Transformers One is a 2024 American animated science fiction action film based on Hasbro’s Transformers toy line. It was directed by Josh Cooley from a screenplay by Eric Pearson and the writing duo of Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, based on a story by Barrer and Ferrari.

The ensemble voice cast includes Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi, Laurence Fishburne, and Jon Hamm.

Overview

The untold origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron, better known as sworn enemies, but who once were friends bonded like brothers who changed the fate of Cybertron forever. It is set on Cybertron, the home planet of the Transformers, and depicts the origins and early relationship of Optimus Prime and Megatron.

In March 2015, following the release of Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), Paramount Pictures tasked Akiva Goldsman to set up a writers’ room to create ideas for potential future Transformers films.

By May 2015, Barrer and Ferrari had signed on as writers, and they came up with the idea of an animated prequel set on Cybertron. The film was announced in August 2017, and by April 2020, Cooley had been hired to direct.

Story

Sworn enemies, once friends. An untold story for Orion Pax and D-16. The story followed the early days on Cybertron where Orion Pax wanted more from life whereas D-16 was just happy following the ideas and rules of Sentinal Prime.

The story showcased the friendship between the two enemies and how they always looked out for each other mainly D-16 saving Orion Pax from the trouble he gets into. The story shows that not everything is what it seems which ultimately ends in a war for Cybertron.

The story delivered the origins of Optimus Prime and Megatron. The story showed that Orion wanted to find the spark and become something other than a miner whereas this was also the beginning of D-16 turning into Megatron.

While the story focused on the origins of Orion Pax and D-16, in the background it delivered the origins of the two factions that ultimately go to war for centuries. The story delivers a fresh look into the war, the connections, and the uphill struggle for leadership on Cybertron.

Characters

Obviously, the characters within this movie would not be the same characters we see later in their history, the rugged, war-torn Cybertronians we saw in later movies. The characters within this movie were all light-hearted, friendly, and well-respected in the sense that everyone got along with each other, there were no Autobots vs Decepticons.

Chris Hemsworth as the voice of Orion Pax was such a great choice for the voice acting, Chris has a voice that is friendly but also can be a mean leader when needed. Bryan Tyree Henry as the voice of D-16 was a unique choice but ultimately was able to capture slow turn into evilness.

One of my personal favorites within the movie was B-127 voiced by the incredibly funny Keegan-Michael Key. While we’ve seen some early days of Bumblebee within different Transformers projects, this one gave us a new spin on the character as someone who essentially was forgotten about on Cybertron, left on a floor of Cybertron that no one went to.

For the full cast list, you can visit IMDB by clicking here.

Hype

Now the hype for this movie seemed to be very well. People were generally excited to see it. I continued to see people talk about the movie even after its release in the States. From comments such as “The best Transformers movie” to “It didn’t need to go this hard”.

The hype has been hurt because of the box office performance as of now. The movie had a budget of 75 – 147 million dollars but at the box office has only reached $100 million.

Favorite Moments

1. Seeing just how smart and curious Orion Pax actually was before coming Optimus Prime. He would break into the archives searching for the answer to what happened to the first Primes and the matrix. While he does get caught, he gets away by his best friend, D-16.

2. Seeing how easily Orion gets D-16 into some adventures. Orion manages to get D-16 into the race to prove they are more than just minors but ends up losing the race and gaining the respect of Sentinal Prime.

3. The introduction to B-127. We are seeing how forgotten he was by other Cybertronians and forced to work in the garbage incineration. He’s just full of life and is always at 110% energy to the point where he still speaks when knocked out.

4. Trion provides cogs to the group to allow them to become full transformers and see how gaining a cog and some information revealed changed the group. You saw Orion, B-127, and Elita-1 all become better while D-16 slowly began to turn evil.

5. After a battle. D-16 shoots Orion but catches him before he falls to his death, although, this was the moment Megatron was born as D-16 tells Orion that he’s done catching him and lets him go. Orion falls into the spirit of the Primes where he receives the Matrix of Leadership and revives him as a new prime, Optimus Prime.

Dislikes

Honestly, going into this I thought I would have some dislikes but I was surprised to see that I didn’t have a single dislike.

Recommend?

Would I recommend this? For sure! It’s everything. This movie is for the children who like Transformers and animated movies and this is for the Transformers fans who want to see the early days of Cybertron.

Verdict

A fantastic prequel movie that sheds new light on the time before Cybertron was ravaged by war and destruction. The movie showcases a friendship between Optimus Prime and Megatron long before they were enemies. The action was fantastic. The story was great and the animation was incredible.

Rating: 9.4/10

Transformers One is available in cinemas worldwide. You can visit here for more information on Transformers One.

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The knock on “Rounders” (1998) was always that it was, to quote a review or two at the time of its release, “lazy.”

It’s a genre pic, gamblers’ ups and downs as one (Matt Damon) tries to focus on law school and his law school classmate/girlfriend (Gretchen Mol) and law school mentor (Martin Landau) as his disreputable hustler pal (Edward Norton) drags him back into his favorite vice.

