THB #591: Transformers One
We are in a moment of enormous challenges to the idea of what a theatrical movie is… whether it makes any real sense to be so or not.
Everything ends up on TV for pretty much ever. This has been true for 4 decades already. You may get to see some a movie years after release in a revival house or if it is successful enough the first time around, perhaps a distributor will mount an anniversary release.
This has been framed like it’s a debate by a lot of media writers and even smart people in the industry… but it’s not. It’s neither debatable or new.
And then you come across a movie like Transformers One that is - here we go - so much more than meets the eye. Because it is a story of unexpected heroes and The Overreaching State and eventually, unexpected villains… as cool and clean and dare I say about a visual marvel, simple as the great films those of us who love the last 70 years of movies (some longer) love to see on a big screen with a bucket of popcorn and an audience of strangers who having never met share the experience of a journey into the expected unexpected.
Two friends, one ambitious and the other shy, move forward, trying to make a better life until they are finally confronted with a dark truth about how meaningless they are to The Overreaching State and at least one of them wants to overcome the oppression. In the journey, they stumble onto partners in the effort in a woman who is tougher and smarter than most of the guys and the endlessly talking idiot who has no idea of his own powers. They will also try to persuade other powerful oddballs to join with them.
Layered over that is an almost biblical story of Gods (and Monsters) who are not always what they seem. It’s a story of an oppressed mass culture (everyone who isn’t with the last remaining Prime, aka God) who are being restrained by a physical part that they think they are missing, but has been secretly taken away from them and the natural power to thrive.
As has always been the case with Transformers - and other cultural institutions, like Star Wars - how religious of an experience this is for you is really up to your level of commitment. Personally, I have almost none. I had the good fortune of seeing the film the first time in a room full of zealots, who squealed and laughed at dozens of things that I did not recognize in any real way. Then I saw it again in a non-zealot room… and there were not as many shrieks of delight… but they room still loved the movie.
In other words, you don’t have to be a Transformers person to have a great time at Transformers One.
Thinking back to the live-action Transformers series, I always felt that Michael Bay was working around the technical and financial limitations of the time. The early movies were all budgeted in the vicinity of $200 million, but with each film, the tech got that much better… and cheaper. And I personally felt that Bay achieved the movie he really was trying for with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, in which the robots actually seemed like actors for the first time. We, as an audience, could engage them without grading on the curve (“Oh my God… that transformation is so cool… why is the Transformers just showing up for a few sequences making the movie lean on the live actors so hard?”)
Transformers One steps into the footprints of the Spider-Man: Spider-Verse franchise (which stepped into the footprints of the Lego Movie franchise) and brings something new to it… relative simplicity. Spider-Verse uses animation to make jazz. That is its overriding (and glorious) ambition. Transformers One is really a modern robot western with that overlay of a biblical epic… it’s all very Charlton Heston (movie-wise, not necessarily politically).
Josh Cooley, who directed the film, comes from the land of Pixar (he wrote Inside Out and directed and co/wrote Toy Story 4), where they know anything is possible and that movies really need to have a strong story backbone so that they never lose the audience in the “side hustle.”
In a weird way, this movie, which has very little visual grounding in our human/earthbound reality, is painted in Transformers imagery, but the core could just as easily have been a live-action movie. There is nothing here we haven’t seen in old movies… except for the fresh coat of digital and specifically Transformers paint.
If you have seen Ben Hur and The Treasure of Sierra Madre and The Departed and The 10 Commandments and Star Wars and Planet of the Apes and The Matrix, you have a lot of what Transformers One brings together in your brain.
The voice cast is great here in that they do the job skillfully… but they never overwhelm the movie. It’s never about the actor, but about the character. Buscemi is really the only voice actor who cannot help but to be “Oh my God, I love Buscemi.” Scarlett Johansson is not Black Widow’s family member here… really, more like Lucy (thrown in the unexpected) combined a kind of grounded ambition to get ahead that oddly she came closest to playing in Don Jon, as a normal woman who wanted exactly what she wanted and never let herself get distracted. Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry play it completely straight in their lead roles and just lay out the characters. And Keegan-Michael Key kills it as the over-the-top B-127… always managing to be irritatng enough to make sense in the context of the story, but never so much that he loses the audience in the theater.
This is the part of the review when I get shy about heaping so much praise on this anumated action comedy franchise movie.
But getting back to the beginning of this review… isn’t a really fun night at the movies enough to make going to the movies worth the effort for people who like going to the movies?
I know a lot of, mostly older, people who “just don’t like animation.” And I don’t think this film is going to change that. If you go in grousing, you will find a way to be unhappy. But I don’t really understand a family that will go see the charming and surprisingly good Sonic The Hedgehog movies who shouldn’t be going to see this film this weekend. (See it early… the kids will want to go back and see it again.) There are a couple family movies that opened to more than $50 million this year that can’t hold a candle to this film… and it will play for the pre-teens, the teens, and most surprisingly, for the adults.
Now… is it The Godfather? No. Is it Avatar? No. Is it as groundbreaking as the live-action Transformers films? No.
But this is one of those movies where someone should be offering a money back guarentee for audiences… if you don’t like it, get your money back. And for the most part, it will be hard for people to ask for their money back with that giant silly smirk on their face because they just had a great time at a very modern, but very old-fashioned movie movie.
Until tomorrow…