Transformers One review: "A cut above most of its predecessors"

The last time an all-animated Transformers opus was in theaters - 1986’s The Transformers: The Movie - it gave us kids’ TV cartoonery, a power-rock soundtrack and Orson Welles voicing the world-eating Unicron. Four decades on, Hasbro’s robo-chameleons get a shiny new upgrade in Transformers One, a CG-animated prequel set on their home planet Cybertron that reignites the spark that’s so often been conspicuously absent from the franchise’s live-action entries. 

Doing away with humans helps, instead Josh Cooley’s (Toy Story 4) film concentrates on the hitherto untold origin stories of the heroic Optimus Prime and his evil nemesis Megatron. Introduced to us initially as mining bots Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry), the dynamic duo start off as friends who dream of more than digging for Energon in the bowels of an orb whose surface is off-limits to drudges like them. 

A chance to elevate their station comes when their august overlord Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm) holds a road race (on self-laying road reminiscent of the rail tracks from Aardman’s The Wrong Trousers) for the entertainment of the masses. The fast and furious frenzy that ensues makes for an exhilarating Ready Player One-like set-piece - albeit one that doesn’t do Pax and ‘D’ much good, forcing them to seek another route to the planet’s mysterious exterior. 

Their quest sees them forging wary alliances with their by-the-book supervisor Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) and a blabbermouth we’ll come to know as Bumblebee (Keegan-Michael Key, annoying). Yet it also exposes secrets that shake their reality to its core, sowing the seeds of enmity that will eventually divide them.

To say Transformers One is a cut above most of its predecessors perhaps isn’t the wildest compliment, given the nadirs those blockbusting behemoths reached in the Michael Bay-directed era. But it earns that laurel regardless, its trio of scriptwriters deploying familiar Star Wars tropes (the Anakin/Obi-Wan rift, an expositional hologram) and a rug-pulling reveal to engineer a storyline that feels both dramatically satisfying and emotionally engaging. 

Flashes of knowing humour sweeten the deal (like the ‘Paging Dr. Ratched’ bulletin we hear on a trip to sick bay), while the sonorous baritone of Laurence Fishburne’s reanimated oldster goes some way towards excusing Peter Cullen’s AWOL vocals. And if the battle finale eventually succumbs to the franchise’s customary bombastic overkill, it at least makes you care a little about who’s doing the fighting.

Transformers One is released in US theaters on September 20 and in UK cinemas on October 11. 

For more, check out our guide to how to watch the Transformers movies in order.