Bumblebee

Transformers was able to build such a prominent cinematic footprint in the mid to late 2000s that arguably became just as popular as their toy line, but that popularity came with a noticeable backlash, as many took issue with the Michael Bay-led movies being laced with sexist/racist qualities, a tone that was way too serious to the point of feeling ridiculously self-indulgent, and cluttered visuals that overly drenched its audience in CGI overload to the point that the action stopped wowing even its impressionable teen demographic. Even as they lost more and more respect, the brand remained an appealing money-maker, so a reboot was the smartest choice in order to continue moving things along with the baggage of the past, and the 2016 film, Bumblebee, was their first attempt at restarting this 80s-tastic brand and universe with a fresh coat of paint, and the results were moderately efficient.

Set in California during the 1980s, a teenage girl named Charlie (played by Hailee Steinfeld) is your typical moody down-on-their-luck youth who is still grieving the loss of her father and is unable to adjust to her mother, Sally’s (played by Pamela Adlon) new boyfriend, Ron (played by Stephen Schneider). With most of her time being spent trying to fix an old car she was working on with her dad, her latest trip to the junkyard leads her to a rusted Volkswagen Beetle, and after purchasing it, she quickly realizes that this car is in fact the extraterrestrial Autobot transformer, Bumblebee, in disguise. Having lost his memory and voice box after crashing on Earth and escaping his home planet of Cybertron, Charlie starts to bond with this alien robot which helps him regain his memory as a freedom fighter against the villainous Decepticons. As this is going on, two Decepticons named Shatter and Dropkick (voiced by Angela Bassett and Justin Theroux) track down Bumblebee’s location and trick the U.S military into believing Bumblebee is a criminal that needs to be neutralized. With former U.S army general, Jack Burns (played by John Cena) helping in their search, Charlie and Bumblebee will have to deal with this intergalactic threat in order to prevent a total Decepticon take-over.

While the film was at the time the lowest-grossing instalment in the franchise, Bumblebee proved more favorable with critics than past entries and still managed to earn $468 million on a much cheaper budget, so it was still considered a success. It’s not really anything that special as it houses a really predictable and safe storyline, bland characters, and an overall cheap feel, but through some solid performances, an occasional memorable scene, and a lot less offensive and demeaning material, it’s a perfect harmless film to check out.

Being the sixth film in the series as well as a reboot/prequel for this long-running universe, this movie would’ve needed a new feel and therefore, a new voice in order to liven things up and take it in a new direction. This is one of the many reasons why it was a smart decision to replace Michael Bay as director (with him only acting as a producer this time around) as while he may have resulted in several big financially successful projects, they haven’t aged well and many now see them as embarrassing. Ironically, the film’s idea of changing things up was to actually take a few steps back and set the movie in the 1980s, adopting a tone, personality and even narrative that ironically would fit better with this very clearly 80s toy line. On the plus side, the film is honestly not too bad at emulating that element, as even though the visuals and overall presentation are very modern and the tone isn’t as unique as it would’ve been had it come out in the 80s, the directing style by Travis Knight and the screenplay by Christina Hodgens authentically captures how an 80s environment would feel and how a story of this kind would’ve played out, with the plot being very reminiscent to something like E.T, Explorers, or any similar story about hiding a foreign creature in a pretty goofy manner.

Bumblebee feels more like a Saturday morning cartoon next to the Bay films, which went for bombastic scale on the level of a high-budgeted blockbuster, and that delivery fits much better with a premise that, while clearly just a marketing tool, can have some retro coolness if handled in the right way. With that said, while more approachable and digestible, the story and script fittingly feel very outdated and don’t offer enough fresh ingredients to disguise this issue. You can predict every character arc, every decision a character is going to make, every direction a scene is going to go down, it’s a movie that doesn’t try to think outside the box and plays things incredibly safe which leads to a cozy but also immovable viewing experience. This shouldn’t be too surprising given the target audience, but for a franchise that does have the potential to offer something outlandish and distinct, seeing it presented in such a bland fashion is a little underwhelming. Most of the emotional moments don’t die immediately but aren’t real heart-tuggers, a lot of the dialogue can feel sporadically humorous at times, but is otherwise fairly traditional, and a lot of the characters come across as pretty stupid and idiotic mainly due to their terrible decision-making skills (the U.S military continue to look like idiots in these movies), it’s unfortunate that within their shake-up, they couldn’t upgrade the main driving force.

