The ‘Transformers’ Movies Explained: Making Sense of the Bayhem

  

 

To prepare for the June 21st premiere of Transformers: The Last Knight, I recently watched all four prior Transformers movies—all 611 minutes—in the span of two days, an experience I’m confident changed me as a person. I now dream of explosions, think primarily in Linkin Park songs; I blacked out halfway through Age of Extinction, and when I woke up I was leasing several Dodge Chargers. I cannot afford any of them. What I can do, however, is explain every detail of Michael Bay’s pyrotechnic-porn franchise based on a line of toys from the 1980s, the ins-and-outs of the Transformers universe.
What is the difference between an Autobot and a Decepticon? Who is Sentinel Prime? Why would a robot incapable of reproducing sexually need a giant, swinging pair of testicles? Dive in to these burning questions, and more, right here.

Transformers (2007)

So, before we officially begin, a few important technical aspects to keep in mind throughout:

• For a franchise that is ostensibly about a race of robots made of outer-space sheet metal, the Transformers films have a nasty through-line of borderline racist caricatures. For example: the jive-talkin’, breakdancin’ Autobot named Jazz, who speaks around three times throughout the first movie. The first, to ask “What’s crackin’, bitches?” The second, to say, “Earth looks like a cool place to kick it.” The third, to say “Aghhhh” as he’s ripped in half during the climactic battle scene. Everyone cares about Jazz’s death for roughly 22 seconds.
• Michael Bay films the female body like Guy Fieri films pulled pork on Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives. I swear in some scenes there is audible heavy breathing just off frame.
• The only thing Michael Bay shoots more lustfully than women is the United States military. Ninety-five percent of the reason Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson are in the series is for Duhamel’s Captain Lennox to call in an air strike, and for Gibson’s Tech Sergeant Epps to look up and say, “Oh yeah, that’s an airstrike.” If you cut out every shot of a jet taking off from an aircraft carrier, each of these movies would be half an hour long.

Just…keep all that in mind.
Centuries ago, in the furthest reaches of space, a planet called Cybertron thrived, the native “autonomous robotic organisms” (Autobots for short) living in perfect harmony. Like Krypton, but populated by sentient SUVs. Cybertron’s peaceful existence was rocked by the betrayal of Megatron, leader of a faction called the Decepticons, which is a bit like being surprised when the head of the Coalition For Pushing People Down the Stairs pushes you down the stairs, but the Autobots were an incredibly trusting race. In the civil war that followed, Autobot leader Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) jettisoned the planet’s power source, the AllSpark (or “The Cube,” colloquially), into space, where it traversed the stars and landed on Earth. For years, the AllSpark rested, sitting dormant like a giant, useless art installation.

Image via Paramount Pictures

So, naturally, it attracts Shia Labeouf. The actor plays Sam Witwicky, a high school junior whose last name sounds like someone bumped into a turntable, who is fixated on two things: his classmate, Mikaela (Megan Fox), and owning a car. He can’t get the first, not yet, but his father does buy him a yellow, rusted Chevrolet Camaro. Not a day later, the Camaro reveals itself as an Autobot named Bumblebee. The Autobots have this thing where they scan a mechanical object—in this case, the Camaro—and then can transform into that object at will. This ability gets super wonky down the road, and you have to wonder why any Autobot would choose to scan an ordinary car over, say, a tank, but for now just accept that Bumblebee can turn into a Camaro and Sam now owns that Camaro.
Which, as it turns out, is no accident. You see, Sam is the descendant of the 17th century explorer, Archibald Witwicky, who not only discovered the AllSpark in the Arctic Circle, but also the frozen body of Megatron. Archibald, who was good at exploration but bad at spacial awareness, accidentally activated Megatron’s navigational system, imprinting the location of the AllSpark on to Archibald’s glasses.
In present day, Sam has the glasses, and therefore the coordinates, which attracts everyone. Optimus Prime and a band of Autobots arrive on Earth, nobly causing millions of dollars in property damage in the process. A Decepticon named Frenzy hacks into the Pentagon’s mainframe, gleaning Sam’s whereabouts. Finally, a subsection of the CIA named “Sector Seven” interferes to round up Sam (and Mikaela, who gets dragged into all this and then contributes very, very little). Sector Seven is led by Agent Seymour Simmons (John Turturro), which is helpful to know in case Trivia Night ever asks “in which movie did a robot urinate on Emmy-winner John Turturro’s head?”

