Bumblebee has Transformers fans abuzz
Could this be the Transformers movie Bay didn’t want you to see?
Bumblebee is unlike any Transformers movie you’ve seen. The first one, back in 2007, got a twostar review in this paper, while its four sequels earned 3 1/2 stars — combined. Honestly, I feel like Michael Bay and I have been engaged in a decade-long battle, where he attempts to make movies as dumb as possible, while I try wearily to outsmart them in print.
But this time he has literally outsmarted himself, by giving up the director’s chair to relative unknown Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) and hiring a new writer, Christina Hodson. Her previous movie, Unforgettable, wasn’t. Her debut, Shut In, wasn’t screened for critics. But third time’s the charm — this story about a young woman and her self-aware Volkswagen is warm, funny, relatable, coherent and less than two hours long — all first-time traits in the Transformers universe.
Hailee Steinfeld (Gwen Stacy in the new Spider-man movie) stars as Charlie Watson, who in the summer of ’87 is 17 going on 18. And all she wants for her birthday is a car. Fortunately, one has just arrived near her coastal California hometown, in the form of a giant alien robot named B-127. When it first landed it almost took out a group of soldiers headed by John Cena, who must have been understandably freaked out, given that Predator was playing in theatres at the time.
Previous Transformers movies have relied on increasingly outrageous plots powered by wonky high-voltage Macguffins coupled with ever weirder casting choices — Patrick Dempsey, Kelsey Grammer, John Malkovich, Anthony Hopkins, etc. Bumblebee dials back on all that, with a simple story about a couple of evil robots trying to phone home. Steinfeld’s love interest is played by Jorge Lendeborg Jr., about whom I know so little that I couldn’t tell you if he’s a so-so actor with no screen presence, or a great actor who can act like he has no screen presence.
Either way, he’s a breath of fresh air, as is Bumblebee, voiced by Dylan O’brien until he loses his voice early in the first act. I didn’t know it was possible to recast a special effect, but this movie’s Bumblebee is nowhere near as annoying as in previous outings.
What else does the film get right? Fight scenes are shot as intelligible contests — nothing like Bay’s trademark style, which feels like watching a grenade go off from the inside. Knight’s background in animation
has probably influenced the look of the robot-to-car transformations, which are sleek, slick and eye-popping. I’ll even forgive the villains’ habit of transforming from one vehicle into another and then immediately into a third — unnecessary but so much fun to watch.
The movie uses so many ’80s rock touchstones that it might be easier to list what music isn’t in the film. Amid the Rick Astley, The Smiths, A-ha, Steve Winwood, Tears for Fears, Simple Minds, etc., I’m almost positive there wasn’t Dexys Midnight Runners.
And there you have it — the world’s first decent Transformers movie. It only took 11 years, $1.1 billion and a combined 14-hour runtime, in the same ballpark as a trip to the moon. Mission accomplished — or in the case of Bay, mission aborted. I don’t think this is what he was looking to do at all. But the rest of us can enjoy his “failure” and hope that the inevitable sequel will be precisely as disappointing as this one.