Netflix Review: TRANSFORMERS: WAR FOR CYBERTRON Chapter 1 Is Held Back By The Past And Poor Choices

This is a spoiler free review, we will be posting a longer discussion about why the show received the score it did.

The Transformers franchise has been telling basically the same stories for the last 40 years, Megatron and Optimus Prime trying to fight over a planet and the AllSpark. As much as the story is extremely familiar, the characters and subplots add a lot of extra depth and personal touches to the war. Rooster Teeth being involved adds a lot of good aspects to this animated show, but there are just as many things that weren’t well executed and makes the show not that amazing.

Let’s discuss the negatives first. The biggest problem that the show suffers from, like I mentioned above, is its main storyline. This very generic battle between the Autobots and Decepticons has been around and done and redone in animated movies, other animated shows, video games, live action movies and again in this 2020 show. I would’ve loved to see a new story, new things for the characters to care about and something other than an all powerful weapon/item to save one faction from the other. The other storylines and subplots are more interesting but were so short-lived and unexplored that the audience couldn’t care about them. The few changes that the show did make didn’t have much of an impact because the end of this chapter happened so fast it seemed to ignore all of the character growth and unique storylines with one big explosion. 

Another thing to be critical of is the animation. I know that Rooster Teeth isn’t the biggest company, but they aren’t small. I understand budgetary limitations, time restrictions and the quarantine has really put a damper on the flow of projects, so I am just pointing these things out to be objective fully knowing that I don’t know the situation in the animation department at Rooster Teeth. Anyways, to be critical, all of Cybertron is a dark, foggy spattering of generic buildings and it shows because most battles and conversations happened in such small, limiting and bland looking areas. And another issue I had was with the voice acting/facial animations. This may just be me, but I felt like every single character was talking as slowly as possible and dragging out words, phrases for no reason except to try to be serious and extend the run time. At one point a character even broke up the “understand” to “under….stand.” I can “under….stand” the time for characters to talk more slowly and seriously, even choosing your words carefully. But it felt like the voice actors were told to speak incredibly slowly so that the animators could animate the lips as easily as possible and they didn’t have to write so much dialogue. One last small animation issue, far too often there are clones of other characters and character models with simple colors swaps. It’s really obvious and takes the audience out of the show when many of the main characters look unique the rest of Cybertron looks like each other or knock off main characters.

The last thing to point out in the negatives is Optimus Prime. His characterization and leadership choices are okay sometimes, but I found him to be fairly problematic a lot of the time. I’ll be talking about it more in a later spoiler post, but his character and way he treats his team was odd and somewhat out of character.

With the negatives out of the way, let’s talk about what was good about the show. As much as I was complaining about the animation before, the actual design of the characters it’s pretty nice. The classic shapes and designs are all there from the original Transformers but now in really good 3-D quality with lots of details, scars and imperfections. The action and fighting is mostly good, it’s just too bad that almost every single fight between characters ends in a Deus-Ex Machina or another character swooping in at the very last second to save the one in peril (another form of Deus-Ex Machina).

Continuing to talk about positives, the side plots. Bumblebee’s unique position and journey is very interesting and has a lot of potential, but it’s snuffed out a little early. It’s interesting to see Optimus Prime‘s unique relationship with various different characters in the show. Megatron’s use of different tactics and being very smart about his approach with fighting the Autobots can be great most of the time. All these things were really great, but got cut short because of the runtime or for no reason except wanting to focus on the Allspark.

I wanted to like the show, I love Rooster Teeth and a number of things they do. I love Transformers and the characters are really fun and the universe has a lot to offer. However, the recycled storyline and feeling of a rushed production really held this show back. I’m hoping that the success of the show will give the animators and producers a much larger budget so that the next chapter can improve significantly. But as of now the show adds a lot of things that don’t amount to much.