Advertisement

News

Transformers Franchise Ranked: Which Movies are the Best and Worst?

All Transformers movies sorted from worst to best

Transformers Franchise Ranked: Which Movies are the Best and Worst?
Álvaro Arbonés

Álvaro Arbonés

  • Updated:

There was a time when neither Marvel nor DC seemed to be in the public’s expectations. In the late 00s, when blockbusters were eagerly awaited, what everyone was thinking about was the Transformers franchise. A franchise that today has lost some of its favor with critics and audiences, but is the fourteenth highest grossing franchise in the history of cinema. Considering that we are talking about a list where the top 5 is made up of the MCU, Star Wars, Spider-Man, Harry Potter and James Bond, the fourteenth place does not seem to justify the oblivion to which it sometimes seems to have been relegated.

HBO Max: Stream and Watch TV Movies and More APK DOWNLOAD

That doesn’t take away from the fact that the films in the franchise have had their ups and downs. Better and worse moments, especially thanks to the fact that the director most involved with it, Michael Bay, has more passionate critics than ardent defenders. But as the seventh installment of the franchise, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, is so close that we already have even its first trailer, we are going to order all the films of its particular cinematic universe to check how fair have been the reviews of it. All to find out why, the best of them all so far, is a spinoff.

Transformers: Age of Extinction

The greatest sin an entertainment film can commit is to remind you that you’re watching a movie. That’s something that Transformers: Age of Extinction and its gargantuan 165 minutes constantly falls into. An ode to excess where the special effects fail to lift a movie where the human scenes make you want to hit the fast forward button and the robot scenes remind us that previous movies did it better. A painful reminder that for a movie to feel important, you have to do more than just repeat over and over again how important everything at stake is.

Transformers: The Last Knight

Ingenious in its premise, but disastrous in its execution, Transformers: The Last Knight falls into the same problems as Transformers: Age of Extinction with one differentiating element: what happens in The Last Knight has a coolness factor that allows us, from time to time, to go back to childhood and gaze in awe at the mayhem happening on screen. Or it could have if it had embraced what it really is. If it had taken it to its ultimate consequences that it’s a story that feels like it was written by a 5 year old playing with his Transformers toys after being told the story of King Arthur way too much, it might be a couple of places higher on this list.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

There is an expression that second parts were never good because when it was forged Dark of the Moon had not been released to compare it with Revenge of The Fallen. Everything that the second installment of the franchise is -mamarracha, crazy, full of fights and epic scenes with lots of slow motion-, is what this third installment wants to be, which only manages to be a worse, longer and more tired version. A movie that promised a lot, but lacked a twist of its own.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

There are two ways to watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. As a movie that wants to follow a script with a meaningful logic, it fails miserably and ends up being too repetitive and frustrating not to notice that it has forty minutes of footage left over. But if viewed as a film where robots bleed brake fluid and the Great Pyramid of Giza is used for robots that turn into vehicles to fight and perform spectacular stunts, the film is enjoyed as one enjoys an afternoon at the circus: appreciating the possibility of seeing something that should not be possible.

The transformers: The Movie

This is cheating, because it is not part of the canon of modern Transformers movies, but it does not detract from the fact that it is a Transformers movie. And the fact is that, taking place twenty years after the original series, The Transformers: The Movie was a critical and public failure that only over the years has ended up being revalued. Why? Because the robots are voiced by people like Leonard Nimony, Eric Idle or the invention of fake news, Orson Welles; the soundtrack is a mixture of Vince DiCola’s electronica and heavy metal composed by Stan Bush and “Weird Al” Yankovic, and its animation can only be defined as psychedelic at times. A film that probably deserves to be at the top of this list.

Transformers

Except that the movie that started it all is still an example of what late 00s blockbusters were all about. Michael Bay unleashed. It starts as a comedy, continues as a thriller, ends as an action movie, and somehow, it works throughout without us even getting to consider that it all shouldn’t ever be able to fit together. But it does. The result is a family film that the presence of Megan Fox and Michael Bay’s direction of actors make it extremely uncomfortable to watch as a family to define the identity of the franchise from its first installment. Something very few in the history of entertainment can say.

bumblebee

Now, let’s not kid ourselves. If Transformers is the foundational film of the franchise, Bumblebee is what happens when you make that same movie with a fifteen-plus audience in mind. It’s not just that Travis Knight’s direction, Hailee Steinfield and John Cena’s performances, and Bumblebee’s design are among the best in the saga, it’s that the film has cinematography, pacing, and a script that manages to be consistently enjoyable, familiar, and when it hits, epic and tense, without being uncomfortable for any member of the family. Does it miss the sound and fury of Michael Bay? Perhaps. But it’s a price we’re willing to pay in exchange for the comfortable genius unleashed in Bumblebee.

Some of the links added in the article are part of affiliate campaigns and may represent benefits for Softonic.

Álvaro Arbonés

Álvaro Arbonés

Cultural journalist and writer with a special interest in audiovisuals and everything that can be played. I'm not here to talk about my books, but you can always ask me about them if you're curious.

Latest from Álvaro Arbonés

Editorial Guidelines