Feature movie review: TRANSFORMERS ONE 

• Paramount Pictures
• Transformers One

There are occasions in this gig when the only morally-honest response is to acknowledge when the "I just don't get it" factor is in full effect. Sometimes that involves the appeal of a specific actor whose charms are utterly lost on you; maybe it's even a whole genre, like, say, the bodily-injury/self-humiliation comedy of Jackass or Eric Andre. That's not to say that you can't make certain evaluations involving those things, but when the basic premise involved is "this is a thing that people want to watch," you've got to be prepared to cop to 100 percent not being one of those people.

That brings us to the entire concept of Transformers, which have been part of the American pop-culture consciousness for 40 years now—a 40-year span which, relevant to our conversation, did not include any part of my childhood. I recognize the existence of a generation that grew up in the 1980s playing with Transformers toys, watching Transformers cartoons, reading Transformers comic-books and so forth, leading to the nostalgia built into the excruciatingly bombastic Michael Bay live-action films of the 2000s. For those folks, an overly-dense good-vs.-evil mythology constructed for the backstory of a pretty-cool toy concept is simply what they grew up with, so maybe they've all been dying for something like Transformers One, an animated feature which offers an origin story of primary protagonist Optimus Prime and primary antagonist Megatron that deepens the story even further. And meanwhile, all I can think is, "This is still all about those toy cars that turn into robots, right?"

Yet here we are, on that distant home planet of Cybertron, at a time in the past when ... look, it's complicated. Apparently, there once were super-awesome Transformers known as the Primes, and they were mostly defeated during an alien invasion, and there's a shortage of some kind of power source called energon, which at least isn't as dumb a name as unobtanium. Miner-grunt robots Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry) are best buddies who get pulled by Orion Pax's striving and curiosity into discoveries about the true nature of their world that could destroy their friendship when—not at all a spoiler alert, since it's the essence of the advertising campaign—they ultimately become, respectively, Optimus Prime and Megatron.

The ensuing adventure as directed by Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4) is lively enough, full of creative production design that renders the Cybertron subterranean metropolis of Iacon City as something that grows in two directions like stalactites and stalagmites. All of the action often feels too busy to fully take in who's fighting whom, but it's certainly never tedious. And there's solid comic-relief in Keegan-Michael Key's B-127/Bumblebee, whose transformation from solitary-confinement garbage salvager to warrior prompts some giddy reactions. As matinee kid-friendly entertainment, you could do a lot worse.

But then we arrive at the question of what this matinee kid-friendly entertainment is doing by trying to turn the relationship between Orion Pax and D-16 into Shakespearean tragedy. There's certainly pop-culture precedent for this kind of friends-turned-foes narrative—from X-Men's Professor Xavier and Magneto to the fan-fiction ret-con of the Oz witches in Wicked—and Brian Tyree Henry in particular voice-acts his heart out as the blue-collar guy shattered to realize that his heroes might not be deserving of his adoration, and that those in power can manipulate you. But all of this presumes an emotional investment in the characters that this movie alone can't deliver, likely dependent on whether or not you've grown up caring about Transformers in any way. Transformers One wants the fate of the friendship between these two beings destined to become enemies to matter deeply—and I'm just not seeing it.

Maybe there's some allegory I should also be seeing here, about the tragedy of contemporary family members divided by opposing political philosophies. This series does seem awfully serious, after all, about attempting to lend gravitas to an elaborate marketing tie-in—which makes it even weirder that on a basic level, this movie is about the danger of investing too much in myths. Transformers One might be somebody's movie, a movie for a theoretical viewer who cares about Optimus Prime as more than a cool toy with a bad-ass voice. Me? I just don't get it.