‘Transformers One’ Review: This Animated Robot Prequel Is Rusty Around the Edges

In modern IP culture, you occasionally get films that feel like total filler, movies that only exist to remind people that, oh yeah, that franchise is still around. 2024 movie theaters have already hosted plenty of cinematic hot air, from “Madame Web” to “Alien: Romulus,” but it’s hard to think of a project this year more pointless than “Transformers One,” an animated adventure starring Hasbro’s robots in disguise that asks an uninteresting question — how did Optimus Prime become Optimus Prime? — and answers it with a straight down the middle, perfectly calibrated kids film that does almost nothing to delight or excite.

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It is admittedly a futile exercise to get offended over the sanctity of the “Transformers” franchise, which from its early days as an ’80s cartoon favorite has always existed in service of selling kids cool toy robots that can transform into firetrucks or fighter jets. Still, the war between the virtuous Autobots and the sniveling Decepticons has enough sheer weirdness to it to serve as inspiration for compelling fiction, even if Michael Bay has never managed to crack that code. Spinoffs like the E.T.-with-a-yellow-robot buddy movie “Bumblebee,” the surprisingly intelligent 2010s cartoon “Transformers: Prime,” the hilariously cruel 1986 animated film that featured Orson Welles as a planet-sized robot and traumatized a generation by violently killing Optimus Prime, and operatic (and queer) IDW comic book series “More Than Meets The Eye” have shown there’s a way to wrangle all of this sci-fi mythology into something that means something beyond ensuring good holiday sales for Hasbro executives.

“Transformers: One,” with its cute, easily marketable character designs (comedic relief B-127, voiced by Keegan Michael-Key, has a frame that’s begging to be captured with a plushie) and generally light tone, feels like it’s aimed at an audience even younger than usual for the Autobots. Still, that’s no reason that the movie — whose director Josh Cooley has plenty of experience with franchise extensions after making his debut with “Toy Story 4” — couldn’t satisfy as a compelling bit of kiddie space opera action in its own right. And yet, for all of the garishly shiny lens flairs that gleam off our heroes’ metallic heads, “Transformers One” feels rusted over, offering a predictable, formulaic product as generic as its “working title that never got dropped” name.

If you’ve seen any American animated movie that’s come out in the past few years — from Pixar favorites like “Coco” to superhero soap operas like the “Spider-Verse” films – you can predict the plot of “Transformers One” with ruthless efficiency. Set entirely on the Transformers’ homeworld of Cybertron, where the population has decamped underground into the city of Iacon, we’re introduced to the bot that will become Optimus, Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth with an American accent that only serves to make his performance even more generic), a dreamer who wants to achieve something great. The problem is that the city is ruthlessly divided into two castes: the large Transformers who compete in races and serve as the default upper class, and the smaller miners, who have a gap in their chest in place of the cores that allow for transformations and are cosigned to working as miners collecting energy for the city leader Sentinal Prime (Jon Hamm). Orion is one of the latter, and he’s forced into long, brutal hours toiling away in the sub-sub-zero levels of the city, even as he longs to try and prove himself to the Sentinal Prime and find the mythical energy source known as the Matrix, thought to be lost on the surface, since conquered by a mysterious alien race of Cthulhu-like creations.

Would you believe that Orion stumbles upon a sign pointing to where the Matrix might be? Would you believe that he drags a group of friends — including his bestie that will one day become Megatron D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry, providing way more gravity and effort than this movie deserves), stick-in-the-mud supervisor Elita (Scarlett Johansson), and the hyperactive hermit B-127 to the surface to search for it? Would you believe that, in the process, he discovers the real story behind the circumstances of his planet and must take charge of a resistance to become a hero? At every stage in the film, “Transformers One” pretty much goes exactly where you’d expect it to. There’s very little to savor in the film, which chugs from plot point to plot point without much room to subvert your expectations, or build on its formulaic, paint-by-numbers plot and its underdeveloped central theme “believe in a better future.” It’s all executed competently but joylessly, with zero fun to be had as it labors across an hour and 40 minute runtime that feels both too short and painfully long.

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The lack of much ingenuity extends to the animation, which was done by Industrial Light & Magic, the company behind the Bay movies. “Transformers One” is certainly a good deal better looking than those gritty CGI eyesores, but the shiny, chrome-covered aesthetic begins to feel hollow after awhile. While the surface of Cybertron has some striking panoramic images, Iacon feels more like a toy set than a physical place, and the facial animation is a bit stiff and expressionless even for robots. All of the fight scenes and set pieces are rendered with about 30 percent less energy than you’d want them to be: when (spoiler alert) Orion gets the ability to transform, the chase where he and his friends successfully shapeshift comes across curiously perfunctory rather than, well, transformative. Maybe it’s just hard to invest in the action when the character work does almost nothing to make you care: the antagonists are broadly evil without coming across as enjoyably twisted, Johansson’s hot pink Elita is an almost offensively basic “responsible, nagging girl” to the rest of the central quartet, B-127 is such annoying comedic relief you long for him to make like the Bay Bumblebee and shut up already, and Steve Buscemi is utterly wasted as the iconic conniving Starscream, here present in a role that amounts to an elongated cameo.

The center of this tale, in the grand tradition of prequels like the “X-Men” series or “Wicked,” lies in the tight, lightly homoerotic bond between the main hero and his future enemy. But there’s very little to grasp onto with the friendship between Orion and D-16; the film is content to have them tell us about how close they are rather than show us with action. D-16’s chip on his shoulder and slow devolution into robo-fascism is poorly defined and overly rushed to the point of incoherence, leaving zero oil in the tank to give the inevitable final confrontation and Orion’s pleas that they were like brothers some much-needed charge. It’s a problem that all of “Transformers One,” which is content to take the easiest and most expected route rather than offering something deeper, has. As Orion begins to take on a leadership role to fight the power in the film’s climax, he shares wisdom he learned from mentor Alpha Trion (Laurence Fishbourne) that “a transformer is not defined by the core in his chest, but by the spark at his center.” If that’s true, it’s bad news for “Transformers One,” which doesn’t have much spark to speak of.

Grade: C

Paramount Pictures will release “Transformers One” in theater on September 20.

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