Some franchises are eventually graded on a curve. The Michael Bay Transformers movies are so recklessly anti-aesthetic in their over-designed jumbles of robot parts, unreadable action, teenaged sexuality, and preference for plot over story, that anything is better. Bumblebee (2018) was authentically a good and heartfelt movie. Then we got last year’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2018), another heaping of nothingness. The bar is relatively low, so when Transformers fans pronounce this new movie as one of the essential animations of the year, know where they’re coming from, the place of a neglected fandom that at least understands that by form and function, Transformers ought to be played as a cartoon.
After all, they got it right with The Transformers: The Movie (1986) — casting Orson Welles as a Transformer is maybe the most inspired voice acting decision all-time — so, in this way, the bar for an animated feature is actually fairly high. The Movie (movies used to need to tell you they were movies, so you didn’t think you were going to the theater to watch the concurrent tv series), was a good movie; the aesthetic ruled, the voice cast was good (also, Leonard Nimoy), and it presented The Transformers (indefinite articles also more popular back then) as they were meant to be seen.
So, there’s a point of comparison, the best Transformers movie is an animated movie and this one is too. Directed by Josh Cooley, Transformers One, as the title suggests, reads like a franchise-starter. A bit of kindling to create a new fire for a brand that should always have something cooking. It’s fairly okay in every way. Josh Cooley is pretty good at this, he found real and perhaps undercredited gold in revisiting Toy Story for a fourth time and just as he found the magic in those toys, the appeal of these toys are likewise realized on-screen.
As a movie, it’s a bit junky, though, to use a derisive word for something many people worked hard on. It’s not formless — there’s a visual choice and it’s readable — but it does feel boxy and while robust, not very out of the norm as a work of animation. It always looks perfectly fine, never impresses, and generally looks like extra work for lower rewards, that kind of computery animation that makes us miss handdrawn stuff. It’s good enough and that’s really as far as it goes in any capacity.
There’s one moment of animated joy, where the Transformers discover their Transformational properties. It’s a lot of fun for a few minutes, as each character works out the kinks of their new abilities and it’s a good opportunity for animated parts, which the movie needs more of. Often in other action segments, the characters blur and blend across the screening and there’s a flattening feeling mostly due to the 3D-ness of the art style, it’s endemic in the style choice; sure the robots are shiny and boldly stated but they don’t convey movement in an interesting way.
Transformers One suits the modern model for making franchises. Make it quippy, make it about origin stories, tell a beginning without a middle or an end, leave that for sequels. It’s perfectly fine. Not too compelling. Feels like one arc rushed through, like televisual storytelling.
What is interesting is how it grounds the characters in further backstory. It renders the Transformers brand, albeit one we judge on a curve, as though it’s anything but that, like it’s a clean slate. We go way back to the origin points for Optimus Prime (voiced by Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (voiced by Brian Tyree Henry), who start as miners on a foreign planet and join forces to shape the course of events that defined the Cybertron universe. That’s all kinda cool and the voice acting is starry enough.
It just plays like a prelude — yes, a Part One — all preamble for a cool movie we haven’t gotten yet. But there’s just enough here to preserve hope that the franchise is being pulled out of the mud and has been given a new lease on life. Just enough to make one or two more movies, which seems to really be the point of the whole exercise anyway.