Bumblebee (2018)
(Netflix Streaming, September 2019) I have a vivid imagination, but even I wouldn’t have predicted that the sixth entry in the modern Transformers franchise would be a teen-oriented back-to-basics “a girl and her robot” period piece that is a marked step upward for the franchise. Having finally acknowledged the inherent awfulness of the franchise and managed to sedate Michael Bay long enough to put Travis Knight in the director’s chair, the series producers surprisingly shifted gears to a smaller-scale story and Bumblebee is better than its predecessors. I wouldn’t exactly call it a good movie, but it fits together better than the other entries and doesn’t quite insult the audience in the process. Taking place in 1980s northwestern America, Bumblebee details how robots land on Earth and one of them is deactivated long enough for a teenage girl to discover him in car mode and get to work in getting it to work. Much to her surprise, she discovers the robot and you can write the rest of the film yourself as both the eeeevil Decepticons and human military forces take an interest in her yellow robot friend. Liberally borrowing from many 1980s coming-of-age movies, Bumblebee does manage to understand and portray a broader emotional range than the rest of the series, and to create some attachment to the film as more than a series of grandiose blurry impressionistic action sequences. Knight slows down the pace, lengthens the average shot and ends up showing more than random colours and movement for five minutes. It’s not quite satisfying—what with its dropped subplots, inconclusive relationship with the rest of the series, and overly precious moments, but I enjoyed it a bit more than the increasingly punitive series so far. Even the visual design of the robots has undercome a much-needed streamlining, bringing them closer to my own formative G1 ideal of what they should look like. Hailee Steinfeld and John Cena are quite sympathetic in generic roles, but generic is far better than cliché. While I’m more reserved about the result than many other reviewers (I do love Bay-made explosions), the result is encouraging in showing the way the inevitable future instalments should be headed. I’m still not a fan, but I’m open to further developments.