Movie Review: Bumblebee

Bumblebee *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Travis Knight.

Written by: Christina Hodson.

Starring: Hailee Steinfeld (Charlie Watson), Jorge Lendeborg Jr. (Memo), John Cena (Agent Burns), Jason Drucker (Otis), Pamela Adlon (Sally), Stephen Schneider (Ron), Ricardo Hoyos (Tripp), John Ortiz (Agent Powell), Glynn Turman (General Whalen), Len Cariou (Uncle Hank).

 

Over the past decade Michael Bay has directed five increasingly incoherent Transformers movies, turning what was a beloved, nostalgic memory from my childhood into a mess of CGI and rapid fire editing that traded more on cynicism than anything else. I couldn’t tell you what happened in most of the Transformers movies – because Bay never seemed all that interested in plot or characters. Occasionally, he really would deliver a sequence that was excellent, but for the most part, he drove this series into the ground one film at a time.

 

It’s refreshing then to report that Bumblebee, the first Transformers movie not directed by Michael Bay, is easily the best the franchise has ever produced. I’m not sure it’s any less cynical – after all, this film sets itself in the 1980s, which makes it all the easier for it to milk nostalgic feelings out of audiences who grew up with this franchise, and the plot is essentially E.T. but with a giant robot who can turn into a car instead of a cute, brown alien, and a teenage girl instead of a little boy – to further scratch that itch. Yet, even taking that into consideration what director Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) does here is to craft a story that has characters who actually care about (at least enough to get through the 113-minute movie) and action sequences that are coherent and exciting – two things Michael Bay never managed to do.

 

The plot of the movie is really simple – the Autobots and Decepticons are warring on their home planet, and Optimus Prime sends Bumblebee to earth as an advance man to set up base. Once there, he gets injured by a Decepticon who followed him, and has to hide from the government agents he is forced to fight with. He ends up as a VW bug in a junk yard, where he is discovered by Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld) – who nurses him back to health. Of course, more Transformers on their way, and the government still wants their technology.

 

The heart of the movie is the relationship between Charlie and Bumblebee – something the Bay films tried to do with Bumblebee’s relationship with Shia Labeof’s character, but didn’t really pull off. Here, their relationship is really rather sweet – with Bumblebee essentially acting like a big, dumb pet who doesn’t understand his own size or power, or the consequences of what he’s doing, and Steinfeld having to teach him. There’s also a rather sweet, chaste relationship between Charlie and Memo (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) – the geek next door who has a crush on her. Steinfeld continues to be an actress who impresses me – as she has ever since her breakthrough in the Coen’s True Grit. Here, she essentially has to carry the emotional load in a movie about her and a car – and it works.

 

I’m not going to go overboard with praise for Bumblebee. It is still a blockbuster, and it’s plotting is pretty much on rails as it delivers precisely what you expect it to, and works to setup a sequel for itself so that the Transformers Cinematic Universe can continue to expand. But it’s a very pleasant surprise that after a decade of increasingly bloated, incoherent Transformers movies, that they decided to step back, and make on a slightly more human scale – and the result being the best film in the franchise.