What Is the Transwarp Key in ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’? & Why Is It So Important?

We know that the Transformers: Rise of the Beasts storyline involves an entirely new chapter in the life of the Autobots, especially because this new movie serves as some sort of a reboot and prequel to the Michael Bay Transformers movies. In that regard, the film quickly introduced the most important relic they needed to protect. We’re talking about the Transwarp Key. So, what is the Transwarp Key in Rise of the Beast?

The Transwarp Key is an artifact that can operate a machine that allows anyone to travel through time and space through a portal opened from another planet. Optimus Primal and the Maximals were the ones in charge of keeping the Transwarp Key safe from Unicron, who was known to eat planets.

Of course, there’s a good reason why the Maximals wanted to keep the key away from Unicron and why the Autobots wanted it. As such, it is the single most important artifact in the movie, as all the different parties had a reason for wanting the Transwarp Key. So, with that said, let’s look at what we know about the Transwarp Key and why it is so important.

Transwarp Key Explained

One of the things that we know about the Transformers movie franchise is that there have been artifacts that the movies revolve around. We saw this in the first Michael Bay Transformers movie when the Autobots wanted to keep the All-Spark away from Megatron because he wanted to use it to turn the entire planet into Cybertronians. Of course, the same thing applies in Transformers: Rise of the Beast, which acts like a reboot of the entire Transformers film franchise.

The artifact the characters are looking to protect in this movie is the Transwarp Key. Like the All-Spark, this artifact was so powerful that it could change the fate of an entire planet. However, the Transwarp Key could potentially put the entire universe in danger if Unicron were allowed to get his hands on it.

That’s because the Transwarp Key is a relic capable of operating machines that can open entire portals from one world to another. We first saw the Transwarp Key in the hands of a Maximal named Apeling, who was trying to keep it away from Scourge and the Terrorcons that served Unicron. Apeling was injured while trying to keep the key away from the Terrorcons. And he allowed Optimus Primal and the other Maximals to escape their planet with the key before sacrificing his life to try to hold off Scourge.

Then, in 1994, a museum intern named Elena found a statue dedicated to Maximal named Airazor. When she got intrigued by the statue, she tried to learn more about it, only for the statue to break apart and reveal a piece of the Transwarp Key inside it. Unknown to her, the key sent out a signal only Cybertronians could see.

The signal alerted Optimus Prime and the other Autobots that were hiding in New York at that time. It also alerted Scourge and the other Terrorcons, who Unicron sent out to find where the Maximals took the Transwarp Key. And they needed the key to call Unicron to their location.

Eventually, the Autobots learned from Airazor that this key was only half of the original key, as the other one was given to Optimus Primal, who Elena figured out was in Peru. After some Indiana Jones-level spelunking in Peru, Elena and Noah discovered that the key’s second half wasn’t there. Instead, they ran into Optimus Primal and the other Maximals, who revealed they had the key’s second half all along.

Primal revealed that he entrusted half of the key to an indigenous Peruvian human, as Prime was surprised to see someone like him was willing to trust a human. That was when Primal revealed that he and the other Maximals have been on Earth for centuries and that they could learn how to trust humans by spending a long time with them.

Nevertheless, because Scourge could infect Airazor’s mind, he got his hands on the second half of the Transwarp Key to unite them and use a hidden machine in Peru to call his master, Unicron. The Transwarp Key was presumably destroyed by Optimus Prime when he and the others sought to stop the machine from allowing Unicron to invade Earth.

Why Is the Transwarp Key So Important?

The Transwarp Key is so important because it is the only artifact in the entire Transformers movie franchise that allows anyone to travel from one world to another regardless of how far the planets are from one another. As such, the key had the power to operate a machine allowing anyone to travel through time and space easily. And that was why Unicron wanted it.

We know that Unicron lives to devour entire planets, which means that he has to go from one world to another to satiate his hunger. This is why he wants to obtain the Transwarp Key, as having control over this artifact would have allowed him to quickly move from one world to another to devour entire galaxies in a heartbeat. And that is why the Maximals wanted to keep the key away from Unicron and his Terrorcons.

In the case of the Autobots, they wanted to get their hands on the Transwarp Key not because they wanted to protect it from Unicron but because it was the only way for them to be able to get back to their home planet of Cybertron, where there was a war going on between the Autobots and the Decepticons. Because Prime wanted to get home and help his people win the war against the Decepticons, he needed to get his hands on the only artifact that could allow him to travel from Earth to Cybertron the fastest way possible.

Meanwhile, Noah initially introduced the idea of destroying the second half of the Transwarp Key because he thought that this was the only way for him to keep Earth safe from Unicron. Without the key, Unicron couldn’t get to their planet fast enough to devour it. But Noah eventually decided against destroying the key because he realized that Optimus only wanted to use it to get home and protect the Autobots.