This past weekend, I took my 3-year-old to the movie theater for an advance screening of the ultimate little boy movie of 2024: Transformers One, the much-awaited backstory for Transformers franchise icons Optimus Prime and villainous Megatron. (Okay, in fairness, I wanted to see it too.)

I expected narrative fluff and a lot of onscreen boom-bang. To my great surprise, this movie was not that. In fact, it was probably the most thematically sophisticated “children’s film” I’ve come across in years—a throwback to a smarter era of cinema. Though there were a lot of explosions, too.

At the risk of an unseemly backstory dump: Transformers One picks up years after the surface of the Transformers’ homeworld, the planet Cybertron, was devastated by the invading alien Quintessons. Despite the valiant efforts of the elite “Prime” warriors, the Quintessons inflicted real damage. In the course of the war, the Primes lost the mystical “Matrix of Leadership”—a failure which cut off the natural flow of the  “Energon” mineral that powers Transformers society.

We then meet Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-13 (Bryan Tyree Henry), lowly mining robots toiling under the gleaming underground city of Iacon, which is guarded by the benevolent Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm, channeling Antony Starr’s Homelander). As members of the mining robot “caste” (a word not used in the script, but certainly implied), they’re physically smaller and weaker than their brethren, and can’t transform into vehicular form. Following an unsuccessful attempt to win respect for the miners as a class, Orion and D-13 are memory-holed by the city’s corrupt leaders. From there, they must make their way to the surface and then back to Iacon with a message of warning for the city’s inhabitants. (Ultimately, they end up pitted against each other: this is an origin story for Optimus Prime and Megatron, after all).

Obviously, this is an absolutely torrential amount of exposition. If you weren’t steeped in at least a little Transformers lore going in, it will be mostly inscrutable (though my son seemed to love it anyway). But take it from me: beneath the surface, all of this is just a straightforward deployment of Joseph Campbell’s famous “monomyth” story structure. We have young heroes who face a call to adventure; an elder mentor who steps in to disclose the secrets of the universe; a descent into the underworld to confront evil; and a reunion with the divine and rebirth to restore a crumbling social order.

Yes, you read that right. Spoiler alert: the climax of this movie involves Orion being resurrected from the dead and anointed as Optimus Prime by the film’s obvious stand-in for the Creator God (“Primus”). It’s an anointing that simultaneously confers upon him the Matrix of Leadership—which is not so much an object to be possessed as a kind of sacral authority to be inhabited.

Suffice it to say that I did not expect an apparently throwaway animated movie to be playing around with ideas of class warfare, truth and reconciliation, and resurrection by God. (Optimus Prime and Megatron are both revolutionaries who want liberation for the mining-robot caste, but Optimus is basically a Trotskyist and Megatron is a Leninist.)

But the most interesting idea in here comes in the film’s final moments. As it so happens, the constitutive myth defining the mining-robot caste—that they lack the “cogs” required to transform into vehicles—turns out to be a lie; their “cogs” were removed by Sentinel Prime at “birth” (please don’t ask me to further explain the reproductive biology of Transformers, because I have no idea). Significantly, Optimus Prime’s ultimate accession to leadership (which is to say, divinely appointed rulership) involves a replacement of the cogs within these once-stunted robots, a kind of “grace restoring nature” to its original form. As the springs of Energon begin to flow once again, so too do the stolen cogs fly free. There is no longer any caste system; all are capable of being Transformers in the full sense. It’s a nicely metaphysical illustration of an important truth: evil, as St. Augustine famously imagined it, is always privative, always a matter of “lack.”

In conclusion, Optimus Prime declares that the people of Cybertron will now be known as “Autobots.” Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that “Autobot” has something to do with automobiles, given that, well, Optimus Prime turns into a semi truck. And historically, of course you’d be right. I strongly doubt the toy company executives who first formulated any of this had anything meaningful on the brain. But Transformers Oneexplicitly subverts the expected etymology. Here, “Autobot” denotes not “automobile-ness,” but autonomy—that is to say, it means that the robots, as robots, are now free.

This is thematically interesting. From one angle, this emphasis on newfound autonomy makes this movie a story about coming-to-consciousness of one’s own powers of self-making and self-creation, about becoming modern. Transformers, uh, transform. And interestingly, this is where Joseph Campbell himself, at the close of his four-volume study of mythology The Masks of God, pushed the logic of his own monomyth. Under modernity, the story of the Hero’s Journey becomes something unmoored from external metaphysical referents, The Hero’s Journey becomes a matter of inward psychological processing within the immanent frame, as one journeys toward their own self-actualization and independent agency (something like “divine” self-mastery).

And yet the movie itself resists that reading. Despite the fact that the film depicts a popular revolution, its resolution is decidedly undemocratic: Optimus Prime enjoys something very like the divine right of kings (the “Matrix of Leadership” which comes from an actual, ontologically substantive deity). So too, this degree of “self-creation” only takes place within limited bounds: Transformers change, but they are not infinitely malleable. Optimus Prime cannot become a Corvette. The autonomy of Autobots, in short, is profoundly restricted—and yet better, now, than freedom under the lies of Sentinel Prime.

I’m under no delusions that the filmmakers were consciously thinking about any of this. But the ideas in play here are all good and necessary consequences of the story being told, within the structure and themes that’ve been chosen. 

One of the most obnoxious dimensions of recent Disney films is their refusal to allow evil to be evil, and preference for resolving narrative conflict through something like group-therapy sessions. By contrast, Transformers One is simply more honest: conflict often follows from private malice (Sentinel Prime) and from competing visions of justice and the good (Megatron), and sometimes, that conflict has to be worked out painfully. There is not always a shortcut. The key is in learning to see one’s striving as bound up with a larger story of creation and restoration—a journey toward peace, not final violence. And that is exactly where Transformers One ends up.

In any event, Transformers One is exactly the sort of movie I want Hollywood to be making—and that I want to be fueling my little son’s imagination. Let’s roll out a sequel.