Transformers One (2024)

Transformers One arrives as an origin story for two robots who will spend the next forty years trying to kill each other, and it approaches that assignment with a straight face and a decent budget. The picture is competently assembled. ILM's animation gives Cybertron a pleasing Art Deco sheen, and the decision to strip humans from the frame entirely leaves the robots to carry the emotional weight on their own. They mostly manage it. The friendship between Orion Pax and D-16 is sketched with enough warmth that the eventual rupture lands, even for viewers who know exactly where the runway ends.

The film's social consciousness is modest and largely incidental. The voice cast is notably diverse for a franchise about alien machines, with Black performers voicing Megatron, Bumblebee, and others, though the characters themselves have no human race to represent. Elita-1 begins as a demoted supervisor and ends as a resistance fighter, which is a fine arc for a female character and not a thesis about anything. Sentinel Prime rules through the exploitation of cogless miners and trades Energon to alien aggressors, a thread of anti-authoritarian class resentment that never hardens into an argument about capital. B-127 talks a great deal. Nobody diagnoses him.

Elsewhere the ledger is blank. There is no romance, no identity subtext, no body-image conversation among the machines. The resource crisis is a resource crisis. The villain is a liar and a tyrant, and the film is content to let that be the whole of its politics. Lessons about tyranny and friendship are delivered through chases and punches, which is the correct venue for them. What we have, then, is a well-made cartoon about two coworkers who fall out over a disagreement regarding murder. It is not trying to teach us anything. It simply wants us to watch the falling out, and it is right to want that.