Film Review - Transformers One (2024)

Transformers One is a new Transformers film and an animated one (the first since the infamous 1986 film) and Chris Hemsworth stars as Orion Pax, a miner in the mines of Cybertron which is under the protection of Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm) who is the last of the Primes following a war with the Quintessons but Orion and his co-miners D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry), Bee-127 (Keegan Michael-Key) and Alita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) and there is more to Sentinel and the Quintessons than meets the eye.

Transformers One is a really good film and continues the upward trend the film series has been on since 2018’s Bumblebee and 2023’s Rise of the Beasts (which I enjoyed more than most) and this film firstly is very nicely animated with Cybertron rarely looking better on film save for the opening of Bumblebee, you can see the various metals and metallic colours on full display and Iacon which soon becomes the capital city of the Autobots looks very good here, I particularly liked the transforming highways when the robots are in their vehicle forms.

The film also has some good voice acting, Chris Hemsworth at times struggles to fill the enormous truck sized shoes left behind by Peter Cullen who IS Optimus Prime but he captures the character’s sense of honour and nobility very well, Scarlett Johansson is well Scarlett Johansson and she does a decent enough job while Laurence Fishburne and Jon Hamm do very well in their roles.

But my favourites are Brian Tyree Henry and Steve Buscemi who turns out to be an inspired casting choice for Starscream capturing the character’s snivelling and cowardice very well and Tyree Henry is excellent as Megatron as you see him go from being Orion’s friend to the tyrannical leader of the Decepticons in a very believable way, like Peter Cullen, Frank Welker (who also voiced Dr Claw on Inspector Gadget) made Megatron his own but Tyree Henry doesn’t struggle as much as Hemsworth does and his shining moments are so good to watch.

Where this film does fall down is Keegan Michael-Key as Bee-127 aka Bumblebee and he sounded more like a parrot that will not stop talking rather than an actor giving a performance and given what eventually happens to that character I didn’t really care if that event happened to him and the overall humour in the film at times intrudes on the overall storytelling, you’ll be sitting there enjoying the action and animation and voice acting and characters and then a joke will come out of nowhere and totally break the mood.

And that happened more than once for me during my watching of this movie and I’m pretty sick of it, I get these kinds of films need to have humour in them it comes with the territory but there are times where it gets in the way and this movie does that.

That said however Transformers One is a film I will probably see once more on the big screen as I had a great time with it and while family entertainment can be tricky to pull off this one does and families and fans will have a great time at it, 4 out of 5.