YOU GOTTA ‘BEE’ LIEVE IT’S BEST ONE YET
New ‘Transformers’ has less sting, more honey
To describe “Bumblebee” as the best “Transformers” movie ever made may sound like such damningly faint praise as to border on the nonsensical. (Do you remember your funniest migraine? Your sexiest root canal?)
For the past decade or so these pictures have existed so completely in their own crass, bombastic universe — one packed with giant fireballs, vacuous characters and orgies of mass demolition — that it has seemed sensible to speak less of quality than of bearability. And few directors have pushed the boundaries of what is bearable like Michael Bay, a visually incontinent action stylist who attacks his big-screen canvases like a Jackson Pollock of pulverized metal.
Mercifully, Bay's wrecking-ball aesthetics are little in evidence in “Bumblebee,” which, compared with its bigger, noisier brethren, turns out to be a mercifully short, smooth ride. The movie, a prequel to the “Transformers” saga rather than a continuation, was son and directed by Travis Knight, who made his directing debut with the grave and elegant animated feature “Kubo and the Two Strings” (2016). The difference is immediate: You can actually see and follow what's going on for a change when those giant Hasbro robots go at it, as they do in a smoothly executed opening sequence on the distant planet of Cybertron.
As pleasing as it is to hear the sonorous tones of Optimus Prime (voiced once again by Peter Cullen), the real hero of this story is, of scrappy Transformer with the striking yellow-andblack paint job and a heart of sweetest honeycomb. But before he comes by his Earthling moniker, he is B-127, one of several rebel Autobots waging an intergalactic war on the dastardly Decepticons.
Severe losses conspire to send B-127 to planet Earth circa 1987, where he has the bad luck to crash-land near a U.S. military training base and lose his voice (supplied briefly by Dylan O'Brien) in a violent clash with a Decepticon tracker. But he survives and quickly learns a battered yellow Volkswagen Beetle in an old Bay Area junkyard. (The souped-up Camaro days are still to come.) There, he is found and driven home by Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld), a teenage car enthusiast who has no idea that her new ride is a centuries-old shape-shifting robot.
She finds out soon enough. And although Bumblebee cannot explain to her what he is and where he came from, his soulful blue eyes and shy, sensitive demeanor tell her all that she needs to know. “Bumblebee,” following the superior models of “E.T.,” becomes a sweetly amusing tale of intergalactic friendship.