Just when you’re about to give up on stories that endlessly repackage the same old trademarks, along comes a film like Josh Cooley’s Transformers One. As its subtly confident title suggests, it carries itself like no one’s ever made a Transformers movie before. It’s so sincere, bringing a freshness and innocence to a prequel that, by all rights, shouldn’t have had a Transformers at all.

Cooley managed to find new things to say about very familiar franchise characters in “Toy Story 4.” He accomplishes the same thing here by crafting an extensive backstory for characters who, despite their considerable appeal, have never been known for their rich sense of history and psychological depth. It’s fun to imagine an alternate universe where no one knows anything about these characters, let alone that there will eventually be a galactic war between the Decepticons and the Autobots. In this way, people could be shocked and moved to see the central characters become the robot equivalent of brothers who meet on a battlefield during a civil war. The effect would probably be similar to watching the “Star Wars” prequels without knowing that best friends Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker end up on opposite sides of the Force.

Of course, the characters being referred to here are Optimus Prime and Megatron. They are introduced as two lone nobodies named Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (voiced by Brian Tyree Henry). Orion Pax and D-16 work as miners on Cybertron, a planet of intelligent robots divided into two social classes: those with transformation cogs (or t-cogs) and those without. Those without are essentially slaves who mine Energon, the fuel/food that keeps the robots running. All of this mining is a result of the planet’s fabled Matrix of Leadership being lost. Orion Pax becomes convinced that if he and his buddy D-16 can retrieve it, it will not only eliminate the need for slave labor, but allow the oppressed underclass to rise up and become something other than second-class citizens.

What is this? the reader asks. Has Josh Cooley turned the Transformers film into a parable that sits somewhere between a slave rebellion film and a labor vs. management metaphor? Actually, yes. Of course, you can’t go too far with a story like this without incurring the wrath of the megacorporation paying the bills (in this case, Paramount, which at the time of writing is on its way to becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of tech mogul David Ellison’s Skydance Media). And there’s a touch of monarchical fetishism mixed in at the end, only because the guys are on a quest to find a mythical artifact that grants superpowers rather than, say, write a constitution and form a parliament. Not that anyone would be interested in a movie with that plot — Transformers fans have been immersed in a mythological “find the artifact and embrace your cosmic destiny” flavor of storytelling for decades, and they’re here to watch robots beat each other up and transform into cars and planes and whatnot — and after a quick but dense buildup, the movie eventually gets there, staging an all-out battle in the spirit of something out of a “Star Wars” or “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie.

But it’s still fascinating to see this material treated with something approaching sensitivity and warmth. Orion Pax and D-16 are joined on their mission by other robots, including two garbage-disposal robots. One is B-127 (Keegan Michael Key), a lovably insecure comic book character who fantasizes about renaming himself “Badassatron,” and the other is Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson), who’s defined mostly by her unflappable supercompetence (Johansson and Key have been typecast in this way before, and probably will be again). The grand sets are all designed and executed with a sense of rhythm and humor that keeps the film from becoming repetitive or lapsing into routine fan service. There are villains, too, but they’re not particularly important. This is a relationship movie.

The biggest reason to see and appreciate the film—besides its ability to give fans something new and give them what they always want anyway—is the way it develops the relationship between Orion Pax and D-16. There’s a sense of tragic weight as the story unfolds. The allusions to the Old Testament (particularly the story of Cain and Abel) are done so matter-of-factly that it doesn’t feel like Cooley and his collaborators are burdening the film with a load it’s not strong enough to carry. But it does have weight, because it knows what needs to be done and doesn’t shy away from the inevitable. Henry’s vocal performance goes all out, as if he’s playing a mythical figure from an ancient text who wants to be good but isn’t strong enough to resist the bad mojo swirling around in his head. The script does a remarkably thoughtful job of showing how D-16 gradually compromises his moral code to the point where he’s willing to become the same kind of despot he and his former buddy used to despise. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, and still metal.