Just when you’re about to give up on stories that rehash the same old properties over and over, along comes a movie like Josh Cooley’s Transformers One. As its subtly confident title suggests, it plays out like no one’s ever made a Transformers movie before. It’s so sincere that it brings notes of freshness and innocence to a prequel that, by all rights, shouldn’t have had one.
Cooley managed the unlikely feat of finding new things to say about well-known franchise characters in “Toy Story 4.” He does the same here, devising an elaborate backstory for characters who, despite their considerable appeal, were never known for a rich sense of history and psychological depth. It’s fun to imagine an alternate universe where no one knows anything about these characters, let alone that there will eventually be a galaxy-spanning war between the Decepticons and the Autobots. This way, people might be surprised and moved by seeing the central characters become the robotic equivalent of brothers facing off on a battlefield during a civil war. The effect would likely be similar to watching the “Star Wars” prequels without knowing that best friends Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker end up on opposite sides of the Force.
Of course, the characters being alluded to here are Optimus Prime and Megatron. They’re introduced as two lonely nobodies named Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (voiced by Brian Tyree Henry). Orion Pax and D-16 work as miners on Cybertron, a planet of sentient robots divided into two social classes: those with transformation gears (or t-cogs) and those without. Those without are essentially slaves who mine Energon, the fuel/food that keeps the robots running. All of this mining is a result of the loss of the legendary Matrix of Leadership on the planet. Orion Pax becomes convinced that if he and his friend D-16 can retrieve it, it will not only eliminate the need for slave labor, but it will allow the oppressed underclass to rise up and become more than just second-class citizens.
What the fuck? the reader asks. Has Josh Cooley turned Transformers into a parable that’s halfway between a movie about a slave revolt and a metaphor for work and management? Actually, yes. Of course, you can’t go too far with a story like that without incurring the wrath of the megacorporation footing the bills (in this case, Paramount, which, as of this writing, is On track to become a wholly owned subsidiary from tech mogul David Ellison’s Skydance Media). And at the end, there’s a hint of monarchical fetishism mixed in, just because the guys are searching for a mythical artifact that grants superpowers rather than, say, writing a constitution and forming a parliament. Not that anyone would be interested in a movie with that plot: Transformers fans have been steeped in a mythologically flavored “find the artifact and accept your cosmic destiny” story for decades, and they’re here to see robots beat each other up and turn into cars and planes and whatnot, and after a swift but dense buildup, the movie finally gets there, featuring a large-scale battle in the spirit of something out of a “Star Wars” or “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie.
But it’s still fascinating to see this material treated with something approaching sensitivity and warmth. Orion Pax and D-16 are joined on their mission by other robots, including two garbage-disposal robots. One is B-127 (Keegan Michael Key), an endearingly insecure comic relief character who fantasizes about changing his name to “Badassatron,” and the other is Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson), who is defined primarily by her unflappable supercompetence (Johansson and Key have been typecast this way before, and probably will be again). The big set pieces are all crafted and executed with a sense of pacing and humor that keeps the movie from becoming repetitive or settling into rote fan service. There are villains, too, but they’re not particularly important. This is a relationship movie.
The main reason to watch and appreciate the film, beyond its ability to find the balance between offering fans something new and giving them what they’ll always want, is the way it develops the relationship between Orion Pax and D-16. There’s a sense of tragic weight as the story unfolds. The allusions to the Old Testament (specifically the story of Cain and Abel) are made so naturally that it doesn’t feel like Cooley and his collaborators are burdening the film with a weight it’s not strong enough to bear. But it does have weight, because it knows what has to happen and doesn’t flinch from the inevitable. Henry’s vocal performance is fully committed, as if he’s playing a mythical figure from an ancient text who wants to be good but isn’t strong enough to resist the evil swirling around in his head. The script does an especially thoughtful job of showing how D-16 increasingly compromises his moral code to the point of being willing to become the same kind of despot he and his former friend used to hate. Meet the new boss, just like the old one, and still a metalhead.