My Review of "The Transformers: The Movie (1986)"

The Transformers: The movie (1986) is a transformative movie that has affected many young boys of the era. I happen to be one of them. It really was a game changer because back in the day TV shows didn't really get their own movies very often.

For those of you that don't know, The Transformers was a cartoon TV show in the 1980s that was wildly popular for kids at the time. It consisted of robots that came from a world called Cybertron that landed on Earth millions of years ago. When they finally awoke in the 1980s they took everyday things at the time and transformed into those things as a disguise.

There were two factions of these Transformers. Autobots were basically the good guys and Decepticons were the bad guys. It's a very simple good guy versus bad guy cartoon show but it was revolutionary because the cartoons looked so good. The whole concept of robots transforming to vehicles and using these abilities to help them fight each other was incredible.

Their popularity skyrocketed and so I guess they made this movie to cash in. The crazy part of this movie is that it flips everything on its head and didn't care what kids were going to think. It could have been a tactic to make kids buy a new generation of toys but some of the stuff in this movie would never happen in today's movies.

They had beloved characters dying in this movie. None of this stuff happened when we watched the TV show. In the TV show all of the robots were shooting each other like Star Wars stormtroopers. None of the shots would actually hit or even if they hit it would have been a scratch. This movie was crazy and killed off who we thought would be main characters.

Of course this would be this movie's method in introducing us to new characters. All of these new characters just came out of the blue and we just had to go with it. It's sort of as if they killed off your regular teacher in the middle of the school year to replace them with a substitute. Still Hot Rod, Kup, Ultra Magnus,, Spike, Arcee, and Galvatron are all great characters.

I thought it was funny that they created Arcee as a female Autobot. At the time I didn't even realize these robots had genders but they created Arcee with female curves and a feminine face. For the 80s this was actually pretty progressive as the toys were primarily targeting boys.

The movie has tons of flaws that only fans could overlook and that's who it's made for. Not a lot of people can get into this movie without loving the original TV show. There's no sense of connection to the original characters if you just jump right into this show. You won't know who the characters are and their significance. It's basically a longer TV episode with vastly better animations and visuals.

Speaking of visuals, you should not watch this movie if you have epilepsy. There are a ton of flashing lights that can trigger people today. I didn't remember seeing all the strobe light like visuals in this movie. It happens pretty often and I'm surprised that there is no disclaimer before the show starts.

There are also a ton of weird scenes. You'll see characters in certain action sequences when they're supposed to be in another area. The consistency for this show is ridiculously bad. There's no rhyme or reason why certain characters will die whereas others remain alive from even worse incidents.

The audio is weirdly flat for certain explosion and action sequences. I don't know how that got through any review of this movie as well. It doesn't seem like they did a lot of review for this movie before it came out.

Another odd thing that I noticed was that the 4k Blu Ray disk is wide screen and the regular Blu Ray is full screen. I did a comparison and it looks like the 4K Blu Ray actually zooms into the full screen version to fit wide screen TVs. There's a crop on the 4k version but the colors do pop out much more and with more crispy visuals.

Compared to the visuals in today's animation these may seem crude and ugly but back in the 80s this was revolutionary for kids that had watched the show. A lot of the scenes on the TV show would include very few frames of animation as they had to be mass produced. Also you have to consider the detail that they add to each of these frame images. The Autobot and Decepticon insignias on the robots alone in animation must have been a nightmare to draw. We're talking about a time when computer animation barely existed folks.

Overall, this movie was still a blast from the past. I love it because it brings back so many memories for me. Those that are unfamiliar with the series should stay away from this movie altogether. You will find it horrible because you won't know what's going on. I have to give this movie a 7 out of 10 purely because I get nostalgic for this movie every so often. It is incredibly flawed but the little kid in me still loves it.