There’s been five main title “Transformers” movies and one prequel spinoff titled “Bumblebee” and this is sorta a sequel to the prequel spinoff film and is set in the 90’s, well before the first Michael Bay directed film, which was in 2007. This movie is extremely loosely based on the concept of the “Beast Wars” cartoon that I loved so much back in 1996, but don’t try to compare the two, other than some character names and designs there are no connections at all.
I have a theory that given a long enough time, all science fiction franchises will inevitably have a time travel element in them and we’ve finally reached that point in the Transformers series. The plot involves Optimus Primal (named after Optimus Prime long after his ‘ultimate sacrifice’) traveling into the past to save a MacGuffin from the evil Unicron, who can’t time travel himself, but he’s given the ability to one of his heralds, “Scourge”, who eventually finds the necessary tools to pull his master into the past to eat the entire universe. There’s a few interesting battles, some funny lines, then the movie wraps up with a tease of some significantly interesting things to come. It’s a pretty standard franchise film without many surprises, but it does all the necessary things well enough that I don’t have any complaints about the final product, and I’ll likely eventually end up buying a copy when it’s released on the digital store fronts.
