TRANSFORMERS ONE – Review by Valerie Kalfrin
The prospect of another Transformers film might feel like one too many, but the animated Transformers One breaks some surprising new ground in this long-running robot-smashing franchise. Who knew that watching Optimus Prime and Megatron before they were enemies could be so charming?
Directed by Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4), this prequel opens on the high-tech planet Cybertron, where buildings form stalactites and stalagmites and two castes exist: those who can transform, like current leader Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm, Grimsburg), and those who can’t, lowly bots relegated to mining fuel for everyone to survive.
Although he’s a foot or so shorter than the transforming class, miner Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga) yearns for more than his station in life. (He thinks he’s more than meets the eye, if you will.) Orion seizes any opportunity to stand out among the masses, frustrating his buddy, D-16, or Dee (Bryan Tyree Henry, The Fire Inside), the future Megatron to his Optimus Prime. This includes sneaking peeks at the planet’s history files, curious about what happened to the ancient primes and a mystical artifact, and ignoring safety rules to rescue a fellow miner, irritating by-the-book Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson, Fly Me to the Moon).
After another of Orion’s schemes lands the guys in salvage, they meet B-127, or Bee (Keegan-Michael Key, The Super Mario Bros. Movie), and a possible map to the “matrix of leadership,” the MacGuffin that Sentinel has been searching for on the surface. Finding this could restore them to everyone’s good graces, thinks Orion, only to uncover a larger conspiracy.
The various in-world terms like “Energon” tend to make my eyes glaze over, but screenwriters Eric Pearson, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari find a refreshing, affable groove for Orion and Dee. The two fist bump, joke around, and promise to have each other’s backs, even as Dee starts to find his pal’s half-baked ideas maddening.
The voice performances are entertaining all around. Hemsworth and Henry have believable banter that segues into distance and disillusionment. Johansson’s efficiency and eyerolls become heroic and encouraging once the bots discover the larger conspiracy, and Key provides ample comic relief, from the makeshift friends Bee builds from scrap to stumbling across Cybertron’s high guard on the surface. Led by Starscream (Steve Buscemi, Fantasmas), this group includes fan favorites Soundwave and Shockwave, which inspires Bee to ask for a show of hands over who else has “wave” in their names.
The action feels fresh and fun, thanks to animation that makes Orion svelte and sleek, gliding around like a surfer instead of clomping about in his blocky form with the tractor-trailer wheels we’ve long seen on his legs. The characters, too, feel more emotive, with a smoothness to their facial features that seems more human than robotic.
The character designs are detailed and rich, as is the surface of Cybertron, with glossy outcroppings that shift and grow and fascinating creatures, such as robotic deer whose “antlers” turn red when they sense danger. The animators give the regal Alpha Trion (Laurence Fishburne, Megalopolis), a lost Prime, a cape along with a coating of moss and the power to project recordings in swirls of dust. Sentinel’s spider-like henchwoman, Airachnid (Vanessa Liguori, The Super Man), has multiple eyes on the sides of her head that blink and scan independently, and Dee’s eyes shift in color to match his growing bitterness, matched by Henry’s pent-up sense of betrayal.
Transformers One sees Orion and the others learning how to change into their familiar forms (with comical results at first), then challenging the power structure, but the earlier character development also gives the climatic clash an unexpectedly touching note. Some rifts can’t be mended, or as Orion says, some transformations are permanent.
