“As befits a franchise about shape-shifting robots, ‘Transformers’ has had more alternate incarnations than anyone cares to remember,” said Laura Stott in The Sun. “And in the 40th year since the original 1980s cartoon, we have yet another version.”
This one, happily, is “pretty entertaining” – and you don’t need to have seen any of the other films to make sense of it.
An animated origins story, it takes us back to the days when Optimus Prime and Megatron – who will become sworn enemies – were “lowly” mining bots on the planet Cybertron, as well as the best of pals. Then a joyride gets them banished to “scrapheap-sifting duties”, and they discover that their planet’s idolised leader Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm) is a crook – prompting a rebellion. The film does often feel like it’s preparing “to flog you some more plastic stuff this Christmas”, but it’s “pacey” good fun.
“Transformers One”, which could more accurately be called “Transformers Nine”, is not part of a franchise “that could ever be accused of subtlety”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph, but the stylistic choices made by director Josh Cooley (“Toy Story 4”) make it “far more thoughtful and ingenious than the average reboot”. Its characters “may be hulking mechanoids, but they’re animated with stop-motion-like tactility”, their surfaces scuffed like a kid’s “most-played-with belongings”. Is the film just “a glorified Saturday-morning cartoon? Yes, but with the emphasis on glorified.”
After “16 years of clamorous, clattering mayhem”, cinemagoers could be forgiven for longing for the franchise to end, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Yet this film is an “unsettling watch” because, though “loud, multicoloured and garish”, it’s also “quite good”.