Considering the human characters in the previous films were never likable to begin with and even dabbled in truly detestable areas, you can really only go up from there, and though these characters aren’t that interesting, and the acting can be a bit of a mixed bag, the ones that do shine are at least memorable. Hailee Steinfeld is trying so hard with a role that feels laughably underwritten and saddled with a lot of annoyingly familiar tropes and cliches, and even though the character is only really sold thanks to Steinfeld’s capacity as an actress, she isn’t unlikeable by any means and her connection with Bumblebee is cute enough to sustain the film. Her love interest, Memo (played by Jorge Lendeborg. Jr) is acted fine, but has very little purpose outside of generic support, her family are a bunch of tropes and are acted as accordingly (with Pamela Adon being particularly awkward thanks to a somewhat monotone delivery), and people like John Ortiz, Glynn Turman, and Gracie Dzienney are played a little too cartoonishly stock to even be entertaining, it’s an improvement but not by a huge margin.

In spite of feeling like he should be the least experience performer, John Cena actually isn’t that bad as the human antagonist and even elevates what would’ve otherwise been a really awful character, as his comedic timing and delivery manages to make unfunny scenes a little stronger by comparison. It still doesn’t make the character good or interesting as he’s pretty generic and also fairly idiotic (they are putting trust in characters that are literally called DECPTICONS), but it was a pleasant surprise to see him thrive. Since there surprisingly aren’t a lot of Transformers in this movie, the voice actors for the robots aren’t credited as heavily as would be believed, and that is strange given not only how many of them are crucial to this franchise but also considering who they cast for some of them. While people like Peter Cullen, Grey Delisle, Steve Blum, Andrew Morgado and David Sobolov and especially Dylan O’Brian aren’t on screen enough to get attention, getting both Angela Bassett and Justin Theroux to play throwaway villains really feels like a waste of time and talent and they don’t really make for memorable threats or have that much intimidation or personality, so it’s hard to say it was worth getting them at all.

This was Knight’s first live action film, as his main rise to fame in the filmmaking hemisphere came from being the founder of the popular stop-motion animation studio, Laika, so you can sense that he’s dabbling in new territories with this movie, which means that there are sections where things look and feel a little unnatural. The film does truly feel like it takes place in California, from how the people dress and act or the overly sunny beachy atmosphere, but whether it’s due to the smaller budget or having a director who doesn’t really work in live-action, it doesn’t look the best from a visual perspective which is a massive downgrade from the past films, which had hollow effects and phony scale, but at least had the budget to back it up. It features some decent action scenes, including an opening on Cybertron that is slightly cluttered and hard to keep up with, but brings a fun cartoony energy to the film that was sorely lacking in the last iteration, but none are really shot very well, with most of the cinematography by Enrique Chediak being fairly un-cinematic and not positioned in a way that would show any of the stunts off in a cool manner. Once and a while, it’ll do something neat like how the robots will morph during combat to increase the intensity or ferocity of their attacks, but otherwise it isn’t that spectacular to see and doesn’t take full advantage of the brand’s identity (which is sadly commonplace for a lot of this film). This is also a movie that wants to constantly reinforce that it takes place in the 80s to an annoying extent, and that comes through familiar scenes and characters, but especially through the soundtrack, which is packed with retro songs that, while great on their own, get tiring very quickly with how frequently they are played without any rhyme or reason. It starts to become a little ridiculous during the first act with how little time there is before another song is dropped in, and while it does somewhat tie in later with Bumblebee speaking through the radio, it can’t hide its obvious pandering.

For a brand that has mostly continued to do decently well in theatres despite the quality not always being present, Bumblebee repeats that trend by being a different kind of mediocre, one that just doesn’t come with any awkward or demeaning caveats. Even though Paramount probably doesn’t view it as strongly as the Bay films even with relatively big names attached both in front of and behind the camera (Stephen Spielberg weirdly helped produce this movie for unknown reasons, but at least explains the E.T comparisons), it isn’t one to be ashamed of, and much like the 2024 animated film, Transformers One (another film that performed very well critically but not at the box office) it is leading the franchise in a much more tolerable direction. The leads are acted well enough, there are a few nice softer scenes, and while it feels more for children than for teenagers, it feels more natural in this space. With that said, it is an incredibly predictable movie with unimpressive characters, adequate at best action, and ironically not a ton of spectacle to chew on, so it will be up to personal taste whether or not people like their Transformers destroying cities with missiles, or egging houses.