The Transformers Movies Have a Deranged Alternate History (And It Includes George Washington)

In hindsight, one amusing facet of the Transformers movies is how the various screenwriters (including original script architects Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and go-to sequel writer Ehren Kruger) just abandoned the original Transformers lore. Today, major blockbuster franchises bend over backwards to include every possible nod to older incarnations of a pop culture property. In the late 2000s and 2010s, though, the Transformers saga took the most threadbare versions of classic Transformers concepts (Dinobots, Unicron, The Matrix of Leadership, etc.) and used them to service wholly new lore.

The dedication to “new” material would be infinitely more admirable if the Transformers movies hadn’t been quintessential Michael Bay blockbuster schlock. Trading in old familiar fan-service for storytelling derivative of countless other blockbusters was more of a lateral move than anything else. Part of the fresh mythos that the original five live-action Transformers movies incorporated was a deranged alternate history of the human race that incorporated Transformers at every turn.

The Transformers Impacted Mars Rovers, George Washington, and World War II

The concept of Transformers secretly impacting human history was apparent even from the very first piece of publicly released footage from this franchise. The initial Transformers teaser revealed to viewers that the Beagle 2 Rover on Mars actually did function for a few seconds before getting destroyed by a Decepticon. That first Transformers feature would eventually reveal that the Hoover Dam was created exclusively to keep Megatron away from humanity or Decepticon scanners. A norm for this franchise had been established — every corner of human history could be fodder for these robots in disguise.

In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the Egyptian pyramids turned out to be an elaborate way to conceal the Matrix of Leadership. Two years later, in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the entire Space Race of the 1960s was all about reaching a Transformers ship that had landed on the Moon. Buzz Aldrin even showed up as himself in a brief cameo to explain to Optimus Prime how Americans only went to the moon because Sentinel Prime crash-landed there. Things got even wider for Transformers: Age of Extinction, which opened with a prologue explaining that the extinction of the dinosaurs was due to the alien beings that created the Transformers.

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All of this alternate history madness culminated in Transformers: The Last Knight, which wasn’t just content in revealing that the King Arthur lore was all about Transformers. The feature revealed the existence of a secret society, the Order of the Witwiccans. This entity kept the Transformers secret while also keeping track of their contributions to human history throughout the centuries. Everyone from George Washington to Harriet Tubman to the Wright Brothers were involved in this order. Meanwhile, Bumblebee and a Transformers watch proved critical to killing Adolf Hitler. No wonder further Transformers movies dropped this alternate history thread. This was clearly as outlandish as this material could go.

What Was Behind This Alternate History Nonsense?

Part of why the first five Transformers movies inexplicably were consumed by alternate Earth history was likely due to a desire to make these characters more palatable to the general public. Optimus Prime and company were famous in the mid-2000s, but there was a chance they could’ve come as “too nerdy” to mainstream audiences. Rooting these characters in ominous apocalyptic lore that suggested they were already infiltrating people’s lives was one way to make them immediately relevant to audiences.

Meanwhile, using major historical events as storytelling benchmarks allowed the franchise to have an immediately tangible sense of scope and stakes for worldwide audiences. Everyone worldwide could understand the severity of intertwining the Transformers with the Chernobyl meltdown in Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Ditto seeing nefarious aliens wipe out dinosaurs in Age of Extinction’s prologue. Rather than explaining what certain major Cybertronian historical events were, the Transformers movies just co-opted universally known events to convey emotional gravity to audiences.

Most of all, though, this alternate history may just be the result of a recurring, deeply vulnerable thread across so much art, Transformers or otherwise. It’s comforting to have explanations for the most inexplicable wonders or occurrences in the world. Random chaos in life that chills people to the bone has a very tidy Transformers-based explanation within these Michael Bay movies. Whether consciously or unconsciously, that’s certainly something audiences have always gravitated towards in art. The Transformers movies were just another manifestation of that phenomenon, albeit in an especially unhinged fashion.

Transformers: The Last Knight is now streaming on Paramount+.