Quick Synopsis: A look at the inciting incident in the hatred between Optimus Prime and Megatron

I was mildly looking forward to this. The trailer caught my attention, and I thought, “That looks like a lot of silly fun.” A bit like the second coming of The Lego Batman Movie, which I still think is dumb brilliance. It’s not dumb brilliance, it’s just brilliant. Yes, it has some silly jokes, but nowhere near as much as it could. Before it fully settled into the tone I spotted numerous opportunities for some silly jokes, and I assumed it was the scriptwriters missing opportunities. That’s my bad, this is not attempting to be silly, just entertaining, and yes, Virginia, there is a difference. Everything makes sense within the logic created. Also, EVERYTHING is played straight, to a horrific extent at some points.

This isn’t a “fun and joy for kids” movie. It deals with colonialism, disability rights, hierarchal power structures, appeals to authority fallacies etc. It doesn’t shy away from darkness, characters are decapitated, torn apart, mutilated at birth, and stabbed repeatedly. You don’t expect kids’ films to feature a scene of a main character being horrifically tortured, and you certainly don’t expect it to be shown and not just implied or cut away from.

This is only the second film that Josh Cooley has directed, and he does brilliantly. It will be a weird thing to say as a response to an animated kid’s film, but I feel he would make a fantastic horror film. He knows about scale, he knows about tension, and he knows how to maximise character pain so that the audience can feel it, I shouldn’t wince in pain when an animated robot gets hurt, but this manages it. He’s helped by the animation style; it is almost stop-motion in how physically real the world looks.

It’s very well cast. There are NAMES in this, Johannson, Hemsworth, Fishbourne, Hamm etc. And all of them nail it, they actually act, and they’re not just doing their normal voices. The real MVP is Brian Tyree Henry. There’s one moment in particular where his performance is one of the best I’ve heard all year, not just in kids films, in general. His conviction and passion is breathtaking, and it’s genuinely chilling to hear him deliver it, particularly the line “No, I want to kill him” which would easily be seen as cheesy if delivered by a lesser performer.

I know I’ve seen the first Michael Bay Transformers movie, and I think I’ve seen the second one too. But I can’t remember much from them, they were fine as I was watching them, but nothing stands out, it was just metal smashing metal like some Robot Fuck Club (great band name). This? I will remember this. At the risk of sounding crude, it’s f*cking fantastic. It has everything I want in a movie; laughs, good characters, references to Key And Peele sketches, looks fantastic, heart, and some mild terror. Some people may argue that the start of darkness is too obvious. Those people are wrong, it’s not “predictable”, it’s foreshadowing/storytelling, and damn fine storytelling at that.