A new attempt to refresh the franchise, with the voices of Chris Hemsworth and Scarlett Johansson, is surprisingly entertaining if aesthetically ugly
Optimus Prime is typically a dour and self-serious figure. In both the 80s cartoons and the Michael Bay-directed Transformers movies, the leader of the Autobots – a red, blue and gunmetal robot who can contort like a Rubik’s Cube into a big rig – typically puts on a noble warrior performance with his rigid posture and voice, and those tinny and operatic speeches.
He wasn’t always that way, according to Transformers One, a movie that turns those full-throated operatic speeches into a running gag. The animated origin story gives us a grinning, rascally and rebellious young Optimus who is constantly cracking jokes and getting his best friend Megatron (yes, the one who will become his nemesis) into trouble. This Optimus – who at one point is described as “blindly optimistic”, get it? – makes the movie built around him considerably lighter and arguably more fun than almost all the other entries in the behemoth franchise. Though that’s not saying a whole lot.
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