I recently caught a 40th anniversary screening of Transformers: the Movie. The screening included a new 12-minute short, Optimus Prime: Awakening, featuring Peter Cullen’s final performance as Prime. I will share my spoilery thoughts on that below.
But first, the movie. Picture the scene. It’s December 1986, and I’m at the Granada Theatre for a friend’s birthday party. We are there to watch a double bill of Transformers: the Movie and Basil the Great Mouse Detective.
It wasn’t my first cinema visit, but it remains my earliest clear memory of a movie theatre experience. Safe to say I was hooked from that point on.
It was also my final experience of a traditional movie theatre before it closed its doors forever. The Granada opened in 1938 and was a real theatre with stalls, balcony seating and a goddamned chandelier.
But all things must pass, and in 1987 the new ten-screen multiplex in the centre of town swept the Granada away forever.
Childhood trauma
I can’t recall much about Basil the Great Mouse Detective. Weirdly, I found a DVD of it at a charity shop recently, but nostalgia hasn’t motivated me enough to watch it again yet.
But Transformers: the Movie was different. I remember every frame. I didn’t watch it again for a couple of decades, and this latest viewing was only my third time EVER, but the movie still lived fresh in my mind.
The reason for this is simple: movies that brutally kill off one of your childhood heroes after 20 minutes tend to stick in the mind.
I tried to explain this to my son with the following comparison:
“Imagine going to see a new Cars movie and they kill off Lightning McQueen in the first act.”
Now that I think about it, Cars 3 flirted with this very idea but then pussied out. That’s the problem with the youth today – not enough onscreen trauma in their lives.
Transformers: the Movie, Watership Down, and The NeverEnding Story taught an entire generation of late generation X children about the fragility of life way too early. I call them the trifecta of death.
Megadeth
Just in case you don’t know, Transformers are alien robots who come to earth and can transform into vehicles, weapons and various other things to disguise themselves. Two warring factions – the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons – continually try to kill each other to gain control of their home planet Cybertron. Clear so far? Good.
Watching Transformers: the Movie again in 2026 with an almost perfect recall of 1986 allows me to analyse it from two points of view: the child and the adult. As an adult, I understand that Hasbro is a toy company who were using this movie as an end-of-season sale – deleting the old toy line and bringing in the new.
And boy do they clear house. Early on we get a massive battle where Autobots Prowl, Ironhide, Ratchet, Brawn and Wheeljack are all dispatched.
But nothing touches the jaw-dropping moment when Decepticon leader Megatron fatally injures the Autobot leader, Optimus Prime.
Did Hasbro have a contract issue with Peter Cullen? He voices two characters in Transformers: the Movie – Optimus Prime and Ironhide – and they both get it.
Fan favourites Jazz and Bumblebee get eaten by planet-sized Transformer Unicron and sidelined for most of the movie, but ultimately receive a last-minute reprieve. Thank goodness for small mercies.
The Decepticons don’t escape the carnage either. Megatron is badly wounded and left for dead by his sidekick, Starscream. Unicron rebuilds him into Galvatron (got to sell those new toys), who then vaporises Starscream for his treachery.
All this was rather traumatising as a child. Stark tells me he still hasn’t gotten over it, and I’m pretty sure he’s serious. But it works well in setting the stakes and establishing a sense of peril for the remaining characters.
When you murder Optimus Prime, all bets are off.
The Matrix
Optimus Prime’s deathbed scene is the only quiet moment in Transformers: the Movie, and surprisingly emotional. Prime hands off a maguffin called the Matrix of leadership to the new Autobot leader, Ultra Magnus.
The Matrix is a small crystal sphere inside a metal casing. It is prophesised (it’s the 80s, there was always a prophecy) that one day an autoboot leader will use the Matrix ‘to light our darkest hour.’
Well, that darkest hour arrives in the form of Unicron, who munches two of Cybertron’s moons and another planet early on, before setting its sights on Cybertron itself.
The Matrix is the only thing that can kill Unicron, so he tasks Galvatron to destroy it. Galvatron only wants it so he can kill Unicron. Ultra Magnus wants to use it but is unable to.