Image via Paramount Pictures

Sector Seven has been holding the AllSpark and Megatron’s body underneath the Hoover Dam since the 1800s, testing the device’s ability to turn iPhones into slightly deadlier iPhones. Optimus Prime explains that Decepticons want to use this ability on Earth’s technology, so they can take over the galaxy with an army of sentient Xbox 360s.
Unfortunately, Optimus is also telling this to Frenzy, who has been hiding in Mikaela’s purse the entire time. Frenzy broadcasts the AllSpark’s location to the rest of the Decepticons, just as Megatron awakens from his centuries-long nap.
A fight between Autobot and Decepticon ensues over the fictional Mission City. Thousands of extras whose names’ are not on the IMDB page are killed. Optimus Prime tells Sam he must get the AllSpark to safety, or else he will be forced to combine it with his own internal spark, destroying both Cube and Prime in the process. Like the taco deal at Jack in the Box, those are your only two options with the AllSpark—you hand it off to someone else for safekeeping or shove it into your body, where it will kill you from the inside.
But Sam devises an Option C. He shoves the AllSpark into Megatron’s chest, leaving behind a depowered Decepticon leader and one, tiny AllSpark shard. With the battle won, Megatron’s body dumped into the ocean and the AllSpark destroyed, the Autobots decide to stay on Earth, “leaving no evidence” they were ever there. Which is a hilarious way to describe the fiery pile of rubble and corpses that used to be Mission City, but maybe it’s a translation thing.
Transformers concludes with Optimus Prime broadcasting a message into the galaxy for any Autobots still in hiding. “We are here, and we are waiting.” Not a single person on Earth told Optimus he could do this, and frankly I’d be a little annoyed. He’s lucky his open invitation doesn’t lead to any further cataclysmic alien invasions and countless more deaths.
Haha no, it totally does.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen does this interesting thing where it takes the events of the first movie and renders them obsolete faster than you can process the words “executive produced by Steven Spielberg.” Right off the bat, “the Transformers have never been to Earth” becomes “actually they were here way before us, 17,000 B.C. to be exact, when they murdered some cavemen and built a machine to suck all the energy out of our sun.”
Here’s the explanation for…all that. Originally, Cybertron was run by Seven Primes. This council of elder-bots discovered they could harvest Energon, the fuel that powers Transformers, by collecting other planets’ suns using machines called Sun Harvesters. (They were good leaders, not good copywriters). The Primes had one rule: check the planet for people before collecting that sweet, sweet Energon. One of them, Megatronus Prime, who hates organic life like current day leaders just hate the poor, made a move on Paleolithic Earth anyway. He was defeated by the six other Primes using an artifact called The Matrix of Leadership. With Megatronus branded The Fallen and sent packing into the furthest reaches of space, the remaining Primes sacrificed their bodies to hide the Matrix, in a spot that went undiscovered for several thousand years. Which, if we’re being honest, makes the part where they sacrificed their bodies seem like overkill.
Because no one holds a grudge like a dude named Megatronus, The Fallen stewed for eons, waiting for the perfect chance to enact revenge on Earth.
As fate would have it, that chance occurs two years after the events of Transformers. The remaining Autobots have joined forces with the United States, under the Classified Alien Autobots Cooperation Act, to form the covert Decepticon-hunting team, NEST. They carry out secret, undercover missions away from the eyes of humanity, most of which involve the destruction of several landmarks and the deaths of countless bystanders. Just real off-the-grid stuff.
Sam is going away to college, leaving behind Mikaela (now his girlfriend) and Bumblebee (still a giant robot). Just before move-in day, Sam brushes up against an AllSpark shard that was stuck in his jacket. Not only does this low-key mean he hasn’t washed that jacket in two years, but the shard also implants the knowledge of the AllSpark into his head. Labeouf plays this like a malfunctioning machine, his twitching eyes unable to process the alien symbols flashing across his vision, assumedly very similar to his first read-through of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Image via Paramount Pictures

