So far, there have been seven Transformers films and two of the top three have been prequels: the genuinely charming Bumblebee and the okay-compared-to-its-predecessors Rise Of The Beasts. It makes the prospect of this prequel, returning our robots-in-disguise heroes to their animation roots, a bit more enticing. Sure enough, this makes three of the top four films prequels, but the format means there’s still an air of inevitability about many plot developments here: we always know, in a prequel, that some characters will survive to fight another day and others will go back for good.
Our heroes are the goofily enthusiastic Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth) and more law-abiding D16 (Brian Tyree Henry), two small, downtrodden mining robots. They lack the ability to transform, so labour daily in the dangerous mines of Cybertron to find their power and food. However, an unexpected discovery and Orion’s obsession with Primes, the franchise’s powerful warrior robots, sends them to the planet’s surface, along with their boss Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) and hanger-on B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key), where they learn something that will change everything.
It’s consistently pretty entertaining, even if it takes a while to get going. The voice cast, which also includes Steve Buscemi, Laurence Fishburne and Jon Hamm, does very good work; hardcore fans may miss voice-of-Optimus-Prime Peter Cullen’s sonorous tones, but Hemsworth doesn’t even attempt an approximation until the end, rightly figuring that that’s the sort of authority you have to earn.
There are times where you can’t tell which lump of metal is hitting which
The animation is colourful and characterful, and if there are a few moments where you can’t tell which lump of metal is hitting the other, that’s probably baked into the franchise.
Director Josh Cooley, a former Pixar stalwart who worked on Inside Out and Toy Story 4, keeps a much closer eye on character development than, say, Michael Bay. There’s an easygoing and often very funny camaraderie between our heroes. Cooley also remembers, crucially, that Transformers was originally a cartoon for kids who liked toys that turn into slightly different toys, and pitches the adventure appropriately.
The result is likeable enough to win over a whole new generation, starting the endless cycle of reboot and rebirth over again. Let’s roll?
In US theaters Sep 20 and UK cinemas Oct 11.