It’s the perfect maguffin – everyone wants it, the whole plot revolves around it, but the only one who can wield it is unknown until an effective third act revelation.
Me, Grimlock
As an adult, you marvel at Transformers: The Movie’s ability to play fast and loose with time, size and the laws of physics and get away with it. Interstellar travel takes minutes. Transformers fly despite having no means of propulsion.
Decepticon Astrotrain transforms from a regular sized robot into a space shuttle capable of holding all the other Decepticons, including the six-in-one giant Devastator.
You don’t worry about most of this stuff as a child. The only thing that bothered me then was how Megatron could transform into a gun and simultaneously shrink so that Starscream could hold him in his hand and fire him.
Scale issues aside, even as a kid I had a bigger problem with this, although I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it. It’s a passive, submissive act from the Decepticon leader. No wonder Starscream has no respect for him.
And don’t forget the Dinobots – mentally retarded Autobots who speak broken English and think a dinosaur disguise is a good idea. Dinosaurs are not made of metal and are also extinct. Where exactly are they hoping to blend in with a disguise like that?
But as a kid? Dinosaurs = cool, and that’s all that matters. Also, one of the Dinobots is called ‘Slag’, which we found hilarious at the time.
Transformers: The Movie is simultaneously juvenile and hardcore. The contrast is jarring at times, as the movie lurches between mass murder and robots dancing in circles holding hands.
You Got the Touch
But Transformers: The Movie powers through all that by not giving a shit and not taking its foot off the gas for its entire 1 hour 37 minute runtime.
It’s a relentless fever dream of constant action, clunky but charming animation, casual genocide and excellent voice work, all powered by a motivational hair metal soundtrack that simply will not be denied. You are not ready for Stan Bush.
The all-star cast adds gravitas and includes acting heavyweights Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack and Orson Welles, in his final screen role playing a planet.
Must…resist…fat jokes.
And because it’s the mid-80s, Judd Nelson has to be involved too, it’s the law. He plays the coolest Autobot, Hot Rod, who may or may not be the chosen one. He is.
Transformers: The Movie is crazy, frantic, childish and brutal, but it ploughs ahead at full steam, makes bold decisions and is consistently entertaining throughout. It traumatized an entire generation, but I like to think we are better people because of it.
Bonus review: Optimus Prime: Awakening
Spoilers ahead!
Peter Cullen and Frank Welker return as Optimus Prime and Megatron in the animated short Optimus Prime: Awakening.
With Cullen’s recent passing, Optimus Prime: Awakening serves as an accidental tribute to the man behind Prime. But what could have been a beautiful walking-off-into-the-sunset moment becomes something else entirely.
I’ve seen some people calling this The Last Jedi of Transformers, and they aren’t exaggerating.
It starts at Prime’s Transformers: The Movie deathbed, albeit with new animation. We then see him floating in space before being revived by The One, a kind of Transformer God. The One shows Prime a montage of his battles over the last 40 years, including the various animated shows and even Michael Bay’s live action version.
I found it quite touching, and the sequence seems to be rounding off Peter Cullen’s journey as Prime quite nicely…
The Last Jedi
Then The One tells Prime that all his efforts over multiple timelines and lifetimes meant nothing.
Err….what?
The One tells him to give up because he can never win. Prime refuses, and we next see him in a battle with Megatron. As Prime is about to win, he remembers what The One told him and…gives up.
He throws the Matrix into lava and walks off into the light (presumably the afterlife). But here’s the worst part – the Matrix misses the lava and Megatron picks it up and laughs.
The end.
I’m still struggling to get my head around it. I thought this short was gearing up to retcon Prime’s death, or at least give him a decent send-off. Instead, we get another rug pull.
I’m too old to give much of a shit. It’s hardly traumatic at this point in my life, but it is baffling. What were the writers trying to say? Do they even know?
In a way it’s almost poetic – screwing over the fans all over again 40 years later. But you’re not going to get me this time, Hasbro, for I have borne witness to the trifecta of death, and your puny efforts are but the buzzing of a fly that I casually swat away.
