Maybe ten minutes into Transformers One, the computer-animated prequel to the entire existing saga of Hasbro’s robots in disguise, Scarlett Johansson’s focused mining manager Elita says to Chris Hemsworth’s idealistic worker Orion Pax, “You don’t have the touch or the power.” It’s a clunky, forced reference to a cheesy power ballad from the original 1986 animated Transformers movie, and it seemed like a bad sign that Transformers One was going to be the kind of film more concerned with winking bits of fan service than with telling a compelling story of its own. Thankfully, however, while it’s ultimately uneven and lacking the inventiveness or visual splendor it would have needed to be truly great, T1 manages to have more smarts and depth than it first lets on. It could serve as a setup for better films to follow, now that all the “origin story” table setting is out of the way.
And make no mistake, this is an origin story top to bottom, and we know how it’s going to end even before it starts. Chris Hemsworth’s character may be called Orion Pax by everyone around him, but we know from the moment we first see him, already sporting that iconic blue and red, that he will be Optimus Prime before all is said and done. This is a movie that, you might say, exists in the context of all that came before it, so your own investment in Transformers will inevitably color your experience. For my part, I was already of moviegoing age when that 1986 cartoon hit theaters, and if the late, great James Earl Jones’ incredible performance as Darth Vader defined malice and evil for me as a child, Peter Cullen’s work as Optimus Prime defined goodness and virtue just as much. In his acting, he conveyed so much: warmth, compassion, decency, thoughtfulness, a concern with the greater good, a reluctant willingness to sacrifice if that’s what was necessary to do what was right.
When we first meet Orion Pax as he recklessly sneaks into a facility where classified archives are kept in the hopes of learning something he can use to help end the shortage of precious energon plaguing the robots of Cybertron, it’s hard to imagine him growing into the measured, thoughtful leader we know him to be. He wants to make the world better, sure, but he’s also a bit of a goofball, a bit impulsive. To Hemsworth’s credit, however, he finds a path with his voice performance that reflects how the experiences Orion endures over the course of the film change him. And the screenplay smartly takes him through such galvanizing, radicalizing experiences that we believe he would be forever changed.
The origin story ultimately works because it all feels deeply personal for Orion, and it feels personal because of the relationship at its center. Orion’s best friend is his fellow mining bot D-16, voiced by Brian Tyree Henry, one of the most exciting actors working today. And as surely as we know that Orion will be Optimus before the credits roll, we know that D-16, at first his fast friend, will become his eternal nemesis, Megatron. Together, the two of them—along with Elita and Keegan-Michael Key’s B-127 (who someday will be Bumblebee but for now prefers to refer to himself as Badassatron)—go on a journey, discovering truths that will shake Cybertronian society to its core. It helps that some of those truths come from the wonderful voice of Laurence Fishburne, a welcome presence as a robot named Alpha Trion. In one moment, as he’s illuminating long-lost realities of Cybertron’s past, he suggests that the true meaning of “Transformer” may have less to do with being able to change one’s shape and more with being able to change the world. That’s a pretty cool idea.
But how do we go about trying to create that change? How do we react when we learn difficult truths, when we learn that the things we believed in were a lie? It’s natural, sometimes even good, to be angry. Anger can fuel us in our desire to fight for something better. But it can also consume us. The most fascinating thing about the plot of Transformers One isn’t the deep, dark secrets that Orion and his friends discover. It’s the way that Orion learns what kind of leader he wants to be by watching what D-16’s anger over those discoveries does to him, and deciding what kind of leader he doesn’t want to be.
It’s heartbreaking and a little horrifying seeing how D-16 is changed by the truths he learns and the injustices he discovers. He’s all the more compelling as a villain because we understand why he’s so outraged, and we feel the pain Orion feels in watching his friend lose his way. Near the end of the film, his simmering rage leads him to commit a shocking act of public brutality against another robot, and it’s tragic to see him become a demagogue who uses the rhetoric of dominance and violence to appeal to the basest impulses of those who end up following him–those who become the Decepticons. While Optimus becomes something like a labor organizer, using solidarity to encourage oppressed robots to toss off their chains and arguing that “freedom and autonomy are the rights of all sentient beings,” Steve Buscemi’s Starscream expresses the opposing ideology like this: “The idea of a unified Cybertron is a myth. The only thing that matters is the strength of one bot to dominate all.” It’s an idea that many find seductive at times, but it offers nothing but rot. (I feel like there’s something relevant in this kids’ cartoon to current events but I can’t quite put my finger on it.)
Anyway, the film’s climax is strong, a showdown which crystallizes the identities of these two friends-turned-adversaries and left me eager to see more of them, now that they are the Optimus Prime and Megatron we’ve known for so long. (It even, to my delight, nods to Optimus’ long history as a kind of Christ figure.) But that’s not quite enough to make Transformers One a great film in its own right. For most of its runtime it’s passably enjoyable, but sorely lacking the kind of ingenuity a film like this needs to establish itself as more than just another piece of corporate entertainment. There are no sequences here on par with the awe-inspiring action of the Spider-Verse films, for instance, nor any imagery as memorable as the unforgettable planet-sized robot Unicron from the 1986 Transformers movie.
I saw the film in 3D, which definitely enhances the film’s visuals, giving the central setting of Iacon City a wonderfully layered depth, but Transformers One never figures out how to make the most of its vistas in its action scenes, which often feel like arbitrary diversions from the story rather than involving sequences that contribute to the film or our understanding of the characters in a meaningful way. An early racing scene, for instance, just kind of happens, offering lots of sensory diversion with plenty of robots zooming really fast, but it’s hard to feel invested in it because it’s not shot in a particularly exciting way and Orion and D-16 just kind of fumble their way through it. It’s not until that final showdown, when the characters are each fighting desperately for what they believe in and the stakes feel truly high, that the action really starts to land. In this emotionally heightened context, a callback (or, I guess, call forward, since this is a prequel) to a famous line from another Transformers movie feels not like the clunky reference-dropping that Transformers One indulges in a bit too often, but like a real, defining moment in the relationship between these two, and man, it hurts.
Like a number of origin stories, Transformers One has the problem of ending right when it feels like things are really getting underway. Now that the dynamic is established and we understand that Optimus Prime and Megatron are two leaders with fundamentally different ideologies and approaches to the idea of making things better for those who’ve been wronged, I can see stronger films following in its wake, direct sequels that continue the story on Cybertron long before the robots make their way to Earth. And if and when those films come, Transformers One may feel more vital and necessary in retrospect, the setup we had to get through so that those films could dig deeper into the versions of these characters that are established here. But for now, at least, Transformers One is good but not great, a film with an involving relationship arc at its core that spends too much time taking jabs at rival toy GoBots and explaining why Starscream’s voice has always been so annoying, rather than giving us great action sequences or truly inventive visuals. But, then again, this is only the beginning.
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