Before they became the franchise that Michael Bay would milk dry, Transformers were a toy brand and animated show that lasted throughout the mid-80s. Much like most animated kids shows at that time, the premise was mostly made to sell toys, with a very comfortable formula and quick to understand simple characters, but it proved to be very popular with kids spawning various spin-off brands, various different tv shows and a movie franchise being made by the overly Americana ‘’man’’ known as Michael Bay, managing to rack in the dough but also the hatred from fans and young impressionable teenagers. Just before its conclusion in 1987, the Transformers cartoon released a movie in 1986 under the name of The Transformers: The Movie. In a world where transforming robots come from space to earth, the two kinds of robots, the Autobots (the good guys) and the Decepticons (the bad guys) are engaged in a war that has left the autobots on the run, after the lead Decepticons, Megatron (voiced by Frank Welker) becomes mind-controlled the Unicron, a planet sized machine that consumes planets filled with Transformers. Already taking out a good chunk of autobots, the remaining forces on earth, mainly focusing on Hot Rod (voiced by Judd Nelson), are called to action after hearing that their recent colony of transformers are under attack by Unicron and the decepticons. Heading into battle after losing a good amount of their tropes, the winner of the battle must be decided quickly before the Unicron devours them both. With such an obvious cash-grab product going the next step to make an obvious cash-grab movie based on the product, it didn’t do very well at the box office and got mild reviews at best. But fans seem to hold fond memories for this little film and as an overall product, its shallow and dated, but ultimately silly and extreme enough that it doesn’t offend like others of its type.

With a product and tv show that’s main premise was ultimately a throw-away narrative in order to make money and sell toys, the movie didn’t have a ton to base itself on. Because of this, it leaves the movie feeling like its only running of the heels of a large action scene, which could have been done if the narrative sprinkled in character and story building throughout like most chase movie do like Mad Max Fury Road, this is not the case. With the set-up throwing people in really quickly and the overall plot being as complicated as ‘good vs bad, whose gonna win’, it hard to ignore its simple beginnings. With this in mind, the movie is so blatantly upfront about how bare-bones and manipulative it is, that it relishes in its own extremism and goes all the way with it, fully engrossing itself in its own world and allowing the audience to just witness the material without much thought put into it. The story is way too limited, but it got a small running time that just works enough for a film length, and the premise is effective enough to keep kids engaged. The movie feels like just a longer episode than an actual movie though, decreasing its purpose and limited itself to just four average length episodes. The tone is also surprisingly dark and messed up for a movie that doesn’t equal it out in terms of substance, including a lot of robot death and gruesome imagery.

The characters themselves are just as basic and shallow as the toys their based on. While none have particularly annoying or bad personalities, they do have very stereotypical personalities that are just bare enough that they work as characters for the kind of show they were making. The main good guys are your standard good role models; they have energetic younger personalities that work for kids, but they also have the older more responsible characters to show them some form of authority and balance, and the bad guys are all essentially the same except in what they do and how they sound. The big bad planet-like main villain is a cool idea and manages to do some pretty bad evil stuff throughout the film, but it’s hard to separate him from other villains of his type. The voice acting from everybody is fine, doing their job’s as well as they can and mostly having to be the throttle behind the engine that can give these characters likeable personalities.

The animation in the movie has some very good moments and also some reasonably poor moments. On the lesser side, the actual transformers and especially the two human characters don’t always look the best mainly in the stiller moments. They have pretty colorful designs and look a bit hard to animate in that regard, but especially on the facial animation, it can look a bit choppy and awkward sometimes. However, when they action set-pieces get going, it can be a lot of fun and really nice to look at. Anytime an action scene is happening, everything goes into extreme overdrive; the camera starts moving around everywhere, the characters move very fluidly, the backgrounds look really nicely detailed and it helps make most of the fighting (which takes up a good chunk of the running time) not too eye-piercing to watch. The film’s soundtrack is packed with very famous 80s songs, not even placed in where it feels natural, all of them feel really forced and overly cheery, it horribly dates the film and comes across as horribly cheesy.

As a movie based on a tv show made to sell toys, this movie turned out exactly as people should have expected it to. Its not high art, its nothing remarkable, its barely even saying anything that worth watching, but for fans of the show or people that just like seeing fighting robots battle each other in space, it does that job just fine. With basic but likeable characters, an overblown and cheap but effective enough plot, and with enough decent visuals to at least warrant a viewing for people that care about the franchise, won’t do anything for non-fans but transformers are most likely used to that at this point. The robots in disguise aren’t as perfect as kids would hype them up to be, but they turn out a lot better here than anything that comes from Michael Bay himself.