Just when you're about to give up on stories that endlessly repackage the same trademarked properties, along comes a movie like Josh Cooley's "Transformers One." As its subtly confident title suggests, it carries itself as if nobody had ever made a Transformers movie before. It's so earnest, bringing notes of freshness and innocence to a prequel that, by all rights, shouldn't have had any.
Cooley pulled off the unlikely feat of finding new things to say about very familiar franchise characters in "Toy Story 4." He accomplishes 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 nobody knows anything about these characters, much less that there will eventually be a galaxy-spanning war between the Decepticons and the Autobots. This way, people could be shocked and moved to see the central characters become the robot equivalent of brothers facing each other across a battlefield during a civil war. The effect would probably be similar to watching the "Star Wars" prequels without knowing that best buds Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker end up on opposite sides of The Force.
Of course, the characters 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 intelligent robots divided into two social classes: those with transformation cogs (or t-cogs) and those without. The ones without are essentially slaves mining Energon, the fuel/food that keeps the robots going. All this mining results from the planet losing the fabled Matrix of Leadership. Orion Pax becomes convinced that if he and his pal D-16 can recover it, it will not only eliminate the need for slave labor but allow the oppressed underclass to rise up and become something other than second-class citizens.
What the heck? asks the reader. Has Josh Cooley bent the Transformers into a parable that's somewhere between a slave revolt film and a metaphor for labor versus management? Actually, yeah. Of course, you can't go too far with a story like that without incurring the wrath of the megacorporation that pays the bills (in this case, Paramount, which, as of this writing, is on track to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of tech mogul David Ellison's Skydance Media). And there ends up being a hint of monarchial fetishism mixed in by the end, only because the boys are searching for a mythic artifact that confers superpowers rather than, say, writing a constitution and forming a parliament. Not that anybody would be interested in a movie with that plot—Transformers fans have been immersed in a story with mythological "find the artifact and embrace your cosmic destiny" flavor for decades, and they're here to see robots beat the crap out of each other and turn into cars and planes and whatnot—and after a fleet-footed but densely packed buildup, the movie eventually does get there, staging 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 approximating sensitivity and warmth. Orion Pax and D-16 are joined on their mission by other robots, including two trash disposal bots. One is B-127 (Keegan Michael Key), a lovably insecure comic relief character who fantasizes about renaming himself "Badassatron," and the other is Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson), who is defined mainly by her unflappable super-competence (Johansson and Key have been typecast in this way before, and probably will be again). The big set pieces are all shaped and executed with a sense of rhythm and humor that prevents the film from becoming repetitious or settling into rote fan service. There are villains, too, but they're not particularly important. It's a relationship movie.
The main reason to see and appreciate the movie—beyond its ability to thread that needle between giving fans something new and giving them the thing they will always want regardless—is the way it develops the relationship between Orion Pax and D-16. You feel a sense of tragic weight as the tale unfolds. The Old Testament allusions (specifically to the story of Cain and Abel) are done so matter-of-factly that it doesn't feel as if Cooley and his collaborators are burdening the movie with a weight it's not strong enough to carry. But it does have weight, because it knows what has to happen and doesn't flinch from the inevitable. Henry's vocal performance goes all-out, as if he's playing a mythic figure from an ancient text who wants to be good but isn't strong enough to resist the bad mojo swirling in his head. The script does an especially thoughtful job of showing D-16 incrementally compromising his moral code to the point where he's willing to become the same kind of despot that he and his former pal used to loathe. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, and still metal.
