youthful slightly (and slightly more generic) riff on the same battle-hardened gravitas. The best vocal performance in Transformers One by far comes from Brian Tyree Henry, who puts so much feeling into D-16 rapid transformation into the menacing Megatron that you almost buy that he goes from Orion's loyal bestie to his sworn mortal enemy in the span of about 10 minutes.
I imagine kids in the core Transformers audience will have a decent time with Transformers One. It's certainly colorful, with nearly as much chaotic visual energy as the Michael Bay Transformers movies. (It is, mercifully, a bit more coherent on a story level than most of Bay's Transformers, which is a plus.) Personally, though, a Transformers movie where the Transformers mostly don't transform wouldn't be my first choice.
Additional Thoughts:
-Not to be that guy, but I have to say this: I'm not sure why a movie that is clearly aimed at younger kids (and rated PG) needs to have the Bumblebee character jokingly refer to himself as "Badassitron" -- and not just once, but repeatedly. It's practically his catchphrase. Children are absolutely going to mimic him, and parents are absolutely going to have to deal with that. As a parent myself, I can tell you: This kind of stuff becomes a huge pain in the assitron.
-It's funny how two of the fall's big movies for kids -- Transformers One and Wicked -- are essentially two gender-swapped versions of the same story: Prequels about how a famous hero and villain pair from fiction were actually friends before their relationship fell apart. One more blockbuster like this and we've got a full-blown trend!