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Bumblebee

By | December 18th, 2018
Posted in Movies, Reviews | % Comments

It would be easy to declare, after ten years of increasingly worse Michael Bay Transformers films, that Travis Knight’s prequel Bumblebee is a masterpiece and move on. But how good is it really?

Set in 1987, the film opens with an exquisitely crafted prologue depicting Bumblebee (Dylan O’Brien)’s journey to Earth from Cybertron and how he lost his voice. It’s a statement of intent from Knight, with a film version of Cybertron that looks and feels more like The Transformers than anything before, that culminates in a readable and surprisingly intense chase/fight sequence. It’s a microcosm of the whole film, relying on nostalgia, capable of eliciting genuine emotion, and still quite action-packed (and therefore not a complete departure).

But despite the title and prologue, this is really the story of Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld), an outcast who’s at odds with her mother after the death of her father. After finding Bumblebee’s dormant Volkswagen Beetle shell, she claims him as her own and takes him home, only to discover there and then that he’s a living car. The two quickly bond over their shared secret, watching VHS tapes, listening to music, and enjoying the coastal California view, like a mechanized E.T. – like the lonely Elliott and abandoned E.T., her helping the displaced, disabled robot reawakens a spirit of empathy and kindness that went into withdrawal because of her grief.

Suffice to say, Steinfeld is excellent as Charlie. The role is admittedly very similar to her part in The Edge of Seventeen, which no doubt explains why she was cast, but she’s nevertheless as charismatic and authentic a presence as she was in that film. In many ways, Bumblebee is a manifesto for Steinfeld’s career: did you miss her performance in that indie hit? Here it is again, for your viewing pleasure. And her role as the one who teaches Bumblebee to express himself via the radio feels apt given her music career, so much so you wonder why Charlie wasn’t written as a singer-songwriter. (Don’t worry though popheads, she does have an appropriately ’80s-esque song played over the end credits.) By the end, you’ll be clamoring for Steinfeld to headline her own live-action movie franchise.

The rest of the humans are a mixed bag: Charlie’s neighbor and love interest Memo (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) feels perfunctory, like he’s only there to placate concerned studio executives about how much chemistry Steinfeld and Bumblebee have. Charlie’s mother, stepfather and brother (Pamela Adlon, Stephen Schneider and Jason Drucker) are much more fun, earning some of the film’s bigger laughs, and you’ll wish they had an even larger part. And then there’s John Cena as the antagonistic Sector 7 agent Burns, who brings his natural ‘good guy’ qualities to make the character more sympathetic than he should be.

Speaking of antagonists, Shatter and Dropkick, the Decepticons tracking Bumblebee, are a fun pair of villains. (It’s just a shame they’re not named onscreen.) Shatter (Angela Bassett) is calculating, logical, and has some degree of nuance: her insistence on calling Bumblebee a traitor convinces you she’s a true believer in Megatron’s cause. (By the way, Megatron is not even mentioned in the film, though there is an easter egg regarding his whereabouts.) Dropkick (Justin Theroux) is a trigger-happy thug, who raises a smile with his surly attitude about following Shatter’s plan to fool the icky humans into working with them.

Charlie and Bumblebee’s relationship is so sweet, and watching the Decepticons deceive Sector 7 is so interesting, that it’s a shame things get a bit predictable when the two storylines inevitably meet. As much as Knight has redesigned to the Transformers to look like their simpler Generation 1 selves, the fight sequences are still an overly violent and heavily choreographed series of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em matches. Granted, this Bumblebee uses his wits instead of gaining some cheap wins against his enemies, but it is strange that this younger-skewing take on the friendly yellow Autobot is still a formidable fighter. Things aren’t helped by the generic choice of a pyrotechnic-fueled climax at a dockyard: it’s nowhere as inventive, delightful and subversive as some of the choices made with the car chases in the film.

The fallback on old imagery is easily the film’s main flaw: its cornerstones are very much E.T. and The Iron Giant, and a couple of big moments in the film are too obvious homages to those respective films. This is, for better or worse, a film fueled by nostalgia, and it’s more successful harnessing that when it acknowledges its inspirations: for instance, there’s a couple of direct and indirect nods to 1986’s animated Transformers: The Movie (hint: Judd Nelson voiced Hot Rod in that film), which are great as they demonstrate how Bumblebee is embracing our art, and our world, as his own.

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Bumblebee is ultimately a fine adventure film damned by the low expectations the previous films set for it – no matter what, many have and are going to embrace the film because it finally lets them watch live-action Transformers without any crass, puerile or sexist distractions. So while it doesn’t really offer anything new, it has a heart and a soul, and that is always something that we can be thankful for.


Like the film’s sole end credits scene, I’m going to come back immediately for one stray comment: Optimus Prime looks weird talking with his faceplate bobbing up and down. ‘Til all are one folks.


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Christopher Chiu-Tabet

Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can't speak Cantonese or Arabic.

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