Steve Jablonsky’s Transformers Score Is the Highlight of the Movie

The Transformers series is a lot of things. It’s a blockbuster action series with humor heavily based in stereotypes and sexism. It’s a testament to how many wild historical revisions you can put into a movie—did you know that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were actually on the Moon to see a crashed Transformer? It’s a genuinely amazing display of practical effects, interesting transformations and explosions…and also some less-than-great CGI. But it’s also a movie with a heartfelt score that most clearly portrays the film’s point, or at least what the point should be: Alien robots are cool.
Michael Bay’s Transformers series began 15 years ago, with a story following Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBoeuf), whose great-great-grandfather’s glasses hold the secret location of the AllSpark or the “Cube”—a power source that can transform objects into the morphing alien robots. Now, Transformers both good and bad are trying to grab them from him. We also get to know the story of the Transformers themselves: The Autobots, led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), are the good ones trying to protect humanity, while Megatron (Hugo Weaving) and the Decepticons are trying to destroy them both. It’s a messy movie, and the attempt to connect the story of alien war to human conflict is lost in the mammoth runtime, but Transformers has some genuineness imparted to it by its score.
Steve Jablonsky, other than having an objectively cool name, has scored all five of the live-action Transformers movies (excluding 2018’s Bumblebee, which was passed off to Dario Marianelli, king of the 2005 Pride and Prejudice score). His work shows up primarily in action movies including Battleship, Lone Survivor and Ender’s Game, and he has scored seven of Bay’s movies, beginning with The Island. Here, Jablonsky gives the best themes to the Autobots themselves, making these unique heroic melodies stand from the rest of the score.
Part of the score’s charm is the reliance on strings. There are some movies where harder, rock sounds in a heroic theme are fitting—see Man of Steel, scored by Hans Zimmer who also helped compose for Transformers. But, there’s a quieter strength to using strings, and that’s what the Autobots embody in these movies: Powerful, ageless gods who could kill you just by stepping on you, but who will fight to the death to protect you. As someone who played in a string orchestra throughout high school, there is an undeniable power of many people pulling their bows across the strings in sync. And still, these long, loud, powerful notes need to be controlled with a gentle and precise bow grip and a knowledge of the people around you. When you’re playing like this, you feel not only like you can do absolutely anything, but that you are completely in control and secure.
The best use of this gentle strength is in “Optimus,” the theme that typically comes up when the character makes an impassioned speech about why humanity is good, actually. First, the melody is picked up by a flute, airy and light over the rumbling lower instruments. Strings and horns come in next, giving the melody some more power as a choir also joins in. Later, percussion gives the song a moving beat, giving a tone of anticipation with full confidence in victory. This is what the leader of the good guys should sound like, according to Jablonsky: Strong, confident strength, by character and not by sheer violence or force (which, considering what Optimus gets up to in later movies, may not be completely correct).
That’s not to say that this film completely shies away from giving the horns and the choir a starring role. The score’s first track, “Autobots,” is the first thing we hear; it’s the track that makes up the tone of this new franchise, and it sets the movie up to be a dramatic, hopeful epic of perseverance despite all odds. The strings keep the time, constantly chugging along, giving the piece a sense of movement and constant vigilance, like danger could appear at any time. Then the horns come in with the main theme: Triumphant, bold, but still gentle and restrained in its strength. Hearing the choir, here in a hopeful melody and not in an ominous chant, gives the sense that these aliens have been alive for a long time and won’t be going anywhere soon. It’s a battle cry, persisting against the embodiment of evil in the Decepticons and the disembodied coldness of space.
The weakest parts of the score are the ones focusing on Sam and his journey. It’s not that the sound is bad, just generic, which is the worst thing that a Transformers movie can be (I write this as a proud defender of The Last Knight). The staccato notes and coffeeshop stylings of tracks like “Sam at the Lake” are too familiar, and while they do their job of making the human-centered drama of Sam trying to “get the girl” feel like the lighthearted cousin to intergalactic war, it doesn’t stand out. The best themes are given to the Transformers themselves, which once again hammers home that alien robots are cool.