‘Transformers One’ Is the Best ‘Transformers’ Movie Yet. Serio

The Transformers brand is so ubiquitous in pop culture that even if you’re not a superfan, and even if you haven’t seen any of the movies, you basically know what’s going on. Giant shape-shifting alien robot Optimus Prime turns into a truck to fight a bad guy named Megatron, and for some reason Earth is involved in this and is usually in peril.

But that’s kind of it, unless you’re deep enough in to have read the comics and watched the tie-in TV shows that have been going for decades. We’re like the humans in the Michael Bay movies, so overwhelmed by the sheer size and power of these characters that there’s just no time to get acquainted with how they got that way.

The animated prequel movie Transformers One hopes to rectify this, presenting the Transformers’ heart-shattering backstory in as much detail as can fit in a kids’ movie under two hours. Boy does it deliver. This is high art. This is Shakespearean drama. This is Greek tragedy.

Many moons before they ever encounter the Earth, the Transformers live in a rigorously structured society on the planet Cybertron. Only some high-caste individuals have the ability to transform; the rest are “cogless” and given menial jobs in waste management or mining for energon, the Transformers’ fuel. Two of these cogless bots, best buddies Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry), toil in the distressingly depleted energon mines under the watchful supervision of Elita (Scarlett Johansson) and fantasize about finding the long-lost Matrix of Leadership and delivering it to their savior, Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm, yes, genuinely, it’s Jon Hamm)—the only Prime to survive the last attack of the bloodthirsty Quintessons.

The movie throws a lot of Transformers lore at you. But since this was built with kids in mind, it never feels especially overwhelming. You get that the characters’ mission is to find a special object, and the two protagonists, close as they are, have different ways of going about it. The robots have the kind of cartoonish expressiveness that was lost in the live-action movies, more relatable in this when there are no tiny humans to reemphasize their scale.

But there is plenty of scale, which starts to creep in once the kids’-movie hijinks end and the real drama begins. (The Transformers’ homeworld was eventually torn asunder by a civil war, after all.) The action scenes, while exciting thanks to Brian Tyler’s bass-boosted score, are animated with such intense speed of movement that you can barely follow what’s going on half of the time. This is an entirely different conversation, but it’s a problem that I see cropping up in more and more computer-animated movies, and at some point animators are going to have to realize that just because you can show a character zooming across the screen so fast the human eye can’t follow it doesn’t mean that you have to do it all the time.

That’s all secondary to the fact that the rest of the movie is riveting. The youthful energy permeating the first half—mostly due to Keegan-Michael Key’s B-127 (otherwise known as Bumblebee), whose dialogue is so annoying you’ll wish he lost the power of speech even sooner—provides just the right amount of contrast to the grand drama of the second half. After a shocking thematic turn, our main characters, the early versions of Optimus Prime and his nemesis Megatron, realize that their methods of doling out justice might be too different to reconcile. The sense of epic tragedy that comes from the loss of such a close relationship is earned. (There is a sizable cottage industry of Transformers erotic fanfiction writers who are going to love this.)

The whole thing has a visual style that feels original, and while the story hits familiar beats, it’s interesting enough that those beats feel fresh—appropriate given that this is the first animated Transformers feature since The Transformers: The Movie in 1986. Hemsworth doesn’t quite reach the gravelly depths of Peter Cullen’s iconic Optimus voice, but there are times when he gets close. Transformers One feels like the reboot it clearly hopes to be, and certainly seems ready to spark a number of sequels detailing the full scale of the conflict that destroyed a whole planet. There is clearly more to these characters than one would think after a decade of live-action snoozes—one could even say they’re more than meets the eye.