Bumblebee -- a review

I was looking forward to seeing Bumblebee, largely for two reasons. The first was that Hailee Steinfeld was starring in it. This is the very same Hailee Steinfeld who admirably held her own against Jeff Bridges in the Coen Brothers’ superb remake of True Grit (and she also gave voice to Gwen Stacey in one of my all-time favorite superhero movies, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse). The other reason I wanted to see Bumblebee was that it was directed by Travis Knight, who also directed the astoundingly good Kubo and the Two Strings, a movie that made me care deeply about a group of animated characters from beginning to end.

Bumblebee starts out like a typical Transformers film, with the Transformers battling their blood enemies on their homeworld, and losing badly. When I first saw this CGI orgy, I let out an audible groan, thinking it would devolve into the usual confusing Transformer slugfest that Michael (Boom-Boom) Bay gave us in the previous five (!!!) films, where you had no idea who was doing what to whom. But I was pleasantly surprised to see this opening fight was not only stylishly directed, and it was genuinely exciting, but you also perfectly understood what was happening. It served it’s purpose in pulling you into the movie.

But Bumblebee isn’t like the other Transformers films (and it’s all the better for it) in that it’s a more personal story about a girl and her robot. As silly as that might sound, it works very well here. Taking place in the outskirts of San Francisco in 1987, Bumblebee comes to Earth by himself on a scouting mission, only to suffer extreme damage during a fight with the US military, along with one of the bad guy robots. Steinfeld plays a young gearhead who discovers Bumblebee--in disguise as a yellow Volkswagen Beetle--in a junkyard and drives him home, thinking he’s just another car that she can fix up.

Of course, once Bumblebee reveals his true nature to Steinfeld’s character, then the real shenanigans begin. It’s basically a lot of running around, dodging the US Army (led by John Cena, who’s perfectly cast here as a jut-jawed super soldier), as well as a pair of evil robots. Eventually, the fate of the world is at stake, but Knight keeps things so well-focused (compared to the usual Transformers film) that we never lose sight of who we’re rooting for. But despite the scaled-down story, Knight still manages to give us a highly imaginative film with some whimsical and even heartfelt moments. Thanks to having sharply-focused, creative direction, along a good cast, Bumblebee winds up being a thoroughly enjoyable entry in this series. --SF

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