"TRANSFORMERS ONE" - REVIEW

Before I get into reviewing TRANSFORMERS ONE, I should lead by saying I am, by and large, a Michael Bay fan. Yes, I know that his movies are almost purely junk food, but he has a stamp that makes his films immediately recognizable as soon as you find yourself watching one, for better or worse. How I stopped worrying and learned to love the Bay came down to a quote I read of his, in which he said, “I make movies for 13-year-old boys… What a crime.”

As such, I have seen all of the live-action Michael Bay-directed TRANSFORMERS movies (which is not the same as saying that I enjoyed them all). When the 2007 original slows down enough to let you comprehend the action, its blending of practical effects and CGI is still pretty damn cool, and some of the transformations are truly thrilling to watch. The rest of the films I can take or leave (they’re good to have on in the background if you’re sick in bed, for example), with the 2009 film TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN being the most abhorrent of the bunch (I saw this movie in IMAX and I’m pretty sure I sustained some permanent hearing loss).

I now have a five-year-old son who absolutely loves the Transformers toys. LOVES them. But because he is five years old and very impressionable, and because we have standards, it will be a very long time before he sees any of these movies (as of this writing, I admit I still have not seen BUMBLEBEE, which I hear is excellent, or TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS). So naturally, we were very excited when the trailer dropped earlier this year for this big-screen animated offering, TRANSFORMERS ONE. It would finally give my son an opportunity to see his favorite toys writ large, in what looked to be a clever and fun origin story that would satisfy a craving while also providing a gateway to the mayhem—or Bayhem—that awaits him when he gets older, assuming he hasn’t outgrown it by then.

It gives me no joy to say that not only is TRANSFORMERS ONE less than meets the eye, but it is also another Transformers movie that I wouldn’t recommend for young children, let alone my own, to see anytime soon.

The movie is well intentioned. The story follows the future Optimus Prime and Megatron, presented here respectively as the courageous-to-a-fault Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth) and pessimistic and cautious D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry), who work as miners in the Escher-esque city of Iacon, a MATRIX-y metropolis with a mining colony deep within the bowels of planet Cybertron. Energon, the power source that allows robots to transform into warriors (and more importantly, awesome vehicles), is a valuable and exceedingly rare commodity. Deep down, Orion Pax knows that there is more to their lives than the oppressive drudgery of the indentured servitude that is their plight. This eventually leads to them teaming up with a hard-nosed mining supervisor named Elita-1 (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) and B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key). They break free of Iacon City into a I AM LEGEND/MAZE RUNNER-esque surface above, and discover the truth of what they are meant to be, which sets off what could have been a rousing story about a revolution against an oppressive system designed to keep certain beings at the bottom while the strongest enjoy the spoils and watch their underlings fight for scraps. (SIDENOTE: there is something I find inherently disturbing, that this is a message of a film that is 100% computer animated; a film that wouldn’t exist if not for the countless hours of animators and VFX artists, a project that rests on the backs of the struggles of the problematic and oppressive VFX industry with its questionable labor practices, and an irony that sadly seems to be lost on the filmmakers).

Suffice it to say, the bones of yet another Hero’s Journey narrative, ultimately about workers exploitation and a labor revolt, infused with good messages about questioning authority, fighting for justice, and continuing to stay hopeful and joyful in the face of oppression, gets ground up to an unrecognizable pulp in the machinery. Here, we get a movie (produced by Bay and directed by TOY STORY 4 helmer Josh Cooley) that is at once too dark and irresponsible for the young children it is intended for, and too leaden and simplistic for the adults who are obligated to sit through it. We get a tonally uneven, flat-looking movie that isn’t fun, filled with the corny jokes, visual incoherence, and cliched dialogue (“I was born ready,” “I was afraid you’d say that”) that you expect from a Michael Bay movie, but without his—dare I say—finesse? On a basic storytelling level, the film suffers from a frenzied pace while still taking a while for it to get going. When it finally hits the speed of traffic almost halfway through its running time, there is still too much casual swearing and violence: not just violence in terms of action, but also violent language and ideas— even murder! Yes, you could argue that they are just animated robots, but there is one scene where you literally see the light going out of another robot’s eyes after being torn in half. So…

Yeah yeah, we shouldn’t expect a lot from these types of movies, but is this for kids? I would say because these movies are supposed to be for kids that we should hold them to a much higher standard. I often wonder when filmmakers make animated movies if they truly remember what it’s like to be a child, let alone if they have children themselves. This movie had me thinking that quite a lot, that either the filmmakers don’t have children of their own, or they just don’t care what they see.

Listen: saying something like “at least it’s not a Deadpool movie” still doesn’t make it something I feel children are ready for. Of course, make your own decisions and draw your own conclusions, but despite its few merits—a game cast that also includes Laurence Fishburne, Steve Buscemi, and Jon Hamm, and a fine music score by Brian Tyler—I just don’t think this movie makes the world a better place. Given the state of the world, I’d like to think that we are now in a society in which we are trying to unlearn aggressive lessons we were taught and to help condition our children, especially our young boys, to grow into emotional intelligence and into a way of dealing with conflict that doesn’t include violence for its own sake, and for me that’s the bottom line. I alluded to the earlier Michael Bay films being junk food. But there is the junk food where you say, “well, at least there’s protein“ and the junk food that’s just a Twinkie. I’m not saying Bay’s films are protein either, or that there’s anything wrong with junk food cinema, but because the experience of watching TRANSFORMERS ONE, a movie intended for children, feels nutritious in moments, it makes it all the more disheartening when the rest of its ingredients make you wish you had never consumed it at all.

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Zach is a proud member of the Minnesota Film Critics Alliance (MNFCA). For more info about Zach, the organization, or to read other great reviews from other great Minnesota-based film critics, click here: https://mnfilmcriticalliance.wordpress.com/