When stuck knee-deep in the bloated mythology of animated prequel Transformers One, it's helpful to remember that these robot characters were initially created for a single purpose: to sell toys. All of the convoluted back stories and world-building have come not from original ideas, but from a need to justify the existence of new and different plastic items to sell to children (and, increasingly, to grown-up children). That's not to say that some semblance of creativity can't seep into various Transformers media, but that every adaptation starts from a substantial artistic deficit and must struggle to rise from there.
So why even struggle? That seems to be the approach that director Michael Bay took with his five punishing, cacophonous live-action Transformers movies, and Bay's assaultive filmmaking style proved perfect for a franchise that is largely about pummeling its audience into a consumer frenzy. Bay is credited as a producer on Transformers One, which is ostensibly a prequel to his films but requires no knowledge of them (or, really, of anything at all) to process, because none of the convoluted connections make any difference.
Set on the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron, Transformers One explores the formative years of future enemies Optimus Prime and Megatron, who will eventually lead the Autobots and Decepticons, respectively. A mere 3 billion years before arriving on Earth in the Bay movies, the young and disturbingly sexy-looking Optimus is a mining bot named Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth), and Megatron is his buddy and fellow miner D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry). They toil underground to extract Energon, the glowy stuff that powers all Transformers, which once flowed freely but has since dried up after the ur-Transformers known as Primes fell in a battle against alien invaders and lost the all-important Matrix of Leadership.
Again: None of this matters.
There's a mystical doohickey that the Transformers need to get, and there's an obviously sinister leader keeping them all in line with urgent threats and inflated promises while he claims to be looking for it. Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm) is a pretty weak villain, but he's mostly an afterthought anyway, since the real focus of the story is on the falling-out between Orion and D-16, so they can become the characters that fans know and, for some reason, love.
That results in lots of Star Wars prequel-style box-checking, with winking references to various Transformers concepts and catchphrases... plus a GoBots joke. Orion and D-16 team-up with the annoyingly yappy B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key) and their by-the-book supervisor Elita (Scarlett Johansson) to search for the Matrix of Leadership, restore justice to Cybertron, etc.
For most of the movie, they can't even do the one thing that Transformers are known for, since part of the Cybertronian caste system denies lower-level bots the "cog" that facilitates transformation. Instead of changing into cars or planes or whatever, they just walk around and make stale quips. There are hints of some kind of class-consciousness allegory based around the oppression of mining bots, but hints are all that the screenplay can muster.
The action scenes are competently staged — and slightly more coherent than the Bayhem of the live-action movies — but they're also entirely forgettable. The slick animation style looks expensive but soulless. Like many of its animated predecessors, Transformers One is remarkably violent for a movie targeted primarily toward an audience of children, although since the Transformers are sentient robots with a questionable connection to mortality, the potential consequences of that violence are easily dismissed. The creators can wallow in death and destruction without having to follow through on the implications.
Director Josh Cooley previously helmed Toy Story 4, so he has some experience imbuing toys with heart and personality, but there's no emotional resonance to the fraying friendship between Orion and D-16. The weak in-joke about the talkative B-127 is that he'll later be known as Bumblebee, the Transformer who famously can't speak, but since nothing that he says is funny or interesting, there's no sense of irony or loss.
Bumblebee is the title character of the only Transformers movie to ever capture something resembling genuine human feelings, which not surprisingly involved placing a human character (played by Hailee Steinfeld) as the center of the story, while de-emphasizing the large-scale spectacle. There are no humans in Transformers One, of course, and the characters' relationships are always secondary to the franchise scaffolding. The actors do what they can within the limited range they're given to play, but they mostly highlight the absence of the series' now-iconic longtime voice performers.
There's a good chance that Transformers One will fuel plenty of merchandise sales, though, and plans are already in place for a trilogy that will take the characters up to their later incarnations. In that sense, the movie is a success: It's a shiny, chaotic distraction that generates new marketing opportunities without any new artistic vision. ♦
Transformers One
