MEGA MOVIE NIGHT: THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE Is Pure Spectacle

“MEGA MOVIE NIGHT” is a series where I recommend your next bombastic, watch-with-pals cinematic experience. Let's get wild.

Rating: 🤖💥🤯

Never did I imagine that a film devised to sell toys could be as compelling, overwhelming, and utterly absurd as The Transformers: The Movie. I don't know a damn thing about these machines that turn into other machines, but I do know The Movie was Hasbro’s attempt to refresh their product by filtering new main characters into the Transformers universe. The fact that they accomplished this by slaughtering double-digit amounts of beloved robots is one thing; the fact that it's delivered through 84 minutes of a non-stop, apocalyptic, space opera eye-candy extravaganza is another. I promise you, there is not a single boring moment to be found in Transformers, one of the wildest animated movies ever birthed from American pop culture.

If you're like me and know little to nothing of ‘Formers, The Movie isn't difficult to follow. There's Autobots (good) and Decepticons (bad), locked in a seemingly eternal struggle over the fate of home planet Cybertron. As leaders Optimus Prime and Megatron clash in a final, ill-fated battle, an evil planet-devouring planet known as Unicron threatens the Bots and Cons alike. A powerful artifact is introduced, all the prerequisite beats for a paper-thin “good vs. evil vs. bigger evil” plot are hit, and the day is saved despite most of the cast being vaporized or otherwise annihilated. A new world of gods and robots is born…...and they all lived happily ever after?

Really though, you can watch The Transformers: The Movie with zero prior knowledge of the property, and that's how I'd recommend it. Bereft of context and approached as a singular work, The Movie is more accurately a feature-length Heavy Metal segment than a kids’ Saturday morning narrative film. The plot here is so consistently bare-bones that it's little more than a nonstop set piece delivery device; an excuse to see mythological robot gladiators go toe-to-toe while delivering unnecessarily raw dialogue, all set in intricate mechanical landscapes against an unbelievable powersynth arena rock soundtrack. Simply put, there is absolutely no reason for The Movie to go as hard as it does.

Take, for instance, the early scene where Megatron and his cronies attack an Autobot spaceship. After tearing their way in, Megatron transforms into a gun, which right-hand man (robot?) Starscream uses to completely ventilate some Bots as guitar riffs wail. One of the Bots melts from the inside; another is put down like a dog when Megatron scoffs “such heroic nonsense!” and blasts him at point-blank range. The entirety of The Movie carries this vibe, reveling in the indelible visuals of giant robots turning into other things and getting blown apart and saying, I assume, whatever the creators thought was coolest in that particular moment. To be fair, they're right - so many of The Movie’s lines carry the exact amount of thunderous, quotable, “oh shit” impact needed to telegraph an impending droid-based smack-down.

Optimus Prime and Megatron certainly get the best of these (“Why throw away your life so recklessly?” “That’s a question you should ask yourself, Megatron.”), but the brooding, villainous Unicron snags a number of Good Ones as well (“Proceed…on your way to oblivion.”). If you love absolutely brilliant and/or absolutely stupid one-liners, you'll love The Movie. It helps that the aforementioned evil planetoid is voiced by Orson “French Champagne” Welles, the crown jewel of a powerhouse voice cast including Leonard Nimoy, Scatman Crothers, and Robert Stack. Combine these fully committed performers with a constant influx of sci-fi Moebius Jr. imagery, vacillating between fairly interesting and absolutely overwhelming…...you've got yourself an experience, my friend.

Sure, Transformers has a lot of uber-weak kids’ movie comedy to endure, but there’s shit in this film totally unlike anything you've ever seen or heard. A five-faced robot squid-egg judge hisses “INNOCENT” in their mechanical deathvoice before dropping another robot to their doom. Face-blasting rock ballad “The Touch” rips out while Optimus transforms into a truck, the opening song is people yelling “TRANSFORMERS!!” over and over against churning guitar, there’s a Weird Al needle-drop, and if nothing else, Soundwave’s voice is one of the absolute coolest noises ever produced by a synth. I think we take Transformers for granted these days, but The Transformers: The Movie is genuinely obsessed with the aesthetic novelty of animating a robot to shift forms, or animating their vaporizations, or their emotional crises, or whatever else. I can't deny it was meant to push plastic products, but The Movie operates on a level of instinctual audio-visual spectacle rarely staged before or since in American animation. Put this on with some friends, maybe get a little zonked, and you’ll have a blast.