Viewing Hours: Bumblebee (2018)

To say that I have a complicated relationship with the live-action Transformers movies would be something of an understatement. Quite literally exploding on to the scene in 2007, the movies started out acceptably before taking a very sharp, very fast nose dive into the trash, culminating, for now, kind of, with 2017’s abysmal The Last Knight, a movie that took an already exceptionally loose narrative and tossed it on top of some totally nonsensical pabulum, creating a movie that I honestly do hate. Bumblebee is the first spin off/reboot/recalibration for the franchise, depending on what Hasbro is thinking this week, and in full disclosure, I had no interest in seeing it at all. I know, as my wife will be quick to point out, that I’ve said that about the last three live action movies, and yet we have seen them all, The Last Knight at my wife’s urgings, as it was a summer afternoon and we had nothing else to do. How does Bumblebee fair? I guess the first main difference is that we saw it on a winter afternoon where we had nothing else to do.

The movie had a lot of potential going in, as it was being directed by a competent director who is known for character-driven and focused stories, something that these movies avoid like a communicable disease. Initial talks were of a small robot cast, so as to be able to actually give some amount of development to the actual robot characters, but we’d heard that line before, so it was skeptically received. Unfortunately, the main robot character was to be Bumblebee, the character that the live action movies were capable of making even less interesting than he was prior to starring in them. But, maybe if he was the main focus, maybe he could be turned into something worthwhile.

But Bumblebee at best manages to be an updated and occasionally better version of the 2007 franchise launching movie, and whether or not that is a positive thing is really up to you. Following outstanding footage on Cybertron, which is the absolute pinnacle of the live action Transformers cinematic universe at this point, Bumblebee is sent to Earth where he has unpleasant run ins with both a Decepticon and the U.S. military because of course he does, and then tries to hide in a junkyard, only to be discovered by conflicted, troubled teenager Charlie, who works on what appears to be a total piece of shit car as a way of coping with the loss of her father. Honestly, the set up for the characters in this movie is a literal lightyear beyond the “characterization” found in the main five movies; but, a thing that will plague this movie in its entirety is the fact that this is a better made and presented cover of the 2007 movie. Bumblebee and Charlie form a bond that leads them to so good and watchable robot-on-robot action, and the action scenes are clear and understandable. Lots of the standard Transformers movie hijinks ensure, so there’s punching and jokes and driving and teenage angst, but it really is done so much better than the other movies. Some of the humor is still corny, but the movie manages to avoid masturbation and pot jokes from tragically unappealing parent characters, and one gets a real sense from watching this that there was an actual script that was followed, abandoning the Bay principle of just tossing it over the shoulder in favor of letting actors adlib things that no self-respecting movie would allow to make it into the final cut. There’s the geeky guy across the street that has a romantic interest in Charlie, which doesn’t really go anywhere, but at least for good story reasons, not like the Sam and Girlfriends stories that are present in the Bay movies. Ultimately by working together and learning to trust each other and a brief, largely superfluous appearance by John Cena to remind you that he was in this movie, too, Charlie and Bumblebee save the day and the world and the Autobots, before Optimus Prime shows up and tells Bumblebee he did a good job and throwing the events of the 2007 movie into disarray by being on Earth decades before they were shown to arrive on Earth, having not even been aware of the place in 2007, and leaving that whole “we tracked Megatron and the Allspark here so that’s why we came” thing into question.

I’d like to try and point out some positive things about Bumblebee, as there were a few. Most importantly for me, Bumblebee FINALLY gave us recognizable robot designs, a literal first for the live action movies. The opening scenes on Cybertron, unquestionably the best part of the movie, and realistically, the best four minutes of live action Transformers movies, showed us the Cybertronian war in recognizable and clear colors and looks. I was astounded to see Wheeljack and Brawn, and the be able to recognize them as Wheeljack and Brawn. That was what I’d been wanting twelve years ago, when I sat down in the theater for the first movie. And man, some of the designs really do look good. Also, Bumblebee seems to capitalize on something that the writers of the first live action movie wanted to do, which is to make this movie a story about a kid and their car. That was totally glossed over in the first movie, but Bumblebee really does focus on the relationship between Bee and Charlie, which is frankly a nice but somewhat shocking surprise.  

But in the end, Bumblebee is a redo of the 2007 movie, which was already the best of the bunch, and if viewed from that perspective, Bumblebee is really only successful because it amplifies the positives of that movie while plastering over the negatives. It makes this movie feel slightly phoned in, since it is just a remake, thus making the new best movie of the bunch largely redundant and dull, since you’ve already seen it. There can be no disputing that this is the top of the line live action Transformers movie, but there’s just not anything new. Even those great, legible designs from the opening? Almost completely absent after that opening sequence. The villains, a pair of triple changers names Dropkick and Shatter, though you’d be forgiven for not knowing their names, as the movie never mentions them, are by a mile the best villain characters in the franchise, despite being nothing more than standard, “we’re the bad guys because we are doing bad guy things” characterization.  Bumblebee is an actual character, an alien on a strange world, the way he was intended to be in 2007, and not just some yellow murder machine because he was edgy. But the entire time watching this, my dominant thought was “this is  the 2007 movie again”.

And that may or may not be a bad thing, really. I was fully convinced as we left the theater that I didn’t care for Bumblebee not because it was bad, because it wasn’t, but because it was fine, but nothing new or different. If the best hope for the franchise is  to revisit its first draft and slightly boost the things that made that entry a positive, I guess that’s the best thing a franchise can do. But as has been made super clear on these pages over the years, I love Transformers, and am always going to want good things for the franchise, and I cannot help but feel a little let down that the best path forward was to remake a movie but cut Shia and those insufferable parent characters while not changing or advancing anything else. If Bumblebee is a prequel, then the rest of the live action cinematic universe is all the more disappointing garbage. If Bumblebee is a reboot, then there may be some degree of hope for the live action movies version 2.0, so long as they don’t immediately revert back to the Bay things. But who can actually know, as days after Bumblebee’s positive theatrical reception, Hasbro reps were back in the spotlight claiming it was a reboot, but then that it wasn’t, and that it was a prequel, except then it wasn’t, an then it was a stand-alone affair that was never intended to be in the mainline narrative, except then it was. So, the traditional Hasbro response of “of course we planned this entire thing, except we didn’t because you are taking this too seriously as a fan because it’s just action movies.”

The only thing I can honestly say about Bumblebee is that it was a fine movie. Better than everything post-2007, about on par with 2007, fine. I fear that this movie may pave the way for others, but I don’t hate this movie the way I hate The Last Knight, which I truly, deeply do hate. What this version of Bumblebee means for the universe moving forward will have to be seen later, but if Hasbro wanted a second chance, I hope they don’t totally blow it.