REVIEW: Transformers One – The Franchise Returns to Its Roots in This Familiar but Charming Animation

Hooray! We finally have another Transformers film that is honourable to its source material. Despite their financial success, the occasional moment of impressive spectacle and the 12A certificate, Michael Bay’s films embarrassingly tarnished the brand name with one installment after the other being so spectacularly misjudged in who they were supposed to be aimed at.

What should have been a fairly innocent source adaptation (considering the toys and TV show and film were for young children), very quickly turned into something far, far uglier.Michael Bay’s film turned the brand of toys into the following: out-of-place military fetishisations, racial stereotypes, poor sexual politics, underage sex jokes, misjudged humour of all kinds, and I’m not making this up, placing genitalia on some of the Transformer characters as that is Bay’s idea of funny. The list goes on and on and on.

Photo credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

At last, we can finally move on as the most recent films in the Transformers universe have been huge improvements, a feat which was by no means difficult to do. Following on from 2018’s Bumblebee and 2023’s Rise of the Beasts (both of which were pretty accurate to the source material, the TV shows), Transformers One is our first animation since the 80s TV show and film and explores the origin of the characters. ‘Orion Pax’ aka ‘Optimus Prime’ (Chris Hemsworth) and ‘D-16’ aka ‘Megatron’ (Brian Tyree Henry) are miner bots working on the planet Cybertron. Both are reduced to laborious mining duties collecting minerals called energon that powers their home.

Pax longs for something more and, when the two come across a beacon containing the coordinates of the lost Sentinal Primes, they set off on an adventure alongside ‘Elita-1’ (Scarlett Johansson) and ‘B-127’ (Keegan-Michael Keen) to rescue them. With Bumblebee having some Spielberg touches to it and Rise of the Beasts being the more action packed smash ’em up, Transformers One does play to the younger audience, and is certainly the most faithful. Despite not having the most spectacular animation you’ve ever seen, certainly in a day and age where the likes of Pixar and Studio Ghibli exist, that does not take away the fact that there is still a story that works here which was I never bored by. I suppose the harshest thing you can say about it is that it looks like it belongs on a TV channel such as Disney XD.

I don’t often say this, but I would actually recommend that you sit relatively close to the back as not only does the story progress at quite a rapid rate (a little too quickly for my liking), but the visuals, colours and action is so fast that part of me wished it would slow down a little. Given the fact that this will be aimed at the youngest of cinemagoers, this does make sense at the end of the day as it will easily keep their attention. Some parts did actually call to mind Speed Racer with its kinetic energy and ideas. Certainly not a film if you are nursing a headache or hangover. As far as these post-Bay installments have gone, more of the same please.

In cinemas now.

7/10