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Transformers One beautifully tells a classic origin story between two legendary characters in the Transformers universe, Orion Pax and D-16, and their early friendship on their planet, Cybertron. If you somehow don’t know these names or the promoted premise, avoid the advertising and let it be a nice surprise, though you will probably guess before the reveal. The dramatic story buildup, the twists and betrayals, and the character revelations combined with the animation were all so good that I at one point had a tear or two rolling down my face, though there is plenty of action and comedy as well. Even without Peter Cullen voicing Optimus, this was One of the best Transformers movies I have ever seen.

Unlike the live-action Transformers of the last two decades, Transformers One is set entirely on their home planet, Cybertron, with no humans to take focus away from the Transformers (while this was not necessarily a bad thing in those movies, it is a nice change of pace). At first, our main protagonists do not have the ability to transform effectively making them lower-class citizens who are relocated to working long hours mining for Energon (their primary source of energy). Orion Pax has dreams of being more and his best friend D-16 joins Orion on his adventures, whether he likes it or not. After brief highs and lows, the pair venture out of the city, along with former/coworkers/reluctant allies B-127 and Elita, to the largely desolate planet looking for a lost artifact, but what they find changes their relationship, their status, and the fate of the whole planet.

The world-building story is amazing. If you have never seen anything Transformers-related, you will have no problem watching this movie. There are easter eggs and nods to the franchise, however there is enough exposition to be able to enjoy this as a stand-alone film, while at the same time it is not so much information that it feels too dense or overwhelming. A few plot points are predictable, even more so if you know the characters and/or have seen other movies (not just other Transformer movies). Nonetheless, this character-driven story is excellent and well told by the voice actors and animators.

Speaking of the voice actors, they were all good choices to play their respective characters. Chris Hemsworth plays Orion and Brian Tyree Henry plays D-16. Side note: Henry is the only main actor’s voice I didn’t recognize, but after looking at his filmography, I should have (he has been in two Godzilla/Kong films, The Eternals, and the Spiderverse movies). I immediately recognized Laurence Fishburne, and it made me happy that he got to say “The Matrix” quite a few times (not the same Matrix, obviously, but it was still fun to hear). For the second movie in a row (following The Killer’s Game), there is an MCU reunion since Scarlett Johansson plays Elita. And Keegan-Michael Key is hilarious as B-127.

Okay, enough stargazing. Overall, I really enjoyed this movie and would highly recommend it to all audiences of all ages. It is fun, thrilling, funny, and emotionally engaging. Even if you know where the story is headed (which is highly likely given the premise and promotion), the story is so well told that it still packs an emotional punch once it reaches its climax.

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Movie origin stories finally reach their nadir this week with “Transformers One,” the super-violent, toy-selling vehicle that tells the tale of how Optimus Prime and Megatron went from besties to foes. Did anyone ask for this? Did Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner ask for too much money?

The computer-animated “Transformers One” is out of time, a throwback to a few years ago when Hollywood mined popular IP for forgotten heroes, built overly complex worlds and then ramped up the action so that the audience just got numbed to a blur of battles. But “Transformers One” isn’t good enough to watch on a plane, even a trans-Pacific flight. The inflight map is better.

A map isn’t a bad idea, actually: You may need some sort of guide for this one — those uninitiated to the folklore of Cybertron are flung helplessly into references to Energon, Alpha Trion, Quintessons and something called the Matrix of Leadership. You come in halfway into a conversation.

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The story by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari is basically the Bible’s Cain and Abel with a detour into the Roman Empire and the Hasbro figurines’ accumulated mythology, which seems to be a series of never-ending epic battles between good and evil. Some stuff just seems downright weird, like why these robots need a gym or why after running they become breathless.

The main heroes here are buddies Orion Pax and D-16 — who will become mortal enemies Optimus Prime and Megatron by the end — and we meet them when they are lowly miners, basically non-transforming bots digging for reserves of the energy cleverly called Energon. This is a society in which the upper class is made up of Transformers who stomp around preening while the lower classes do dirty jobs like comb through garbage.

