Movie Review: Bumblebee
3.5/5
The film opens on a Michael Bay note all right. The planet Cybertron is witnessing a war between the Decepticons and Autobots, with the latter being the losing side. Their leader, Optimus Prime, orders B-127 to go to Earth and protect it as a new command post, promising that one day the surviving Autobots will turn it into their home base. He crashes into the middle of a war games exercise conducted by Agent Burns (John Cena). He's considered a threat and hence Burns orders his men to attack. At this point, a Decepticon named Blitzwing attacks him. His memory gets burned and he loses speech functions but kills off Blitzwing. Heavily wounded, B-127 transforms into a rundown Beetle before passing out. The car is found in the scrapyard by a young girl Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld) who has just turned eighteen. Charlie was a champion diver but has trouble adjusting to life ever since her father passed away. She's also resentful of her mother's remarriage. She discovers her rundown car is actually an alien and a strange friendship develops between an amnesiac alien and a young girl suffering from depression. How they help each other overcome their hurdles forms the crux of the story...
As stated earlier, this is a coming of age story about a girl on the cusp of adulthood. Hence, teenage angst finds a definite voice. We see our heroine yearning for freedom and finds a companion who sort of understands her and offers solace at just the right time she needs it. It helps that the space alien is shown to have the temperament of an overgrown dog. The scene where Bumblebee explores the house and almost wrecks it in her absence is hilarious. Their scenes together elevate the film from a leave-your-brains-behind action potboiler to a sensitive story with a heart. And the fleshing out of ancillary characters too is sound. At first glance, our heroine seems to be saddled with a stock selfish mother and an insensitive stepfather but later we come to realise that she has a set of dysfunctional parents who nevertheless love her very much. John Cena too is made out to be a stock ’80s tough guy at first but later becomes a more evolved creature. He’s also got the most goofy line in the film -- “They literally call themselves ‘Decepticons’. That doesn’t set off any red flags?”.
Hailee Steinfeld is a natural in front of the camera and brings out all the nuances required for the role like a pro. Jorge Lendeborg Jr. too is good as her goofy boyfriend. CGI plays a major role in films like these and here too, director Travis Knight, who had earlier directed the superb stop-motion animation film Kubo and the Two Strings, gets the formula right. He makes us believe we’re watching an intelligent creature rather than a dumb machine -- which wasn’t the case in the earlier Transformers films. He has also made the machines look more in tandem with their toy avatars, something that would be music to the ears of dedicated fans. All-in-all, it would be fair to say that this spin-off or we suspect, a soft reboot of the franchise is the best Transformers film of the lot so far. Let’s hope Travis Knight gets to helm more related projects in the future. Fingers crossed!
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