TRANSFORMERS ONE (2024)

You can’t hear news about Hollywood animated movies these days without a facepalm and a grunt. Have yourself a list of clichés you expect to see and hear when you go to see Sing (2016), Encanto (2021), Wish (2023), Migration (2023), Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024), or Despicable Me 4 (2024). Be sure to include lines like “There’s goodness in you” and “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”, or “Someone’s got to do something!” Don’t forget to time your breaks in between the chase scenes or corny pop numbers either, as well as the lore expositions with ‘cool’ visuals and Hans Zimmer-esque musical cues you’ve heard millions of times before.

It wasn’t so long ago when you could suddenly feel like a child again seeing Inside Out (2015) and Luca (2021), and it’s all the more regrettable that something like Elemental (2023), Turning Red (2022), Inside Out 2 (2024), or now, Transformers One, wasn’t allowed to become something they might’ve been had there been less commercial drive and more thought and coherence in their making. What happened to the creative powerhouse once so ripe with ideas and heart? What’s become of the ecstasy you once felt when Woody lit the rocket that had Buzz Lightyear strapped to it to catch a truck in Toy Story (1995)? What of the light satirical charms of Brad Bird in The Iron Giant (1999) and The Incredibles (2004), whose impeccable yet delicate rhythms and the ingenuities in the comedic devices can only be matched by the American comedies of the 1930s and 40s?

When Hollywood animations nowadays try to replicate the successes of the past, they simply go through the motions of copying and pasting the character types and story devices from Shrek (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), or whatever else you can think of that makes you get all teary-eyed just from nostalgia, without any of the same passions and brains. When you see a title like The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), you suspect how much of the inventive mechanics of the games will be translated over. And when you learn that the person voicing Mario is to be Chris Pratt, hear that copyrighted pop songs are going to be the soundtrack, and finally see for yourself that the plotting is of the tasteless kiss-kiss-bang-bang garden variety, with nods and easter eggs that add up to the hundreds if not thousands, you could feel as though your spirit is draining.

Super Mario Bros. charted second on the year-end global box office ranking, coming in with over $1.3BN in gross, and all the big animation studios are now following suit. So far, Disney and Universal seem to be grappling for the mantle in streamlining everything in the unimaginative contour of fast-action video games, earning the big bucks for old rope. Paramount Pictures, lagging behind with Sonic the Hedgehog and Paw Patrol films, vies for the prize. Transformers One, directed by Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4), was to be their latest bet, and its plot goes something like this…

Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth), later the Optimus Prime everybody knows from Transformers (2007), sneaks into somewhere for lore exposition, then he’s chased out; the sequence ends with the introduction of his buddy D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry), later known as Megatron; they go to work in the mines, and then before you know it there’s a mining incident, and… they escape. Sometime later, they end up on some race tracks because Orion thought it’d be a good idea, for some non-reason like showing the world what they’re made of even though they can’t transform; later still, they find themselves on some cargo train, now with Elita (Scarlett Johansson) and Bumblebee (Keegan-Michael Key), trying to get to a location for important lore exposition; they were then found by Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm), whom they found out is actually a Big Bad, so they… escape. They’re then captured by someone else, who was then discovered by Sentinel Prime, and captured again.

The whole thing goes on and on like this, and you could do less than letting the incessant dialogues and blasting sound effects numb you into an unfeeling trance; it gallops without a pause. The little bits of “character development” in between the booms and the bangs are serviceable, but none of the characters feel like they’re of the age they seem, nor have they grown meaningfully as characters through the course of nearly two hours besides the perfunctory plot progression. Chugging away has never been what animation does quite well at, if not because children, with built-in ADHD, are its primary audience. But increasingly, we could see how fast an animated film will move, and by what structure and formula it will follow, from miles away while driving the freeway. Is it really necessary to work up everything you have and throw it at the audience, accelerating till the film breaks its own neck?