Naturally, this draws the Decepticons’ attention. They plant one of their own at Sam’s college, disguised as a beautiful woman named Alice (Isabel Lucas). This raises approximately one thousand new questions about the Decepticons, and if you think any of them are answered logically I have a brand new Dodge Charger to sell you. Alice is the only Transformer we see into a person. Can they all do that? Shouldn’t the Decepticons do it a lot more? I’m no interstellar robot assassin but I do feel it’s easier to be deceptive while disguised as a human being than it is as a Land Rover.
You know what? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that, as Sam gets seduced by the T-X from Terminator 3, the rest of the Decepticons are raising Megatron from the dead with the remaining AllSpark shard. In the immediate confrontation, Megatron manages to murder Optimus Prime.
With Optimus dead, The Fallen returns to Earth and the Decepticons run amok. One of them knocks over an American flag, like he doesn’t even care about Democracy. As it turns out, Megatron was acting under the orders of The Fallen this entire time, despite no one mentioning his name throughout the entire first movie. “The Cube is merely a vessel. It’s power, it’s knowledge can never be destroyed,” The Fallen tells Megatron, confirming all those faceless, CGI Mission City residents died for no reason.
Sam, Mikaela and a returning Agent Simmons embark on a long, runtime padding search for The Fallen’s hidden Sun Harvester that leads them to the Great Pyramids of Giza. That’s right: the ancient Egyptians built one of the Seven Wonders of the World over a massive, sun-destroying machine then said nothing more of the matter. Sam manages to locate the Matrix, which immediately turns to dust in his hand.

Image via Paramount Pictures

It’s not until after the prerequisite battle between Autobots and Decepticons takes several innocent lives that the original Primes appear to Sam in a vision. “The Matrix is not found, it is earned,” they tell him. Again, really does not seem like they had to kill themselves to effectively hide this thing.
Either way, Sam uses the Matrix, which totally works now, to reignite Optimus’ spark. The Autobots leader bursts back to life and promptly puts his robo-fist through The Fallen’s face. It’s not even hard, to be frank. Megatron and the remaining Decepticons flee. Optimus and his Autobots let their foes go, safe in the knowledge they will never return to wreak havok upon the human race again.
Haha no, but they totally do.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Right from the jump, Dark of the Moon attempts to rewrite history, from the USA vs. Russia space race, to the Apollo 11 Moon landing, to the fact Megan Fox ever starred in a Transformers movie.
Let’s start on the moon. Or, I should say, on Cybertron, where a lone vessel named The Ark escaped from the Autobots war with the Decepticons. Onboard was Sentinel Prime, the “Albert Einstein of Cybertron,” carrying hundreds of Pillars that connect to create a “space bridge,” the Autobots’ version of a teleportation device. Why, you ask, would a race of aliens who can transform their own bodies into a spaceship need a teleportation device? It’s unclear. Why anything, really? What are we doing here? How did this movie gross more than $1 billion worldwide? All legitimate questions, lost to time.
Speaking of: The Ark, damaged in the battle below, crash-landed on our Moon in 1962. Through a montage intertwined with real, historical footage that somehow looks worse than the one in Forrest Gump, we follow the United States’ rush to the crash site. In 1969, Apollo 11 retrieves Sentinel Prime’s body, along with five of his Pillars.
Fast forward through several decades of the human race still, somehow, remaining unaware of the existence of extraterrestrials, to 2011. Following the events of Revenge of the Fallen the Autobots are working under National Intelligence Officer Charlotte Mearing (Frances McDormand) who is clearly as fed up with her crew as Frances McDormand is with playing Charlotte Mearing about a quarter of the way into Dark of the Moon. During a routine mission, Optimus stumbles upon a piece of The Ark, forcing Mearing to admit the U.S. has his old buddy Sentinel Prime strung up in a supply closet. Optimus uses the Matrix of Leadership to revive Sentinel, who just happens to have the voice of Leonard Nimoy (in all seriousness, Nimoy’s authoritative, shockingly measured performance is by far the highlight of this entire series).
Meanwhile, Sam is out of college and, because of Megan Fox’s abrupt ouster from the franchise, living with a new girlfriend, Carlie Spencer (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley). “She dumped me. I moved on to something better,” Sam informs his parents, because no one has ever accused Michael Bay of being subtle.

