A prequel about the robot from Transformers that doesn’t talk? Yikes, sounds super awful. And then, strange, good things start happening. Travis Knight, not Michael Bay, directs the movie, from Laika Studios. Hailee Steinfeld agrees to be the lead, having sewn her oats playing great teenage characters. And the running time is under 2 hours. Simple, smart changes like that create a movie that even the most ardent Transformer haters would say “I guess that’s ok.”
The movie opens with the war on Cybertron, Bumblebee’s home planet. With the Autobots about to lose the battle, Optimus Prime orders the bots to retreat, sending Bumblebee to Earth circa 1987. Bee evades capture, but his voice box and memory are damaged in the process. Bee transforms into a Volkswagen beetle, where Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld), a loner teen whose dad just passed away, obtains the car. Once learning her car is an alien, Charlie keeps Bee secret from her mom (Pamela Adlon), stepdad (Stephen Schneider) and brother (Jason Drucker), as well as Agent Burns (John Cena) and the government agencies that would be very excited to discover an alien.
Travis Knight and Christina Hodson, the creative team behind Bumblebee, opt for treating the Transformer like a pet for Hailee Steinfeld to interact with. Charlie has this perfect backstory ripe for a pet to make her feel better: tomboy loner who was attached to her deceased father, and misunderstood by her family. So with this wide eyed innocent to bounce off of, she projects all of her feelings onto this creature, discovering her own voice while Bumblebee discovers his own. Did you notice something with this set up? It sounds like one grounded in reality and human emotion! So when the time comes for giant robots to fight each other, we are legitimately rooting for not only the good robots, but the humans as well. No more trying to justify sleeping with a 17 year old pin up model, Charlie is a well realized female character in the Transformers world. Who would have thought that possible!
Surrounding the main story is some window dressing that also makes Bumblebee a lot of fun. The Cybertron scenes do a great deal setting up who Bumblebee is, giving him a tragic and heroic backstory so we care about him and get to watch some kick ass fight scenes. The music soundtrack is very much 1987, using many of the synth pop hits of the day to nostalgic effect. And like all good reimagining of the past, the movie retcons things in the present, like how the Internet comes about due to military interaction with the Transformers. All these little touches help keep the main story breezy and fun, and the world consequences relatively minor.
And after 2 hours, you’re out of there! No hours long mythologizing necessary for Bumblebee. Just a girl and her pet car, solving problems and growing up. Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you do….nope, Rick Astley is not Bumblebee’s jam.