Transformers One

A good friend of mine teaches, and amongst other things covers media studies. We were recently talking about the difficulties of discussions of audience. In an era of widely available streaming media, how do you discuss who a film is aimed at? One can look at a text, and within it there are opportunities for phenomenological hermeneuticists and Marxists both. Outside a text, however, come other clues. Among the apocrypha and marginalia of cinematic releases is their marketing. Some examples like the TV spots for Starship Troopers that use Blur's Song 2 are a fascinating set of lenses for critical approach. What I want to talk about are the tie-in promotions. Consider the complexities of McDonald's Happy Meals and Batman Returns, which at release was a 15 in the UK and a PG-13 in the States. Which between sex, violence, and fast-food is most dangerous is itself ground for analysis.

For Transformers One the relevant promotion would appear to be a free battery with selected power-tools and gardening products if spending £99 in a single transaction. Fear not, you're not reading sponsored content. With Quintessons and the like about there's no need to worry about sponcon too. I shan't disclose the manufacturer that is running the deal over the month of release. I mean, of course this is also a film that's an outgrowth of a creative franchise based on the selling of toys, and that notionally apolitical commerce will therefore always be part of a story that involves a war of survival and a slave revolt and gladiatorial contests and hierarchical power-structures that literally deny both freedom and agency. What I will say is that Transformers One being aimed at men of a certain age would be quite obvious without it, but this isn't the only place where the film gives more than meets the eye.

More learned fans than I could explain the differences between Cybertronian continuities. As a fan of comics I know that UK storylines diverged from US ones, weekly and monthly publishing schedules another form of trans-Atlantic gap. I knew that somewhere in the legendarium Optimus Prime was known as Orion Pax. Even that's not a universal origin, hardly surprising one supposes when the whole point of Transformers was to amalgamate a variety of imported toy-lines. We could argue about that as well, in truth, but even without a cordless it doesn't take long to drill down to what makes Transformers One work.

It's fun. It's quite unabashedly so, which is something too many movies based on this sort of property are afraid of. It's got moments of silliness, a fair few thrilling fight and chase sequences, and dozens of nods to various points of arcane detail. These vary, from paraphrasing songs from the earlier animated movie that traumatised a generation who then shed tears and are now buying sheds, to distinctive shaped heads briefly glimpsed in crowd scenes. Other cultural touchstones include blowing on a data-cartridge when it doesn't load properly. I'm trying to console myself that recognising it put me firmly in one of the film's target demographics, but I'm trying to get ahead of the game.

Boy or man, the film doesn't do much to restore the apparent gender divide. Robots in this? Guys. That's with a handful of exceptions, but not enough that you'd be troubled to count them on a moulded fist. In a large and diverse cast there are several notables. Adding to their list of action figures, Chris Hemsworth and Scarlett Johansson appear, as Orion and Elita-1. Orion's best pal D-16 is voiced by Brian Tyree Henry. His performance is one of the highlights, he's no stranger to genre, having popped up in both Gotham and Godzilla. D-16 isn't his final form, super-fans might recognise it as a different kind of label. Turbo-fans might regret that he doesn't mention an uncle P-38 but lightning rarely strikes twice. Rounding out our squad of protagonists is B-127. Keegan-Michael Key is no exception to the rule that comedians tend to make good voice actors, and between his poker crew and pointy-bit (or two) he's got many of the most amusing moments.

Some of those, admittedly, come from the thrill of recognition. Laurence Fishburne isn't playing against recent type as a wiser figure who reveals mysteries to an ingenue. Jon Hamm and Steve Buscemi appear in somewhat unexpected roles, but given the subject, things not being as they seem isn't that much of a surprise. What was less predictable is its quality. Transformers One is a treat.

Its quality is exceptional. One of the weaknesses of the repeated attempts at Spider-Man is the repetition of the hero's origin story. Despite that, Into The Spider-Verse succeeds as well because it leans into the difficulty of telling audiences something they already know by doing it again and again and again. Backed into a corner it comes out swinging, before soaring across even more subverted expectations. Transformers One is willing to recognise that it's a movie about a set of toys, and while it's nowhere near as metatextual as Barbie it's both referential and reverential to its history.

That said, while it's got a producer credit for Michael Bay it's a very distinct break from his Transformers continuity. That might have hit its most complex in Rise Of The Beasts. One eschews the more muddied and muddled character designs of the 'live action' films in favour of something much cleaner. At times those robots resembled a bulldog chewing a wasp in a blender. That's a Lanz tractor, hot bulb and all, wrapping itself around a Pratt & Whitney R-4360 28-cylinder aircraft engine, as seen in the open-source computer graphics tool.

Behind the scenes, director Josh Cooley leverages his Pixar experience for a second feature. Toy Story 4 was an impressive effort, and if one's feeling mischievous this is a toy story too. Writing duties are shared, with co-writing team Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (who penned co-shrinking team Ant-Man And The Wasp , and Eric Pearson (who penned Avengers-adjacent Black Widow). They're all used to pushing franchises forward, but here there's a real sense that they've been given room to play outwith the protocols of parliamentary procedure. It's absolutely appropriate that Transformers One takes familiar components and makes a new shape of them, one that carries hallmarks of what it was before but takes advantage of rearrangement for action and adventure.

It is an origin story, one that goes so far back that its references to creation myths start to feel recursive. In homage to William Grey Walter and Terry Pratchett both, one could say it was turtles all the way down. That chelonian stack is an effort to invent foundations, and Transformers One is hopefully something that'll be built on. I've enough fondness for Marvel's Cinematic Universe that I've seen all of the features and with a spreadsheet can attest that (at time of writing) I've seen 65.2% of the associated TV episodes. That fondness doesn't mean that some of that hasn't felt like homework, and not the kind I used to enjoy. That was never the case for Bay's outings, but Transformers One has done more to rekindle childhood memories of Warpath and his adventures on my bedroom floor. Amongst the various forms of advertising, it's all spark to nostalgia.