Transformers One review: The one we’ve been waiting for

They did it everyone. Roll out the fireworks and merrymaking. Hollywood has finally produced a good Transformers movie that is focused on Cybertron without all the human baggage. Not only that, but Transformers One is also a lovingly animated movie that truly revels and enjoys the long, nerdy history of the franchise, doesn’t shy away from the violence of a robot alien war and is written to be smart without looking down on a younger audience.

If you’re not a Transformers fan then you maybe won’t realise that every minute of Transformers One is a miracle. In 2024 Transformers celebrates its 40th anniversary and its fans have been asking for a movie like this for every single one of those years.

Even for newer fans who weren’t alive at the birth of Transformers, what you see on the screen in this movie is the both the realisation of what this franchise can offer while still being the beautiful start of something new.

The success of this movie starts with its premise. As so many Transformers projects pick up some time during the Great War between the Autobots and Deceptions, this time we’re going right back to the beginning.

“Transformers One is the untold origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron, better known as sworn enemies, but once were friends bonded like brothers who changed the fate of Cybertron forever. In the first-ever fully CG-animated Transformers movie, Transformers One features a star-studded voice cast, including Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi with Laurence Fishburne and Jon Hamm,” reads the official synopsis of the movie.

While we have seen a decent amount of pre-war Cybertron over the years, this is the first time we get such a focused story with this premise at its core. While it would have been easy to go off course with this idea – a big reason why there’s always human characters in Transformers media is to act as an audience POV – the script does not let the setting down.

Strong writing is a big part of what makes this movie so enjoyable. The plot, while rather simple with few surprises, does its job well enough, but the scene to scene beats really show off the strength of the writing.

If you’ve been a Transformers fan for any length of time, there’s likely a joke or throwback inside of the script waiting to delight you. Aside from building this love of Transformers into the writing, it’s also present in the animation itself with many characters, locations, events and more baked into the scenery.

The dialogue itself is also strong but we can see some of the humour not hitting depending on the audience – that being said we do find that it landed more often than not. Our showing of the movie was filled with people from just about every age group and it certainly sounded like everyone got in a few laughs over the course of the story.

This is particularly impressive as the story also gets surprisingly dark and it does this surprisingly often. Slavery, forced mutilation, murder, public execution and more heavy topics are all here in abundance. We have to imagine that these heavier subjects – and showing them in detail, there are at least three instances of characters being ripped in half in full view of the audience – were only allowed due to this being an animation where no humans are hurt.

The writing also helped elevate the vocal performances. The standout is Henry as Megatron who managed to pull off both the innocent earlier version of the character and the more maniacal later version. Fishburne also impressed as an older, wiser Transformer and every scene with Key as Bumblebee was fun. This version of Bumblebee, a character that won’t just stop talking, could have been annoying, but the talents of the writers and Key managed to make it fun.

Johansson as Elita was just fine, as was the main bot in Optimus Prime voiced by Thor himself. Hemsworth did a good enough job, but it was not at all impressive and we don’t think we buy his take on a character that can assemble an army with a good speech. By the end of the movie, when Optimus Prime is in full leader mode, it sounded like Hemsworth was trying to do his best Peter Cullen impression.

The strong script is bolstered by absolutely superb animation. After the “looser” animation style we saw in the Spider-Verse movies, that was also picked up by Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, we’ve gone back to something more solid. This isn’t an insult to those other movies or to Transformers One, it’s just a note that this movie does very much its own thing to create a shinning planet full of weird, transforming alien life.

We do see the influence of Spider-Verse et al in certain scenes, such as the surface of Cybertron that is filled with wildlife and strange morphing landscapes. The rest of the movie is filled with the hard corners and shining metal that you would expect and we really love how it manages to be both completely stylised while still believable.

As you can imagine for a franchise centred around conflict between warring robots, there’s a lot of action to enjoy. The fights in this movie are fun, creative, easy to see and follow as well as being extremely brutal. As mentioned earlier there’s a lot of outright death and dismemberment shown upfront. Transformers One doesn’t shy away from the heavy topics or showing the result of those topics and we applaud it for that. Kids can handle the serious stuff when a piece of media does it with respect, especially when it can be viewed through the abstract lens of alien robots.

Again, fans will have so much to look out for in the animation and the fights. Call backs to other pieces of media, the iteration of themes or characters shown in how they fight and, one of our favourites, the transforming gimmick being used in combat. Instead of just a way to get around, the ability to transform is a big part of this movie and it’s used at every instance in fun and interesting ways.

The only real aspect of Transformers One that we’re not overly positive on is the music and the soundtrack. Unfortunately there’s nothing too memorable or catchy in this movie. It really needed some big song to act as an anchor for the important moments, but that isn’t here.

But aside from that little stumble, this movie walks away with a definite recommendation from us. As we usually mention in our videogame reviews here at Hypertext: new iterations in old franchises need to give existing fans a reason to stick around while also being appetising to newcomers to that they can become that next generation of fans. Transformers One does this to perfection and we can’t wait for the future Transformers fan to look back fondly on this movie as an introduction as we reminisce with the older fans about how great this movie is.

FINAL SCORE: 8 OUT OF 10.

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