The last time an all-animated Transformers opus was in theaters - 1986’s The Transformers: The Movie - it gave us kids’ TV cartoonery, a power-rock soundtrack and Orson Welles voicing the world-eating Unicron. Four decades on, Hasbro’s robo-chameleons get a shiny new upgrade in Transformers One, a CG-animated prequel set on their home planet Cybertron that reignites the spark that’s so often been conspicuously absent from the franchise’s live-action entries.
Doing away with humans helps, instead Josh Cooley’s (Toy Story 4) film concentrates on the hitherto untold origin stories of the heroic Optimus Prime and his evil nemesis Megatron. Introduced to us initially as mining bots Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry), the dynamic duo start off as friends who dream of more than digging for Energon in the bowels of an orb whose surface is off-limits to drudges like them.
