Bumblebee: A Sweet and Lively Evolution for Transformers

Move over and find a new parking spot, Michael Bay. Bumblebee has a vigorously beating heart absent from every live-action Transformers movie before it; in my notes, I described it as Transformers if it were directed by Steven Spielberg. Gone are the randomly placed Victoria’s Secret models and the oceans of computer graphics resembling metal spaghetti, replaced by a muscular arsenal of charming, well-calibrated callbacks to the 1980s and characters whose most interesting element is a real, nuanced personality for a change. It is easily the best movie we’ve seen from this franchise, and that’s because it wants to study the ins and outs of its human characters rather than turn them into a joke or stare at their butts. The same can be said for its title character, who is more charming, lovable, and complex than he ever has been before. The emotions that director Travis Knight cares about run deeper than the kind that merely make you chuckle and nudge the person beside you.

These emotions are centered around the utterly adorable Autobot fugitive Bumblebee and his newfound friend Charlie, a relatively average girl who can’t seem to fit in with the types of women Bay would have devoted far too much time to ogling with the camera. Before the old, yellow VW Beetle she picks up from an old junkyard head comes to life, she spends her days as the town loser, the sort of person forced to wear a weird costume at her amusement park food stand job while the popular kids make fun of her. Memo, an awkward boy who owns an absurd amount of hair products he likes to pretend are his mom’s, has a crush on Charlie, but the girl’s just too caught up in her woe-is-me attitude to notice him, and so they just keep going about life as if the solution to so many of their problems isn’t right there in front of them; sometimes, you just need a yellow, alien robot for everything to make sense. Bumblebee is a familiar drama, largely by design, but it’s more emotionally elaborate and empathetic than any Transformers movie before it. Its titular machine and the people who learn to love both him and each othern pack an emotional wallop that has been missing from the franchise until now.

Where Sam Witwicky was played as a joke, Charlie is presented as a person with an actual personality, a refreshing change of pace for a franchise that has finally learned to care about the feelings of its characters. Yes, Charlie’s a loser, but even worse, she’s been an outsider in her own family since her dad died, the type to sulk in her room while her mom, brother, and stepdad watch comedies in the living room, laughing at the screen as if she and her problems don't even exist. So, once she finds out the secret about her new, yellow VW Beetle, Bee becomes the source of comfort people around her have neglected to be,  whether through cruelty or mere oversight. The two of them are very cute together, and I meant to use that word.

Bee himself is played with such sweet innocence. He’s ignorant to the way things work on Earth, and though an unfortunate encounter has rendered him unable to speak, that doesn’t stop him and Charlie from trying to communicate in perfectly tender ways that may just make your eyes water a little. It’s a lot of fun watching Bumblebee trying to copy the habits of first Charlie, and later Memo. He’s got the spirit, but he turns stuff like harmless pranks against the mean girls of school into wanton destruction, not through any malice of his, but rather because the sheer amount of spirit he has causes him to do things like stomp on cars before considering how heavy he is or much money they cost to replace. Charlie has nowhere else to go, and that makes her newfound bond with Bee just that much more special. As for her and Memo’s budding relationship, it’s refreshingly non-sexual. Any guy who’s ever been an awkward teenager will recognize a little bit of themselves in Memo, and all of these literally me moments make its characters feel more like people than like a ploy to sell tickets, though I've no doubt they did plenty of the latter.

There’s a comedic sensibility to Bumblebee, not like the raunchy awkwardness of other Transformers films, more akin to the family-friendly goofiness of E.T. than Sam Witwicky’s mom barging into his room to ask him if he’s been jerking off. Furthering the Spielberg comparisons, it has an innocent, awkward sweetness that Bay’s movies lacked, and though it’s nothing special in the grand scheme of feel-good dramas, it’s so radically different from the other Transformers movies that it feels revolutionary. The emotional intelligence of Bumblebee is off the charts. It demonstrates such a wide range of emotions in ways that are touching, unpredictable, and genuinely heartwarming; you'll grin like a fool one moment and tear up the next. Charlie’s using Bee as a stand-in for her dad, because she’s got no one else to go to. He becomes the only being—or person—who never pushes her away.

Bumblebee isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t always know how to balance the story arc of Charlie and Bee’s budding friendship with that of the government and two manipulative Decepticons trying to track down this awkward, yellow robot. The former is really charming, and the latter seems to exist because this is a Transformers movie and a Transformers movie needs robotic bad guys. The two arcs compete for space more than they complement one another, behaving more like two separate stories than one coherent movie. Its more sinister elements come crashing back onto the screen in a way that will make you realize that the best things about this movie had almost made you forget about them.

Once these two worlds collide, Bee is decidedly the underdog of this inevitable battle. He’s a small robot compared to his enemies, and it’s a lot of fun watching him have to get creative to defeat them. Last but certainly not least, this movie uses the aesthetic of 1980s Transformers in a really charming way that pays homage to the retro origins of its franchise in live action – the designs of the Autobots and Decepticons themselves are my favorite, bridging the relative realism of Bay’s films with the classic cartoons. In one scene, a massive war rages on the metallic surface of Cybertron, and it looks as though it's been ripped straight from the animated series and thrust into the real world, in a good way. There’s a lot of 80s camp and cheese to be found here, but it’s played as homage instead of an ill-conceited attempt at real substance, the latter of which actually rests on the shockingly genuine connection shared between Charlie, Bee, and Memo. You see, this movie pushes the franchise into the future more than it does pull it back into the past, and again, Charlie also remains refreshingly unsexualized when the other Transformers films would likely have indulged - who would have thought that something as simple as this could be considered revolutionary? At one point, she and Memo are about to hold hands, but they both back out at the last moment because they’re not there yet. Somehow, I get the feeling that Bay wouldn’t have been able to resist his impulses as well as Charlie, Memo, or Travis Knight.

Bumblebee is the first Transformers movie that has empathy, and it’s not just feel-good anecdotes thrown in so that the movie can look like it cares. It actually does. If you’ve ever felt like you don’t belong somewhere, I think that this movie will really speak to you in a way that the other movies it shares subject matter – but not thematic matter – with couldn’t. This movie trusts its heart rather than its visuals to keep viewers in their seats. Movies are more than an exercise of the mind or the adrenal glands, and Bumblebee learns from the mistakes of the past while setting the mold for the future at the very same time.

Bumblebee – 8/10

Job 6:14