The Movie Guru: ‘Transformers One’ is the best Transformers movie in years
Paramount Pictures/Courtesy photo
When I first heard they were making an animated “Transformers” prequel, I was less than thrilled.
Prequels in general have an unfortunate tendency to be poorly made cash-grabs, and in a series that has unabashedly been about selling toys from the very beginning that fate seemed even more likely than usual. The sudden presence of a random girl Transformer no one had ever heard of before only added to the “we wrote this screenplay on a financial spreadsheet” vibe, and as much as I love animation, the switch in style from live-action felt like simply a ploy to save money.
Imagine my surprise when “Transformers One” turned out to be the best Transformers movie in years.
A sweet, slightly goofy buddy comedy that transforms (see what I did there) into an unexpectedly impactful war movie, “Transformers One” delivers the start of an unexpectedly well-thought-out backstory for the entire franchise. It’s more narratively interesting and coherent than pretty much all the big-budget movies, actually focusing on the titular characters rather than a random human and the nonsense plot device of the week. Transformers fans of all ages will enjoy it, and even some non-Transformers fans might get sucked in.
The movie starts with Optimus Prime (known as Orion Pax) and Megatron (known as D-13) as best friends working in the mines on Cybertron. The planet lost its free flow of vital energy after the last war, and Orion drags D-13 into helping him find the device that would turn it back on again. What they discover, however, is a secret so big that it will change not only their lives but the future of the entire planet.
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Though I’ve tried to avoid too many spoilers, a certain amount are inevitably baked into any prequel. The entire history of the franchise demands that Orion and D-13 become both leaders and mortal enemies, and with that knowledge other plot points were pretty easy to predict. The studio seems to be hoping this is the start of a trilogy, and knowledge of what canonically happens to the Transformers home planet casts a shadow over these potential films.
But instead of running away from all that, the creative team took it surprisingly seriously. The battle/revolution scenes carried some real emotional weight, appropriate beginnings for two bots who would essentially become wartime leaders. It was good to have them finally as the center of the movie, rather than some random humans, and if anything I wish the movie was longer so we could have had more of it.
The movie also clearly tried to handle its obvious toy tie-in elements with thoughtfulness and care. There is an unexpectedly subtle nod to the Maximals last seen in 2023’s “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” and they handled the “girls are pink” idea better than any previous film. A character voiced by Laurence Fishburne is also largely pink, and pink and purple seem to be scattered about among background characters with no obvious reference to gender.
It’s not a perfect movie, but it made me feel more deeply about Transformers than I thought was possible. I may not have been looking forward to “Transformers One,” but I’ve never been so happy to be wrong.
Grade: Three stars
Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Denver Film Critics Society. Find her on Twitter at @wardellwriter or drop her a line at themovieguruslc@gmail.com
