Yes, Transformers One is another prequel, so yes, you know who survives and who doesn’t. However, when you have a movie that shows a little love towards the IP, you can let it slide and just enjoy it.
Transformers One is now on streaming and I had heard good things about it. I thought I would give it a chance and watched it.
It’s good, really good.
The movie stars Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi, Laurence Fishburne, Jon Hamm and James Remar. Josh Cooley directs, with Eric Pearson, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari as writers.
I can’t say I’m a huge fan of Transformers. We have all seen the Bay movies, I’ve only seen them once, with no real desire to watch them again. I had the toys as a kid, but that’s about it. It was nice going into a movie blind though, with no preconceptions or anticipation.
The Story
As I said, Transformers One is a prequel, set on Cybertron.
The untold origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron, better known as sworn enemies, but who once were friends bonded like brothers who changed the fate of Cybertron forever.
I won’t spoil the story too much, but it was well done. It made a real change to see something well-written, with interesting characters and a decent story to follow.
Orion Pax (Hemsworth) and D-16 (Tyree Henry) are friends. They work in the mines looking for Energon, which fuels the city. Onion sneaks into an archive and watches a hologram about the Primes, the first Cybertronians. He gets caught and D-16 saves him.
Neither of them has ‘cogs’, which means they cannot transform. They end up in a race, where they shouldn’t be, but earn the respect of Sentinel Prime (Hamm), the city’s leader. They soon learn the truth and that’s all I’ll say.
Honestly, the story is pretty good and I did like how D-16 becomes Megatron, it’s a well-done story and much better, than say, Anakin. There is loads more to the story, but I’ll let you find it yourself.
The Cast
Herein lies one of the first problems with Transformers One, Prime’s voice isn’t Peter Cullen. Cullen has a voice like silk and his Prime is iconic. I love Hemsworth, but his voice just sounds like Thor. Cullen is still alive and could have done the voice, but instead, they kind of make Prime a, well, teenager.
That’s not right, he’s just a younger Prime, but I don’t understand how his voice would have ‘grown’ into Cullens. It didn’t make sense, but I let it slide as I was having fun. Not to spoil it, but they do make an effort to change it to Cullen at the end of the movie.
The rest of the cast is having fun and it shows. I liked Tyree Henry as D-16, his character goes through the biggest arc and he plays it well.
Key plays B-127 and he is funny. The others meet him on a sublevel in the city and he’s gone a little nuts down there. He has some great lines that made me chuckle.
Minor Issues
As I have said, Transformers One is a fun movie, however, it is a kid’s movie. You can tell it’s aimed at kids and I can see some people being a little put off by this. At first, I didn’t like it, but after 20 minutes, I was happy to just follow the story and have fun. If you have kids, they will enjoy it.
The other minor issue is the direction. OK, I’m old school, you don’t need to move the camera around too much, but most modern movies cannot keep the camera still for more than 3 seconds.
As this is an animation, there is no limit to how the camera moves around and this made some of the scenes far to confusing. A lot of it was far to over the top and hurt my brain. It didn’t happen a lot though, as I said, it’s a minor annoyance.
Overall
Transformers One was good fun, amusing jokes, and a good story. I saw a review say:
“A Transformer movie, without a single human in it, and it’s one of the best ones!”
I agree. The entire thing is set on Cybertron and there isn’t a human in site. I find it interesting that all of the characters are CGI and yet I get more invested in them than I do with some actors playing characters.
If you want to chill for an hour and forty-five minutes, you can’t go wrong with Transformers One. It’s a solid bit of entertainment and a prequel done well. You can find it on streaming.