Image via Paramount Pictures

Dark of the Moon introduces the idea that Decepticons have used human collaborators for decades. One of them, Jerry Wang (Ken Jeong), works alongside Sam at his new job. Another, Carlie’s smarmy boss Dylan Gould (Patrick Dempsey) practically runs the country club for wealthy supporters of evil robots, proving once again that the real Decepticons are—and always will be—rich, white assholes.
Megatron, who spent the past few years in Africa wearing a cloak despite not having any skin, gives the order to start eliminating the human loose ends. When that is through, the head Decepticon unveils the final piece of the puzzle: Sentinel Prime. The elder Prime turns on his Autobot pals, siding with the Decepticons for the good of Cybertron. After murdering the Autobot named Ironhide, Sentinel broadcasts a message to the world threatening destruction if Optimus and his team don’t vacate the planet. The Autobots comply, boarding the spaceship Zanthiam—which, again, is a bit like putting your car inside of a bus to get to work, but whatever—and take off. As soon as they hit space, however, the Decepticon Starscream blasts the Zanthiam to bits, seemingly killing the Autobots in the process.
What follows is a non-stop, near hourlong action sequence inside a Decepticon-held Chicago; think the second act of Mad Max: Fury Road, if that movie made no narrative sense and Furiosa was constantly wearing Daisy Dukes. Sentinel intends to use his Pillars to transport the entire planet of Cybertron to Earth and use the human race as slave labor to rebuild it. Sam and a ragtag crew of soldiers dive into the wartorn city to stop him and rescue a kidnapped Carlie along the way. There’s an admittedly impressive, extended set-piece inside of a collapsing skyscraper that defies the laws of physics so blatantly I’m genuinely shocked its mere existence has not yet killed Neil Degrasse Tyson.
Eventually, the Autobots return. Optimus basically shrugs and says, “Are you kidding? We make so much money for Hasbro. We’re still alive.” The head Autobot bests his old mentor Sentinel in a fight with the unlikely help of a jealous Megatron. As thanks, Optimus proceeds to violently rip out his archnemesis’ robot spine. These movies are marketed to children.
Dark of the Moon comes to a conclusion on an uplifting note. “The day will never come where we forsake this planet, or its people,” Optimus’ voiceover intones. And, because the human race is a peaceful, logical species, we never forsake our robotic protectors either.
Haha no, we totally do.