There aren’t a lot of ways for this hand to play out, and director John Dahl (“The Last Seduction,” lots of TV in recent years) and two screenwriters pick the lightest and one could make the case, the lamest.

Damon was young, with a young Hollywood haircut, playing another version of that smart, motormouthed working class knowitall “type” that launched his career in “Good Will Hunting” the year before. So the writers wrote him lots and lots of little “read the player/read the room” monologues, some delivered in the lazy screenwriter’s best friend — voice-over narration.

“I’ve often seen these people, these squares at the table — short-stacked and long odds against them, all their outs gone — one last card in the deck that can help them.

“I used to wonder how they could let themselves get into such bad shape, and how the hell they thought they could turn it around?”

Very Matt Damon speech to make. Very lazy screenwriting to give it to him.

But it’s a GENRE picture. It’s not about the surprises, but the execution, the immersive milieu, the colorful characters. “Rounders” delivers that to perfection. It’s a film that captures a moment in time. And it prefigured the global “Texas Hold’em” poker craze. Hell, even James Bond found himself playing Hold’em and not Bacarat when “Casino Royale” was remade.

I swear I never pass by this film while channel-surfing without stopping to savor Damon, Norton and a long line of colorful supporting players — Chris Messina, Michael Rispoli and Bill Camp before they were famous, Turturro and Oscar winners Damon and Landau, Oscar nominee Norton and future X-woman Famke Janssen.

Damon, a great raconteur and chat show guest (Jimmy Kimmel be damned), has long been telling this hilarious story about working with the odd-accent-slinging John Malkovich, who plays Russian mobster/poker room operator and player Teddy KGB, that’s become a part of the film’s lore.

So there’s a lot to relish in “Rounders,” as it’s become one of those mainstream “cult” films that gets better with age — like “Fight Club.”

The story — Mike McDermott’s a New York law school smarty with a beautiful classmate/live-in girlfriend. He likes to play cards and swim with the sharks, but he keeps that under control for her sake, and to ensure his future.

But when his old running mate Worm (Norton) gets out of prison, Mike finds himself going on a gambling bender to help settle Worm’s gambling debts with Teddy KGB (Malkovich) and the thug called Grama (Rispoli).

Everwhere Mike turns, there’s an old rival/friend (Turturro) who sighs at the lost potential of a player who is great at “reading” the table, the cards and his chief rivals, or a gambling debt collector/barmaid (Janssen) he used to have a thing with. Even the judge (Landau) who is his law school mentor has a “friendly” game of academics and other lawyers that Mike interrupts and “reads” like an old pro.

“You were lookin’ for that third three, but you forgot that Professor Green folded on Fourth Street and now you’re representing that you have it. The DA made his two pair, but he knows they’re no good. Judge Kaplan was trying to squeeze out a diamond flush but he came up short and Mr. Eisen is futilely hoping that his queens are going to stand up. So like I said, the Dean’s bet is $20.”

Worm weasels Mike back into the then-underground world of poker rooms as these “Rounders” — slang for hardcore players — travel from Rahway to Bronxville, Newark to Atlantic City and the bowels of NYC in search of quick cash.

Worm’s a known cheat, but Mike lets him dragshim to the games, winning legit until Worm worms his way onto the same table and starts looking for shortcuts.

That never works out. The movie is about the ballooning nature of Worm’s debt, the beatings and threats to his future Mike endures. Beautiful, rich and about to get richer girlfriend? Law degree?

Norton is in rare, antic form here, showboating about how he doesn’t know Mike when they’ve weaseled into a game with strangers, losing sorely to ensure Mike can win big, taking a bunch of frat boys for a ride, for instance.

“Like my uncle Les used to say “When the money is gone, it’s time to move on”. So enjoy it, you secret handshaking assholes.”

Landau gets to make the big “disappointment to my father” old Jewish judge speech. Mol plays the “It’s me or poker” card as the girlfriend.

“Lazy?” Sure. This movie lays down a straight or a flush, never a straight flush.

But this world is a rare thing, a piece of the “California Split” past before poker and gambling blew-up and ate the early 2000s. We watch gambling movies like that Altman classic and this Dahl classic and “Mississippi Grind” to sample a lifestyle we’d never have the nerve to try. That’s all we really want from this genre.

Hearing Damon recite the script’s poker-professional slang and pro poker player name-dropping might seem “lazy” and heavy-handed. But it’s musical in Damon’s hands. The guy can tell a story.

“Listen, here’s the thing. If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker.”

And there’s no dishonor in critics’ dismissing a film that goes on to become a classic of its genre and a cultural touchstone. Well, maybe a little. But I guess J. Hoberman’s glad to be remembered for something.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Matt Damon, Edward Norton, Famke Janssen, Martin Landau, Gretchen Mol, John Turturro, Michael Rispoli, Chris Messina, Bill Camp and John Malkovich

Credits: Directed by John Dahl, scripted by David Levien and Brian Koppelman. A Miramax release on Pluto TV, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:01

Al Pacino grew up running the streets of the South Bronx with his buddies, getting into whatever trouble might present itself. In his new memoir, “Sonny Boy,” he calls his little crew “a pack of wild, pubescent wolves with sly smiles,” and describes how his three best friends, Cliffy, Bruce and Petey, eventually died of heroin overdoses. Pacino would confine his junkie life to the screen, in his 1971 breakout performance in “The Panic in Needle Park.” He would be the first to tell you that he was saved by art.