They all serve Sentinel Prime, the leader of the subterranean Iacon City, who is not what he seems. He is apparently the last of the Primes and lives in a marble palace, giving the people below spectacles as a diversion, like an epic road race. It gives off ancient Roman Coliseum vibes.

Orion Pax (voiced with puppy-dog sweetness by Chris Hemsworth) is not satisfied by this life. “There’s got to be something more I can do,” he says. “Aren’t you tired of being treated like you’re nothing?” Brian Tyree Henry voices D-16 with skepticism and resignation.

The two friends join with mining manager Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson, bland) and Keegan-Michael Key’s B-127 (who will later become fan favorite Bumblebee) to journey to the surface of the planet, find the Matrix of Leadership (a sort of necklace that might have been sold in the Sharper Image catalog) and get a hero’s welcome. But they learn some unsavory things about the ruler from the Transformer elder statesman Alpha Trion (the instantly recognizable Laurence Fishburne).

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Director Josh Cooley, who co-wrote the screenplay for “Inside Out” and helmed “Toy Story 4,” never lets the action stop — and that’s not a compliment. The camera is constantly swiveling and the violence — assault-weapon lasers, booming cannons, light torture, martial arts crunching moves, beating a rival with their own amputated limb and ceaseless pounding — is nauseating. (“Please stop punching me in the face” is a joke line here.) If Transformers ever bled, this would be an R-rated movie.

The hyper-violence papers over some pretty robotic — sorry! — dialogue. Why do all these movies show the Transformers with cool upgrades like laser knives but they remain speaking in stilted, operatic prose? “I want him to suffer and die in darkness,” “They are to be your undoing” and “Cybertron’s future is in your hands.”

There are some good moments, of course. When our band of misfit bots get an upgrade to Transformer status, they cutely don’t know how to do it seamlessly at first, with limbs awkwardly getting mixed with vehicle parts. Anyone who has played with the toys knows the feeling. And Key never fails to generate a chuckle, proving a masterful comedic voice actor.

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The other actors — Jon Hamm and Steve Buscemi, included — hardly register and the movie’s main song — “If I Fall” by Quavo, Ty Dolla $ign and Brian Tyler’s Are We Dreaming — feels like AI wrote both the uninteresting rap-rock beat and soupy lyrics (“I’m the alpha, omega, got lights on me, Vegas.” Vegas?)

The saddest thing about “Transformers One” is the wastefulness of another dull outing in a universe geared toward kids just learning to transform themselves. The lessons here, unfortunately, are that friends can become enemies overnight and you only win if you beat someone hard enough. “We’re better than this,” Orion Pax screams at his sudden rival at one point. No, they’re not.

“Transformers One,” a Paramount release that lands in theaters Friday, is rated PG for “sci-fi violence and animated action throughout, and language.” Running time: 103 minutes. Half a star out of four.

Getting folks to watch a documentary about the Big Lie is a Big Ask. Who wants to relive that horrible chapter in America’s political history, especially while we’re writing a new, possibly less-horrible chapter?

Despite its title, HBO’s “Stopping the Steal” is as much about what lies ahead of us as it is about that other election that put Joe Biden in office and then-President Trump on a warpath. The 90-minute film, which premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday on HBO, explores the depth and veracity of Trump’s scheme to overturn the election results through the first-hand accounts of the people who were there.

The collective stories of former Trump appointees, staffers and Republican elected officials, who worked and served behind the scenes in the months before and after the election, paint a picture of Trump’s brazen scheme to try to steal the election and what it took to stop him and his allies from succeeding.

Directed by Dan Reed (“The Truth vs. Alex Jones”), “Stopping the Steal” takes viewers back to July 2020, when the president’s popularity was slipping and the election was looming. “By late summer, President Trump starts to grease the wheels for excuses if he lost,” says Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served in 2020 as White House director of strategic communications and assistant to the president. And the film cuts to a summer presser where the former president proclaims, “These elections will be fraudulent. They’ll be fixed or rigged.”

