It’s forgivable to be a little cynical about Transformers in the year 2024. The franchise is seven films deep — eight if we include 1986’s The Transformers: The Movie — and most them aren’t great. Sure, they’ve made a lot of money, but at least one of the films in the series holds the dubious distinction of being one of the highest-grossing, worst-reviewed films of all time (Transformers: Age of Extinction from 2014).
Things looked up in 2018 with the release of Bumblebee, but then the franchise stumbled again with last year’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. The bar for these movies, as they say, is resting on the floor.
There are plenty of reasons for this: the movies look cool because Michael Bay knows how to make things look cool. Criticisms about Bay be damned, he knows how to light and block a scene and point a camera at things exploding pretty effectively. Where they fall down is in the writing and character building. It might seem a little much to expect from a franchise initially designed solely to sell toys to kids, but the original 1980s cartoon series had characters that, while perhaps basic archetypes, were also well-defined and consistent. To date, the recent films are mostly not that, and they occasionally get things entirely wrong.
So when a new Transformers movie was announced, it was difficult not to be wary. Returning to the franchise’s roots with an animated feature sounds great, but pitching a new origin story of the Transformers sounds like the franchise out of ideas. A lacklustre trailer, released in a marketing stunt where it was projected in space, did not help. Imagine my surprise, then, when Transformers One turned out to be a total blast. Yes, that’s correct: Transformers One is an excellent time at the movies.
Link: https://exclaim.ca/film/article/transformers-one-film-review
‘Transformers One’ Is Actually Good?! | Exclaim!
