By Erin Free
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Robert Stack, Judd Nelson, Eric Idle, Kasey Kasem, Lionel Stander, Scatman Crothers, Leonard Nimoy, Peter Cullen, Orson Welles
Intro:
...has the feel of a massive, delirious acid flashback.
In Transformers lore, 1986’s The Transformers: The Movie is pretty much the franchise’s intergalactic black hole, a big, dark abyss which absorbed and exploded childhood innocence decades before George Lucas allegedly ruined the tender years of sci-fi fans around the world with his Star Wars prequels. Michael Bay’s Transformers movies of course inspired debate, but not heartbreak like this cult fave allegedly did. Now, forty years after it made children cry in cinemas for the first time, The Transformers: The Movie is back, and it’s a tripped-out experience indeed.
When toy giant Hasbro bought some Japanese toy IP and rebranded it Transformers, they came up with an ingenious way to sell it to kids: a cartoon series. The show was a hit, but Hasbro always had its eye on the toys first. After two seasons of the cartoon series, Hasbro went big with a feature film to sell their expensive new line of toys. They also wanted to get rid of their old, cheaper toy lines, so 1986’s The Transformers: The Movie was engineered as a slate clearer of epic proportions. Beloved characters were killed off (including the heroic Optimus Prime), and new ones introduced, much to the disdain and disappointment of children and fans of the cartoon series. The Transformers: The Movie tanked at the box office, but in the years since, it has become a real cult curio in the canon.
Watching The Transformers: The Movie now on the big screen is almost akin to a hallucinogenic fever dream. The 2D animation is strikingly rigid and detailed, far less sophisticated of course than what we see today, but boasting almost the same kind of strange primitive charm as 1973’s Fantastic Planet or 1971’s The Point. The film is also far, far darker and more surreal than the TV series that preceded it, as the Autobots and Decepticons duke it out as per usual, but this time against the backdrop of a giant robotic world-eating planet called Unicron…which is voiced by Orson fucking Welles!
There are trippy metaphysical detours; a sense of pace for which the term “breakneck” isn’t really sufficient; shockingly dark moments (including various character deaths and one sequence in which an innocent Autobot is thrown into a pool of robot sharks); moments of weird humour (have you ever seen Transformers dance?); one shock curse word; and a crazed soundtrack of wild, guitar-shredding 1980s metal, including the legendary track “The Touch”, which was hilariously repurposed by Paul Thomas Anderson in Boogie Nights.
It’s a wonderfully nutty stew cooked up with wild abandon by highly inspired Korean director Nelson Shin and off-the-leash screenwriter Ron Friedman, and when coupled with a wonderfully diverse 1980s voice cast (Robert Stack, Judd Nelson, Eric Idle, Kasey Kasem, Lionel Stander, Scatman Crothers, Leonard Nimoy and original Optimus Prime, the late Peter Cullen), it all becomes even more enjoyably pungent.
The Transformers: The Movie gave Autobot-loving children nightmares upon its initial bow, and the 40th anniversary re-release now has the feel of a massive, delirious acid flashback. And in a very nice move, this re-release comes with a post-credit, brand new 3D-animated short film which detours off the shock death of Optimus Prime into fittingly peculiar and metaphysical new territory. It might have a bad reputation, but The Transformers: The Movie is the best kind of blip in the matrix…
