Starring Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jnr, John Ortiz, Jason Drucker, Pamela Adlon and the voice of Dylan O’Brien

Directed by Travis Knight

Sent on a mission to secure a home base for his people on planet Earth, a lone soldier from Cybertron makes a new friend. But the arrival of others from his home might spell the end of the planet as well as the Autobot rebellion.

It’s rather fitting, in the midst of all the sound and fury and incoherent, contradictory narrative of the Transformers live-action film franchise, that this latest entry seems genuinely ambivalent about its place within it. The studio say it’s a prequel, and there are many elements that would back this up. There are also several others that make no sense in that context at all, contradicting elements of the narrative (such as it is) built up by Bay even in the first movie. At any rate, none of that is important.

Starting out with an opening sequence that I suspect will make any fan of the 1980s cartoon series weep with joy, Bumblebee is a film full of contradictions. It likes to be subversive with its character beats, even as it runs a fairly generic narrative, particularly in its third act which runs on the same sort of ‘Race against time to stop the baddies doing a bad thing’ thread that we’ve seen not only in other Transformers movies but in most genre entries in the last decade or so.

It installs central character Charlie Watson (Steinfeld) as an angry, shut-off teenager mourning her late father and refusing to integrate with the rest of the family including new stepfather Ron. As young co-worker Memo desperately tries to attract her attention, and mean high-school girls are mean to her and she works away at the old car she used to work on with her Dad, it all starts out looking very predictable. But then writer Christina Hodson and director Knight have fun shaking all those elements up in a variety of pleasing ways so that you start to really respect the film and what it’s doing, such that when it does hit the slightly hackneyed narrative thread in the third act you’re feeling enough good will towards the thing to let it go.

Steinfeld, who was impressive as Maddie Ross in the Coen Brothers 2010 True Grit remake, is exactly the sort of talent a movie like this requires and exactly the sort you would never have expected to see headlining a Transformers title. Tough, capable, but with a suggestion of brittleness beneath the hard exterior, this isn’t a typical ‘Harsh loner until she finds the one’ type of character. Watson is adrift on the pain of her loss, and unable to really relate to anyone or anything beyond her own internal suffering as she shuts everyone else out. What that means is that when she meets and befriends our titular character, there’s a very real bond to be made there.

Because by the time she finds Bumblebee, he’s a mess himself. Sent to Earth by Optimus Prime to secure it as a safe place for other Autobots to come to, and defend from the Decepticons, he doesn’t get the warmest welcome, and when he and Watson come together, he’s already lost his voice (a link to the other films) and is suffering whatever the Autobot equivalent of PTSD is, as well as having issues recalling exactly who he is and why he’s here. This then, rather than a film about robots that spends too much time on the people around them and their ‘hilarious’ domestic lives, is a film about two damaged people helping one another come to terms with their new circumstance and find a way to move forward.

At its best, the film works this angle well, creating a character in Bumblebee that’s been utterly lacking from any of the interchangeable walking lumps of CGI Bay has been plastering across screens for over a decade. It’s not just that the robot models here are cleaner and more defined (which they are) but also in the mannerisms and interactions of both Bumblebee and the other Transformers we see. When it reverts more to type and the robots start shooting at one another and smashing each other about the place, it’s a lot more bearable because a) you care about the characters beyond how cool they look or whatever snappy catchphrase they have and b) it’s actually a lot easier to see what’s going on.

Set in 1987, the film works its era well, replete with a veritable mixtape of appropriate songs and a host of other aesthetic choices to really cement the mood. John Cena is better than one might expect as the standard military guy who wants to destroy all the Transformers, but the script wisely avoids giving him much in the way of heavy plot lifting to do and the man’s natural charisma helps sell the times when he’s on screen.

Undoubtedly then, it’s the best entry in the long-running live action Transformers franchise, and the only question is how the studio will choose to build on it.  The way it ends leaves the question open as to how faithfully this adheres to the existing ‘canon’ given that in one way it suggests it’s a direct prequel but in many others it suggests it’s taking a different track. Fans like me who grew up with the toys and cartoon of the 80s will hope that this new direction continues, with the recognisable characters and personalities we are used to realised on screen in gorgeous and faithful picture and sound. Time will tell.

Verdict: Easily beating the other entries in the franchise to claim top spot (itself a fairly low bar) this is a movie that tries a lot of new things and pulls most of them off. The credit this charm and invention earns for it in the first two acts goes a long way to make certain clichés in the third a lot more palatable. 8/10

Greg D. Smith