Transformers: Age of Extinction

Age of Extinction truly marks the end of an era, as it is the first Transformers movie not to feature a theme song from Linkin Park. Instead, we get Imagine Dragons, a band genetically engineered in a laboratory to somehow be lamer than Linkin Park.
Oh, also, there’s everything else. Labeuf’s Sam Witwicky is out, presumably living somewhere with Carlie and a hefty dose of PTSD. Instead, we follow the exploits of Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), an unusually sweaty inventor with a Boston accent living in Texas with his high-school senior daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz).
In the five years since Dark of the Moon, the human race has turned completely against the Transformers. A black-ops CIA unit called Cemetery Wind publicly hunts Decepticons, while also low-key rounding up Autobots. Cemetery Wind director Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) sells Autobot parts to K.S.I. Industries, where tech billionaire Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) is developing his own brand of Transformers. In the biggest missed opportunity in this entire franchise, he is not calling them iRobots. What he is doing is cultivating a substance known as Transformium, the alien material that all Cybertron residents are made of.
Turns out, Earth is just chock-full of Transformium, because at this point we’re not even pretending Transformers haven’t been here since the dawn of time. Sixty-five million years ago, the “Creators” dropped hundreds of devices called Seeds onto our planet, killing the dinosaurs and coating the surface in enough Transformium to build the Autobots. The Creators left just enough behind for us to eventually build Ryan Seacrest, and dipped back to the stars forever.
But some Seeds are still floating around; Joshua Joyce wants one—so he can drop it in the Gobi desert, creating “enough Transformium for 100 years”—and a Cybertronian bounty-hunter named Lockdown is willing to trade. In exchange, Cemetery Wind offered to hand over Lockdown’s ultimate prize, Optimus Prime.

Image via Paramount Pictures

Where is Optimus? Injured and hiding, disguised as a dirtier-than-average semi-truck, in Cade Yeager’s garage. At the moment, Cade is preoccupied with making sure his 17-year-old daughter never goes on a single date. In a B-storyline that seems massively unimportant next to the fate of the universe, Tessa eventually reveals a secret boyfriend, a rally-car driver named Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor). Shane is 20 years old, and this movie cites Texas’ “Romeo and Juliet Law” and asks we forget Tessa is 17. I did not forget. Not the entire time. “I’m totally legit. I just got picked up by Red Bull,” Shane explains to Cade, and I must point out this film is two hours and 45 minutes long.
Eventually, both Optimus and Tessa are taken aboard Lockdown’s ship, The Knight’s Temenos. The bounty hunter uses the vessel as a floating prison, converted from the old headquarters of an ancient, King Arthur-esque society of Cybertronian Knights. Optimus Prime was a member, because honestly there is not much Optimus Prime was not a part of. It would not shock me if the fifth Transformers confirms that Optimus Prime was actually the Biblical Jesus.
Either way, Cade, Shane, and Earth’s remaining Autobots—Hound (John Goodman), Drift (Ken Watanabe), Crosshairs (John Dimaggio) and Bumblebee—successfully rescue Tessa and Optimus from the ship. Back on the ground, things come to a destructive head in Hong Kong, where Joyce attempts to hide the Seed after having a change of heart. The Transformer prototypes built by K.S.I Industries were constructed using Megatron’s DNA, and it turns out hooking your machines up to a word-destroying monster-machine is bad business practice. The business’s main project, Galvatron, reveals himself as Megatron reincarnated.

Image via Paramount Pictures

With his nemesis reborn and a pissed off Lockdown returning to Earth, Optimus hops back onto the Knight’s Tenemos for backup. He frees a race of warriors called the Dinobots, an ancient sect of Autobots left over from the Creators’ initial Earth-Seeding, who can transform into different species of metallic dinosaur. In an image I am 95 percent sure is tattooed across Michael Bay’s back, a sword-wielding Optimus Prime rides a gargantuan, fire-breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex into battle.
Lockdown is destroyed, Megatron-as-Galvatron retreats, and the Autobots stand victorious despite the fact a good three-quarters of their race is now dead. Optimus sets the Dinobots free —so thank him for the silver pterodactyl you see on the way to work—and blasts off into space (remember when he needed a spaceship in Dark of the Moon? This movie does not). “This message is to my Creators,” he says. “Leave planet Earth alone. Because I’m coming for you.”
Which is comforting, and in no way suggests that Age of Extinction was a near three-hour-long teaser trailer for the fifth Transformers movie.