The studio executives have a need for betting dollars to donuts when it comes to art and entertainment, even though when they play with the stock market it’s pretty much anything goes. At the moment, they find themselves in a position they weren’t in not so long ago: they’ve got to catch up with the speed of TikTok and YouTube shorts, with the way they’re ‘J and L cut’ that leaves no room to breathe, seducing viewers with an endless supply of infantile comedy bits and “short-form content”. If even educated adults can not resist being locked in with the restless bombardment of sounds and images, what could the young kids possibly do to not be given to such abuse? And if young kids now can’t endure one minute without eye candies and “Cotton Eye Joe”, how the hell do you even get them to pay attention to a normal dialogue?

Franchise continuity matters, but one can’t make fair comparisons with earlier renditions of the same characters here. I mean, the Optimus Prime of the G1 series from the 1980s is so brainless that a random buffoon can come off wittier. But it was a kids’ show through and through, and made no mistake about it. One wants to be more intelligent, but without shaking off its vernix. Kids now pretend to know way more than they ever used to, and they have an existential need to give others the impression that they’re ahead of the curve and keeping up. They’re only willing to engage with media that they feel are on par with their level of maturity, so no animation works now can get away with the more primal sentiments of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) or Bambi (1942). The old Transformers cartoons could be so raw and dumb, and the newer ones like One could be so fictitiously sparkling and personable, that there might not be a better example of the new media’s sweeping influence on adolescents, how they think, talk, and reflect.

Watching the characters of One feels a little like watching a bunch of kids fooling around. They’re stock character types: two buddies never getting bored by their silly handshakes, a friendless Mary Sue preoccupied with being potentially promoted, and an inane loon whose only reason for existence is to provide comic relief. Once you’ve heard Chris Hemsworth and Scarlett Johansson’s voices you can never un-hear them again. Hemsworth’s trying to fit into the mould of the goofy but hearty hero archetype, who can’t get by a minute without yapping a bunch of jabberwocky, but he doesn’t seem to have the sauce to have an identifiable personality, and it’s not all his fault since all these stock characters are so overused they can seem like they’ve been lifted out of practically every Disney animated film of the last decade.

When his Orion suddenly turns to preach about how killing the villain is wrong, it seems as though somebody else has taken over his consciousness. Henry’s D-16 has got a more perceptible arc, going from a negotiator playing by the rules to a vengeful berserker Megatron knowing better now that the rules are rigged against his kind. Psychology is not always what’s needed or helpful in animation, but the transition in his attitude can still seem out of nowhere. It’s a simple defect that could’ve been redeemed by a little more time and effort put into him and the others when they’re not pew-pewing or running off. And that’s not the end of it. We learn nothing about why Megatron is so obsessed with one of the Primes whose head shape resembles the symbol of the Decepticons we’ve come to know, which seemed to have had a big effect on his change in mentality, or why Orion or anybody could be so obsessed with the legends of the Primes and their trophy that they were willing to sneak into some secret establishment for an answer. The film is so much chasing, escaping, and fighting that it never has a chance to piece these characters together more wholly.

While Cooley appeared to be trying to inject as much life into this as he could, the studio forces came out on top. Formerly one of filmmaker Pete Docter’s troupe, Cooley is still a little too wet behind the ears in the directing chair to assert his vision with any sway. He doesn’t have a name as established as John Lasseter or Andrew Stanton for the studio’s confidence to leave more room for him to fledge. His talents show, but the signs are sparse here. The film tries tweaking the mechanics around here and there, like when the characters (at one point given the ability to transform that’s once robbed from them) learn to toddle with their new wheels as they go. His film is never too humourless as a result, but his tricks ultimately don’t add up to much. It’s no Ready Player One (2018) or Super Mario Bros., but it’s more alarming precisely because of that: it’s halfway there.

USA | 2024 | 104 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Josh Cooley.
writers: Eric Pearson, Andrew Barrer & Gabriel Ferrari (story by Andrew Barrer & Gabriel Ferrari; based on Hasbro’s ‘Transformers’ action figures).
voices: Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi, Laurence Fishburne & Jon Hamm.