The Transformers movie franchise has been somewhat hit-and-miss in terms of quality if you listen to the critics and, indeed, the audiences. However, if you take the box office, merchandising, and home cinema revenue into account, then they’re pretty much the greatest things ever made. With Transformers: The Last Knight‘s lukewarm response seemingly killing plans of a Transformers shared universe, followed by the excitement of the surprisingly effective Bumblebee trailer, it’s clear that audiences are ready for a change.
The first five Transformers films featured increasingly massive set pieces that made the overly long running times bearable, while the human characters and plots didn’t capture the imagination as much as the robots themselves. One of the best aspects of the ’80s Transformers cartoons was that, despite them featuring much in the way of robot-on-robot mayhem, the stories were actually pretty low-key, happening away from cities and avoiding massive amounts of collateral damage. That’s something the movies seem to have missed.
What frustrates me somewhat is that I do enjoy these films, but I totally see where the derision comes from. My thing is big robots beating the hell out of each other while things explode, not to mention being a massive classic Transformers geek, so I’m pretty much the perfect target audience.
So that the future of the franchise can be considered, first, let’s take a look at the five movies which have already made their mark on popular culture and see where future entries could differ.
Transformers (2007)
The first of Michael Bay’s forays into cinematic Cybertronian carnage split fan opinion as soon as we heard about the flames on Optimus Prime. It had a number of familiar elements, but the overcomplicated Transformers, uneven pace, uneven dialogue, and overly militaristic bias turned it into little more than passable – yet noisy – popcorn fodder.
It did the job, though, and brought in a ton of coin. It had a likable lead in Shia LaBeouf as Sam Witwicky (A nice nod to Spike and Sam in the cartoons), a decent supporting cast, and Megan Fox. Very much of its time, the first Transformers movie holds up pretty well, even if the first half an hour drags painfully.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
The sequel took everything about the first film and turned it all up several notches. More Transformers. More gigantic set pieces. More running. More shouting. More gratuitous shots of Megan Fox. It also added some rather embarrassing racist comedy relief robots that understandably – and deservedly – garnered much in the way of derision.
What it had in spectacle, it lacked in the story. And script. And direction. Revenge of the Fallen is extremely pretty to look at but is ultimately all noise and no substance. It has a touch more of the old-school Transformers vibe to it and carries more Transformers lore than the first, but that doesn’t make up for its shortcomings.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)
The filmmakers took the feedback from Revenge of the Fallen on board and gave Dark of the Moon more backstory, along with making it known that Transformers have been around our part of the galaxy longer than the first two films had suggested. In some ways, Dark of the Moon is a better film, but the pacing is still ponderous, with plot points feeling often like they were intended solely to get the audience from one set piece to another. Dark of the Moon also suffers from some special effects looking unfinished (with a few composite shots looking really rushed) and some needless bad language.
I mean, come on, these are movies based on a toy range that itself was a repainted bunch of toys from other ranges. It should be suitable for kids of all ages. By including bad language, sexual overtones, and a rather adult approach, something that should be joyful and exciting becomes overly dark and needlessly grim. The final act is deafening and all but devoid of relatable characters, resulting in a film that serves largely to wow you with incredible visuals while leaving you ultimately empty.
Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)
Age of Extinction, by contrast, went the other way entirely, with very little happening for the first hour while the post-apocalyptic setting and new characters are established. Mark Wahlberg is definitely a step in the right direction, and once things kick off, they’re pretty satisfying, but the pace of this film is again very disjointed.
The action is truly spectacular when it comes, but the Transformers – even with a slightly sleeker redesign – are still overly complicated things that make it difficult to follow the action. The tone is bleak and dirty, leaving the film with an air of defeated misery where there should be effervescence. That said, the cast is more relatable.
Transformers: The Last Knight (2017)
This globe-trotting, high-stakes epic was an attempt to kick off a Transformers shared universe franchise along the lines of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, adding Anthony Hopkins, a robotic butler, Transformers knights from a thousand years ago, and the chilling Quintessa, the creator of the Transformers race, awakening something dark within the Earth whilst simultaneously raining destruction down upon it.
The first half drags, while the second beats you over the head with CGI along with nuggets of clumsy world-building. The Earth is a changed planet by the end of it, and the stage was set for a number of spin-offs, but while the film brought in decent numbers, they were less than what would warrant a shared universe. Again it is overly long, overly complicated, and on a scale that it would be impossible to build on without setting the next one in deep space.
Those five films follow a similar path, and all suffer from similar issues. They are too long by far. Event films like this should run to around 100 minutes, lest the viewer loses interest in the exposition and sit bored until the next explosion goes off. The human characters are another major issue. Apart from Sam in the first and eventually Wahlberg’s Cade character in the fourth and fifth, the humans are pretty interchangeable. The military characters are fun to watch, but it’s hard to relate to Marines unless you are one, I guess. There’s no hook for the general viewer. There’s no hook for kids.
Look at the ’80s cartoons. We had the human hook of having Spike and Sam Witwicky acting as our connection and window into the Transformers’ war. We had battles that took place in the desert or space or on distant oil refineries. We had exciting convoys. We had the Autobots’ Ark. We had Metroplex and Trypicon and the classic animated movie.
Am I gazing at this through the eyes of nostalgia and saying that it was better back in the day? Possibly, but my point is that the films have been missing the ingredients that made the franchise so exciting in the first place. The Bumblebee movie looks way more like a Transformers film with a heart and a story, and some proper character beats. Bumblebee and Starscream look more chunky and less visually complex. The setting looks more remote.
For the Transformers franchise to move forward, it needs to look backward. It needs to look back to the games played in bedrooms with armies of beloved toys It needs to look to the comics and games and animated series and glean from them the things that make the franchise so exciting and so endlessly vital in other mediums. The films should be shorter, less chaotic, with more weight to the human stories so we actually care about what’s going on. I, like many fans, would love to be able to write a Transformers story, book, comic, movie, or anything else. There is still so much to say about the Transformers franchise that the films are yet to genuinely capture, and I hope that Bumblebee helps to save the series from certain doom and even more certain derision.
There are a ton of Transformers stories to tell, and they should have the same joy and excitement of those games played with the toys that built the empire.
Until all are one.
