Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Seeing every Transformers film in theaters, no matter how much we’ve come to dread them, is among our few enduring father/son traditions. He grew up as they grew bigger and dumber. Nevertheless, the boy and I would suffer each canned serving of Cinema In Name Only and always spend the car ride home dissecting them together…

After Michael Bay ruined toy robots for several generations of kids to come, damage control efforts have varied. Some gave it a nice try; some made things worse. We nearly excused ourselves from seeing Transformers One because the first trailer’s so-so kiddie-comedy vibe felt aimed at complete newbies with no Transformers experience because their parents shielded them from such harmful matter. Then came the showier, more dramatic second trailer, along with the surprisingly positive buzz from early screenings. Those factors convinced us to give the Robots in Disguise yet another chance. To our shock, T1 may in fact be one of the best Transformers feature films of all time, if partly by forfeit.

Latest director-for-hire Josh Cooley (the utterly unnecessary Toy Story 4) leads Our Toys back into the world of animation with a prequel that may or may not reveal an untold story of the inspirational speaker-warrior Optimus Prime and the trigger-happy terrorist Megatron. I’m not a hardcore Transformers fan like my late cousin was and can’t testify about its faithfulness to established characterizations, canon, or any preexisting Transformers Expanded Universe. Somewhere out there are surely enclaves enumerating its ostensible inaccuracies, fuming about the glaring lack of human sex objects, or printing protest banners reading “I HATE MEGATRON’S NEW VOICE!”

All I know is I’ve never seen the Transformers quite like this. Cooley and his three screenwriters — Eric Pearson (who’s aided in three blockbusters plus Agent Carter), Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (two of Ant-Man and the Wasp‘s five writers) — take us back to more peaceful times on Cybertron, when Optimus and Megatron still went by their birth names, Orion Pax and D-16. The two youngsters were buddies working the same mines, little knowing decades later they’d end up on opposite sides of the same never-ending battle in a seemingly irredeemable, perpetually devastated cesspool of suffering. That’s also the premise of Justified, except Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder had such fitting names that they never needed to change them. Anyone growing up in Harlan County with a name like “Orion Pax” would’ve been lucky to survive long enough to reach and quit third grade.

At first it’s weird to hear them so young and friendly, and not just because they’ve been recast. Peter Mullen is still alive and sitting right there, but if a new Optimus simply had to be anointed, and if he had to be a Chris, then Chris Hemsworth was the best Chris the for job. (In a darker timeline, they chose Pratt and ruined the franchise again.) And as the future trigger-happy warmonger, Brian Tyree Henry (Atlanta, the Godzilla/Kong series) checks D-16’s temper at first, nicely pairing and sparring with his new pal/foil. Through their day-job grind we learn their species has a two-tier caste system. On top are those who have special cogs that grant the power to metamorphose into super awesome vehicles and war machines. Beneath them are the cogless, single-form lessers who mostly work down in the mines digging for Energon, the once-plentiful source of robot life that no longer flows across 70% of Cybertron’s surface because robot climate disaster.

In the grand tradition of mismatched buddy comedies going back to at least the ’40s, D drags Orion into a plan that’s bound to prove they’re no mere grunts: they’re gonna enter and win the Big Race! Of course there’s one of those! A few months late to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer, the duo sneak up to the starting line for a very special competition they’re technically not even allowed to enter. Their intrusive and not entirely winning performance attracts interest in the wrong way and leads to even more demeaning work along with two others: their former supervisor Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) who’s a female character and therefore more serious and levelheaded than either of them; and an off-kilter basement-dweller named B-127, voiced by Keegan-Michael Key as a yellow-shelled comic-relief motormouth who’ll one day become a mute, humorless soldier in future stories whose only endearing quality is that he shows up and communicates entirely in stale oldies and movie quotes aired on radio channels that couldn’t possibly exist.

In the course of their menial punishment, the quartet stumbles across a strange artifact containing a big secret that leads to a long journey to a forbidden land with a shocking revelation and a massive conspiracy. All those tropes strung together lead to the secret origin of the schism that changes Cybertron society forever, gives the toy line its perfunctory premise, but also gives it some weight. A sort of rot is revealed under every shining chassis that explains what Megatron is ultimately rebelling against, once the proto-Big Bad here is dispatched and each character must grapple with how Everything They Knew About Cybertron Is Wrong.

As with any ordinary prequel, pit stops are made for explanatory contrivances of present-day lore. Here’s why Optimus and Megatron adopted codenames! Here’s where the Decepticon name and robo-tattoos came from! Here’s someone saying “more than meets the eye” for the first time! Here’s how all the lower-class ‘bots got cogs and transformed for the first time into devices from another galaxy altogether, though they still don’t explain that last part! And here’s Hemsworth saying The Line! Yes, he says THE LINE! Please squee!

