Director: Travis Knight
Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz
Have I Seen it Before: No. What would possibly possess me to be in any kind of a hurry to watch a Transformers film?
Did I Like It: Okay. Well, here’s the confession. I kind of—sort of—like the first Transformers (2007). It has just enough of the influence of Spielberg where the film is more about a boy and his connection with his car (who happens to be sentient) than it is about the struggle between the Autobots and the Decepticons.
Every subsequent film in the series that I had the misfortune to have been exposed to is so laden with exposition and an endless series of meaningless MacGuffins that each film became the equivalent of spending several hours reading the cardboard backing of an action figure. I gave up on Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) long before its interminable nearly three-hour runtime. Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) was a non-starter for me long before the near-war crime of its 149 minutes was unleashed on an unsuspecting populace.
So it is with great relief that I report Bumblebee—a film no one asked for and no sane studio should have green-lit—is a delight from start to finish. The glip-glorps and whoozi-whatzis that propelled… plots?... in the previous films are stripped away, and all we know about the various Transformers in the context of this film are:
1) The Transformers come from Cybertron.
2) Cybertron is at war.
3) Bumblebee is a good guy. To a far less important extent, so is Optimus Prime.
And that is all you need. Everything else is only of interest to people who have mint-condition Generation One Starscreams* hermetically sealed in their basement.
With the artifice of the franchise now stripped away, the human element that the first film hints at comes back in full force. Shia LaBeouf was sort of a wry, detached figure in the first film, and his affection for the alien car he lucked into never felt like a real performance. Much to Hailee Steinfeld’s credit, I believe the friendship between her and Bumblbee throughout the picture. Her character never becomes a cliché. She never once detaches herself from the proceedings, and one can easily imagine a less polished actor doing just that. After all, there are five films of evidence.
Who knew this series could find its resurgence by making a film actually about people? If the Transformers can turn things around like this, maybe there is hope for other big-budget franchises.
I reserve the right to revoke that optimism upon the release of any further Transformer movies, and probably will.
*That’s a thing, right?