Spanning to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the film explores chronologically how Trump attempted to hang onto the presidential office, no matter the cost. News and events we’re already familiar with — Trump’s vaguely threatening call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding he “find” the president the votes he needed and Trump’s private admissions that he knew he lost to Biden — take on a new light through the accounts of those who stood between Trump and his nefarious plans.

“Up until the election, you could always appeal to his self-interest — ‘Mr. President, this is a bad idea for you. This will hurt you,’” says former Atty. Gen. William Barr, who served under Trump. “That would work if you appealed to his self-interest. That is what helped keep things within the guardrails.”

Barr says Trump embarked on a “destructive” campaign that reached new levels of depravity immediately following projections that Biden had won the election. “At 2 in the morning [Trump held a news conference], and for him to go out and claim that fraud was underway, it was very dangerous. I started worrying a lot from then on,” Barr says.

Also featured in the documentary is former U.S. Atty. Gen. William Barr.

(HBO)

Former Trump campaign and White House official Stephanie Grisham says when the president doubled down on the falsehood that the election was rigged, his staff likely knew better. They played along, though, because no one wanted to be the target of his anger. “I guarantee anyone that was around him at the time, despite what they were thinking inside, they were saying, ‘Oh it was stolen, sir,’” Grisham says.

The film juxtaposes accounts such as Grisham’s with footage of Trump and his Big Lie team (who included Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell) spewing accusations about ballot tampering by poll workers, voting by “illegal aliens” and deceased people, and claims that Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic ballot machines had been hacked.

None of it was true, of course, but that didn’t stop them from leaning on local officials in critical swing states such as Arizona and Georgia. “I was for Trump the whole time … and then it started. The steal,” says former Arizona House of Representatives Speaker Rusty Bowers.

Bowers faced intense pressure from the president and Giuliani to go along with their illegal scheme to replace the state’s slate of electors with ones who would elect Trump. The Arizonan recalls an in-person meeting with Giuliani, where Bowers asked for evidence of election fraud. “Rudy, you have the proof?’ Yeah, yeah!’ [Then Jenna said] ‘Oh, I left it back at the hotel.’”

Like many others who refused to prop up the false allegations, Bowers was doxxed and threatened by legions of Trump’s supporters. The film makes it clear that Bowers is among the Republican officials who stood by their principles, but often at great personal cost.

Former Arizona Assembly Speaker Rusty Bowers testifying at a hearing about Jan. 6 and the post-election actions of former President Trump.

(FedNet)

Former Arizona Atty. Gen. Mark Brnovich was another avid Trump supporter heading into the 2020 election. “President Trump did a great job,” he says in the film. “I was right there with him. [Then] he called me and said, ‘Hey, you’ll be the most popular guy in America. You’ll be able to run for president. All you gotta do is say there’s fraud or find some fraud.’” Brnovich didn’t succumb to Trump’s demands, but he also didn’t investigate the matter of the fake electors scheme.

Other participants in the film, however, did put it all on the line to protect democracy, including Raffensperger; Maricopa County Board of Supervisors appointees Clint Hickman and Bill Gates; and Georgia Election Operations Manager Gabriel Sterling. Marc Short, then chief of staff for Vice President Mike Pence, also offers gripping insight into his former boss’ dangerous and precarious position.

Among those in the film who still insist the Big Lie is the Truth are Trump attorney and insurrection architect John Eastman. Also making an appearance is self-proclaimed “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley. You may remember seeing footage of Chansley on Jan. 6, shirtless, clad in a furry, horned helmet and sporting red, white and blue face paint. There’s no need to quote him here.

We’ve lived through this story, so “Stopping the Steal” isn’t a cautionary tale. But it is a powerful reminder of what we should prepare for. “I think Jan. 6 is like the trailer to a movie,” Grisham says. “That’s the one thing with Donald Trump that I’ve learned. You think he’ll just go this far and there’s not more. There’s always more. He takes it as far as it will go.”