Cooley keeps all the gears in motion so we can’t feel the plot machinery grinding beneath our seats, aided by a celeb ensemble that find their own chemistry and nearly justify the stunt-casting. The important contribution is, despite the collectible toyeticism of it all, Our Heroes’ quest for the truth is built on a more believable foundation than any of the live-action tempests-in-teapots could be bothered to kludge together. The centerpiece of that effort arrives when the party, for the first time in their lives, reaches the surface of their own home planet. Cybertron is traditionally depicted as a harsh labyrinth of brutalist catacombs, unadorned circuitry, and infinite wiring that begs the question of how anyone lives there…like, truly lives there at all. Starshine plays across its sweeping vistas where innocent, technorganic wildlife frolics without interference from the oppressive machinery of the robo-industrial complex. It’s a rarely evinced incentive for heroic purpose — the curious sensation of feeling the world they’re truly fighting for and what any of them see in it beyond the war-zone backgrounds and Trapper Keeper patterns painted on their packaging.

That sensation can also be attributed to the animation, which renders the scenery — claustrophobic interiors as well as paved panoramas — with more clarity than the Bay era ever cared to offer. The high-speed action sequences are largely well-delineated and for once the ‘bots don’t merely seem vaguely cool-ish because they tower over human actors; they look cool because they’re drawn to look cool. Well, as such toys go, I mean.

Regardless of whether or not any of this is backwards-compatible with past ads posing as shows and movies, fans of the basics should be pleased their favorite parts were given more consideration than usual, and with a bit less Hollywood condescension. Hemsworth proves he can deliver sincere hero-speeches without reminding me of Thor’s early lunkhead phase. In the final act, Henry’s Megatron perhaps shifts a bit too swiftly from friendly guerrilla into the infuriated conqueror who sees red everywhere he looks, but he escalates his performance with a near-Shakespearean vehemence. Rather than phone it in, he delivers maximum Serious Robot Warlord timbre. For budding young sci-fi fans, this is DRAMA.

Again, as with any other prequel, Transformers One may not be the best jumping-on point for newcomers curious about Hasbro’s heavy-metal world of robot-car adventure. There are, in fact, actual nuances that will fly over their heads (I howled at a use of “idiot GoBots” as an insult), but it’s closer to all-ages than the ‘bots have been in years and, for once, isn’t an embarrassing jumping-off point, either. It’s a shame longtime fans seemingly abandoned it in theaters, burned by one crappy flick too many. This version effectively wraps up the entire origin anyway without leaving a gap for more prequel explainers. Beyond this point, it’s up to the studio to decide whether the Autobots will continue on big screens with slightly higher standards or they’ll be shackled and dragged back down to the content quarries for Bay-minded successors to strip-mine them for unwatchable cheap thrills again.

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm shows off those distinctively masculine vocal cords as Sentinel Prime, the robot’s robot supreme. All the guy robots want to be him! All the lady robots want to do with him whatever lady robots do with guy robots in this franchise, and I’m not 100% clear on what that is! Character Actor Hall-of-Fame Steve Buscemi steps in as Starscream (whose screechy voice gets a prequel origin!). Jon Bailey, a.k.a. Screen Junkies’ “Epic Voice Guy”, is Soundwave, who of course also isn’t a bad guy at first, just Starscream’s teammate in a special enclave.

When Our Heroes meet their elders, authoritative voices include James Remar (Black Lightning, Dexter) and Laurence Fishburne as the wizened Alpha Trion, who offers wisdom without red or blue pills.

How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there are indeed scenes during and after the Transformers One end credits. For those who tuned out prematurely and really want to know, and didn’t already click elsewhere…

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[…insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship…]

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…if you couldn’t wait fifteen whole seconds into the end credits: after the final battle has ended and a new era has begun on Cybertron, our man B-127 — who hasn’t yet rechristened himself Bumblebee — briefly returns to the 50th sub-level to visit his three lifeless dummy “friends”, still sitting motionless at their table. Bee is dying to show off his new super awesome KNIFE HANDS! Which he immediately unsheathes, unwittingly skewering two of the dummies’ heads. “NOOOOOOOO!” screams poor Bee.

After the rest of the end credits have rolled in their entirety (including the complete, uncut roster of every single musician who performed in composer Brian Tyler’s orchestra), we catch up with the newly rechristened Megatron and his High Guard compatriots in a faraway secret lair bathed in red volcano lighting. Legions of new followers, most of them bearing airplane-shaped body parts, cheer Megatron as he gives an evil pep-rally speech, contrives really hard to explain why he’s now rechristened their entire rebel faction the Decepticons, and introduces the Decepticon brand — like, literal branding with a hot poker with a symbol on the end — so they too can have scars like the Megatronus Prime sticker-head that Sentinel Prime scratched into his chest. Because of course all the most righteous rebel alliances start by getting matching tattoos.