Transformers One review – animated origin tale is fun fan service

Optimus Prime is typically a dour and self-serious figure. In both the 80s cartoons and the Michael Bay-directed Transformers movies, the leader of the Autobots – a red, blue and gunmetal robot who can contort like a Rubik’s Cube into a big rig – typically puts on a noble warrior performance with his rigid posture and voice, and those tinny and operatic speeches.

He wasn’t always that way, according to Transformers One, a movie that turns those full-throated operatic speeches into a running gag. The animated origin story gives us a grinning, rascally and rebellious young Optimus who is constantly cracking jokes and getting his best friend Megatron (yes, the one who will become his nemesis) into trouble. This Optimus – who at one point is described as “blindly optimistic”, get it? – makes the movie built around him considerably lighter and arguably more fun than almost all the other entries in the behemoth franchise. Though that’s not saying a whole lot.

Transformers One is the latest attempt after Bumblebee and Rise of the Beasts at resetting a movie series – based on the Hasbro toy line – that has raked in more than $5bn at the box office. The loud and lucrative franchise, which often left us more browbeat than wowed thanks to Bay’s bombast, is essentially reduced to scrap metal and recycled into something more contained, coherent and palatable, but also generic. The bots in Transformers One are here to show off more personality. But the movie doesn’t really have one of its own.

Say what you will about Bay’s chaotic spectacles, which were often just catastrophic, they were clearly the product of his uninhibited vision and never felt as quality-controlled and attuned to the algorithms as Transformers One. The latter, directed by Toy Story 4’s Josh Cooley (wrangling a whole other set of action figures), is breezy, comically self-referential and totally likable. But its charms nevertheless feel like they came off an assembly line – one that has been engineered to deliver Marvel-like results, in animated form of course.

Transformers One even features Marvel expat Chris Hemsworth. The Thor star lends his voice to Optimus Prime, who, when we first meet him, is called Orion Pax. He’s introduced breaking into an archive like a robo-Indiana Jones. Orion is trying to dig up hidden secrets from his home planet Cybertron’s ancient history, searching for hints as to where he could find a lost thingamajig that will help recharge their depleted energy sources (a great metaphor for this movie’s relationship to its franchise).

Orion’s hoping the discovery will relieve him and his compatriots, who are toiling away as cogs in a mine, like the mechanized laborers in Metropolis. Like Fritz Lang’s sci-fi touchstone, Cybertron has an oppressive class structure. The overlords can transform into vehicles, while the working grunts, lacking the individual power sources that allow shape-shifting, are duped into thinking they are serving some higher calling, in anonymity. But Orion comes into his own by breaking from the pack, going on a hero’s journey and becoming, as they say, “more than meets the eye”. The writing team here isn’t above reciting the brand’s slogan to punctuate tropes.

They fare better with the slapstick comedy – how this movie makes pratfalls funny again is actually quite miraculous – and the lively banter between the bots voiced by a starry cast led by Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry. The latter’s D16 is the BFF on the receiving end of Orion’s fist bumps, until he becomes Megatron. Scarlett Johansson is Elita-One, a wound-up supervisor full of quippy insults. In one stinging deep cut, she disses Orion and his friends as a bunch of “GoBots”, referencing Tonka’s competing toy line of robots in disguise. Meanwhile, Keegan-Michael Key steals the movie as B-127, a motormouthed spin on Bumblebee, pulling up as a constant source of comic relief.

The aesthetic here is mostly hideous, as if the film-makers are beholden to the synthetic looks passed down from Transformers of old – though they do find opportunities for some witty visual gags. I’m thinking the sight of bots sleeping at charging stations (do Transformers dream of Vespa-sheep?) and the robo-deer grazing on Cybertron’s surfaces. Instead of getting stuck in headlights, these deer actually have lights on their head, which flicker red when sensing danger.

The joys in Transformers One eventually gives way to cranking franchise gears, when the labour of a fan service-y prequel must be performed and the giddy characters have to *clears throat* transform into the roles we know them for – tinny speeches and all.

Megatron’s villain origin story, I’m almost embarrassed to say, feels belaboured and rushed. Expecting convincing character development in a Transformers movie sounds irrational, right? But I was having enough fun with Transformers One that it almost made me believe it could pull it off.

• Transformers One is out on 19 September in Australian cinemas, 20 September in US cinemas and in the UK on 11 October