Throughout this discursively soulful book runs a series of interconnected questions: Why did I make it when so many others didn’t? Why can’t I just practice my craft and leave the stardom and celebrity part out of it?

Voted most likely to succeed in junior high school, he considered the insignificance: “All it meant was that a lot of people had heard of you. Who wants to be heard of anyway?” And, a bit later: “At a certain point, dealing with fame is a self-centered problem and one should probably keep their mouth shut about it. Here I am talking about it now, so I’m starting to feel I should keep my mouth shut too.” Thankfully, he has too much to say to follow through.

Now 84, Pacino, who wrote “Sonny Boy” with arts journalist and author Dave Itzkoff, doesn’t really have to worry about offending the person who might get him his next job. He describes creative beefs he had with directors, including Norman Jewison (“And Justice for All”) and Arthur Hiller (“Author! Author!”). A caption accompanying a photo of a hysterical Pacino in “Justice” reads: “I want off this film!”

But kiss-and-tell gossip isn’t really Pacino’s métier. He comes across as a New York theater actor fiercely devoted to the mysteries of the craft, high on the poetry (and, for a long while, booze and drugs), and reluctant to embrace the high profile that followed the star-making success of “The Godfather” in 1972. Never terribly practical, he walked away from movies for a few years in the ’80s — “I began to question the very essence of what I was doing and why I was doing it” — and went broke in 2011, writing, “I had fifty million dollars, and then I had nothing.”

Because he’s now so familiar from so many movie roles, you can almost hear him saying all of this in recognizably Pacino-like tones — the righteous hipster cop of “Serpico” (1973), or the slickly ravenous real estate shark of “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992). This is part of why we gravitate toward movie stars, even those who would rather be something else. We feel like we know them. Pacino has done such a high volume of great work, including the “Godfather” movies, “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), “Scarface” (1983), “Sea of Love” (1989), “The Insider” (1999) and “The Irishman” (2019), that reading “Sonny Boy” often feels like hanging out within a history of American movies over the last 50 years.

It can also leave one wanting more about particular favorites. Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” to my mind among the best films of the last half century, receives barely a mention. “Glengarry” gets short shrift as well. Come on, Al. Always Be Closing.

But the eccentricity of “Sonny Boy” is part of its charm, and the book’s distinctive voice speaks to a fruitful collaboration between Pacino and Itzkoff, the first person Pacino thanks in his acknowledgments: “His considerable help and persistence got me to turn corners I never would have turned.”

These pages contain sorrow, for Pacino’s largely absent father and severely depressed mother, for his late boyhood friends, for the poverty and uncertainty that marked his youth. There is also the jolt of discovery, as when a theater troupe came to the 15-year-old Pacino’s favorite movie theater to perform Chekhov’s “The Seagull” and lighted a fire under him. “Chekhov became a friend of mine,” writes Pacino, who was known to wander the New York streets reciting his favorite theatrical monologues at the top of his lungs.

Pondering the fate of his friends who died by the needle, he asks: “Why didn’t I end up that way? Why am I still here? Was it all luck? Was it Chekhov? Was it Shakespeare?” He all but answers the question elsewhere, when he considers the aspiring actors who ask why he made it while they didn’t: “You wanted to. I had to.”

If industry talk is more your thing, Pacino tries to oblige. He writes that he just recently heard a longstanding rumor, that he didn’t attend the Oscars in 1973 because he was nominated for supporting actor rather than lead actor, for “The Godfather.” He offers a much simpler explanation: He was terrified. “It explains a lot of the distance I felt when I came out to Hollywood to visit and work,” he writes. It might also help explain why he didn’t win his first (and only) Oscar until 1993 for “Scent of a Woman,” in which he gave a performance nowhere near his best. (He has been nominated nine times.) He touches on his various Hollywood romances, among them Jill Clayburgh, Tuesday Weld, Diane Keaton and Marthe Keller. Pacino, by his own admission, is an obsessive workaholic, a habit that hasn’t done him many favors away from the screen and stage. He does come across as a devoted father to his three children.

“Theater people are vagabonds, wandering gypsies,” he writes. “We are people on the run.” And for all of his movie stardom, Pacino makes it clear that he is, at heart, a theater person. The two-time Tony Award winner is an artist who happens to have the career of a celebrity. He makes a convincing case for himself as an outsider who crashed the party, driven forward by the work above all. Is this a self-serving portrayal? Perhaps. But most celebrity memoirs are. At least “Sonny Boy” is also shot through with what certainly feels like self-deprecating honesty to go with the well-worn Pacino swagger.