Transformers has had a long and illustrious history with various movies and cartoons that have acted as advertisements for one of the most popular toy lines on the planet. I am a casual Transformers fan who grew up with the cartoon series in my kid years, the movies in my teenage years, and the comics in my adult years. There has been no shortage of attempts at rebooting the franchise from the ground up to establish how the great battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons first started. Transformers One, as the name implies, attempts to start from the beginning. So, how good of a job does it do in establishing a firm foundation for potential future stories?

In my honest opinion, while I wouldn't necessarily call this bad, it's far from great. I think the word I'm looking for is "disappointing" because there are a lot of good things here revolving around what I feel is essentially a very fractured story. The animation quality is top-notch, and the set pieces are gorgeous. Whether on a barren sentient planet or an F-ZERO-style race track, everything is beautifully rendered with polished and fluid 3D animation. The action is effortless to follow, with action sequences displaying a solid amount of weight and fluidity in the Transformers' movements. How the Transformers use their ability to transform parts of their body are creative, whether in one-on-one fights or onslaughts. The music is a little bit forgettable outside of the iconic leitmotifs, but it gets the job done.

Voice acting is also surprisingly solid despite the usual assortment of celebrity cameos. I didn't recognize some key players immediately like I thought I would, but they hit all the right notes. Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry have great chemistry together. This is also a hilarious movie. In fact, I'll say this is the most I've ever laughed in a Transformers film. There's a great sense of comedic timing here, especially with Bumblebee, who seems to act as the group's clown. The back-and-forth between characters is sharp and has a real snappiness to it, but that doesn't change the fact that it felt like I was watching two movies.

The first half of this movie is a relatively simple, yet well put together, underdog story about two friends trying to make a name for themselves. We have Orion acting as the wide-eyed adventurous spirit, playing alongside D-16, who acts as the more levelheaded rationalist. These two characters are obviously the precursors to Optimus Prime and Megatron, respectively, and this is not the first time that Transformers media has really gone into the early relationships between these two characters. In some iterations, the two did start off as very good friends before turning into murder soulmates on the battlefield. Immediately, I saw what the film was doing in building up this wholesome relationship because the more I care, the more tragic the knife will feel when the inevitable fallout happens. It's like a Greek tragedy: you're just waiting for the train wreck to happen, and everything is being set up to maximize the impact.

For the first half of this film, it was working. I was wholly invested in the relationship between these two. Their brotherhood was infectious, their jabs at each other were believable, and I had a smile on my face for almost the entire time. Then the twist happens where the obvious bad guy is revealed to be the obvious bad guy, and this information ends up being the catalyst that drives the two robots apart. At first, I thought it was clever because the catalyst made sense in the moment as something that the characters would disagree on. If anything, I really appreciated the fact that when the first crack in D-16's character happens, it's almost done in a way that inverses the roles of our two leads. Suddenly, Orion needs to be responsible, while D-16 is driven by pure motion.

But then we remember that there isn't nearly enough real estate in the film to properly transition this point to the climax, where D-16 fully takes on the Megatron persona. These brilliant and well-directed scenes hit me over the head with the tragedy of these two going from friends to enemies, with some scenes getting surprisingly dark when you think about the implications of how certain things affect robots. But a lot of these moments just don't feel earned during the second half because D-16 doesn't feel like he's being written as the same character anymore. You could argue that that is the point, that the film is about him turning into something else, but I would argue it doesn't work for two reasons.

The first is that who Megatron is at the end of the film is significantly less interesting than who he was at the beginning when you remove the connection. There's a lot of setup here for more nuanced political ideas, like what it means to be a leader in this society or the idea of replacing a tyrant with another. But instead, the film just sort of acts like Megatron wants to burn everything to the ground, as if he had a festering desire to do so all along. The film did not establish the hardships of his life nearly enough at the beginning. At its worst, it weakens the friendship connection with Orion because this is no longer the character I was worried about initially.

It also doesn't work because the more Megatron goes down this path, the fewer people should be on his side. We get the introduction of a lot of iconic Decepticons in this film, and while they do establish a rapid reason for why they would support Megatron down the road, it doesn't work when you consider how the film ends with him going off to plot more for the future of the franchise. It's like going in the direction of the franchise's status quo made it a weaker character story when the film could have had its cake and ate it too. There's a straightforward narrative fix here with Megatron just saying he's following the potential for change that Orion was chasing, as Orion's character arc is about being a less reckless idea guy. But it's never brought to the forefront.

This is what I mean when I say the film is disappointing. There's a lot of good in this film, and I can see the potential for this universe to be expanded upon, as there are still a few loose ends that could be wrapped up in either a TV series or another movie. The action and humor are great, with much potential for deep character writing. However, a lot here also falls flat on its face or comes off as the definition of missed potential. Unfortunately, I can think of a couple of other Transformers media that I would rather watch over this film again. It was so close to being more than meets the eye, but in the end, it feels like it just became another cog in the machine.