Paramount Pictures
So I always like to get out my biases up front. When I was a kid, I didn’t really watch the OG Transformers cartoon, finding it dull and uninteresting, although I did like playing with the toys in a generic manner. I thus never saw the 1986 movie nor had any particular interest in that or the several animated shows that followed over the years. I watched the first live action Transformers ‘movie’ in 2007 but I disliked it enough that I wasn’t interested in any of the follow-up movies.
In summary, I have no real attachments to the characters or show, other than very mild nostalgia.
Bumblebee comes from director Travis Knight (known for such animated films as Kubo and Two Strings) and relative newcomer screenwriter Christina Hodson. The movie takes place way back in 1987, a year after the first Transformers movie came out. I’m sure there’s something to that but I’m not deep enough into the lore to figure it out. On the robot planet of Cybertron, the ‘good robots’ Autobots led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen reprising his role again) are ‘rebelling’ against the evil Decepticons.
The action here already is far more coherent and interesting than anything in the other movies, with the character designs more tightly reminiscent of the originals, which is primarily useful in that the robots can be identified and differentiated. A yellow robot (who later becomes Bumblebee) is sent to Earth to scout it out and protect it against any Decepticons that track him down. But due to some ‘misunderstandings’ with soldiers, led by Agent John Cena, Bumbles loses his memory and shuts down. At the same time, the evil robots Shatter (Angela Bassett) and Dropkick (Justin Theroux) arrive to hunt him down.
So those are our stakes, which is all fairly normal as a robot movie goes. The trick is to really get us to care, which only happens when recent high school graduate Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld), a gearhead who worked on cars with her late father, stumbles across the mysterious old yellow Beetle. Charlie isn’t one of those annoying 80s teenagers (or real annoying of any era), as her mother (Pamela Adlon) has remarried to a decent fellow named Ron and her brother isn’t so annoying as these things go. Instead she’s simply trying to deal with the grief and finding her place in the world.
Charlie is able to fix Bumblebee enough for a ‘meet-cute’, where the giant robot is more akin to a smart dog, clearly inspired by the Iron Giant or ET movies. Bumblebee cannot talk, having lost his speech synthesizer in the recent battles, so initial communication is difficult. But Charlie immediately connects with the big robot, who clearly has a good heart despite his lack of understanding what sort of damage he can do.
The storyline of course reconnects back to the primary stakes again, ending in a fairly fun third act action sequence that works because by then we actually care about Charlie and her new friend. Hailee Steinfeld is ridiculously good here, truly making you feel emotional about her connection with a mute robot that can only speak with songs on the radio and with her clichéd tragic backstory. There are a few silly 80s jokes here and there, including a plot thread with bullies that is mostly pointless, but overall the movie fits with its retro aesthetic instead of fetishizing it.
I didn’t expect anything amazing from this movie, and I didn’t get it either, but it’s truly a well done sort of movie of this kind. It is derivative in a lot of ways, with a few bits of unnatural dialog and some overly explained lore nonsense. But the characterization for Charlie and Bumblebee is so good, that it can forgive the thinner ones among the soldiers, family, love interest, and villains.
The action utilizes only a few robots, with clear visual distinctions and reasonably interesting CGI choreography, which means it’s easy to follow what’s happening and keep track of where everyone is — why, sometimes the screen shows more than one thing at a time, instead of an incoherent mess of metallic pablum. Now, I don’t hate Shia Labeouf but his character is a lot more annoying and useless than Charlie here, although much of the praise also must go to Hailee Steinfeld, who’s simply one of the best actresses of her generation.
I can’t predict the future of these robot movies, but this is the first time watching a Transformers product that I felt better after it was over instead of worse. Hopefully that means something better for the next time around.
Bumblebee has a run time of 1 hour 54 minutes and is rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action violence.
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