BUMBLEBEE. Fewer Fireworks, More Heart [REVIEW]

It didn’t take much. Just dial down the color saturation, drop the eye-straining action sequences, and give the alien robots back their… humanity. Bumblebee is the child wrested away from the cinematic father of Transformers, Michael Bay—who this time chose to stay on only as executive producer. And that’s for the best. For years now he’s had no idea how to update the franchise in a way that would win over not only new audiences, but critics as well. Travis Knight, as it turns out, does.

The story is set in the 1980s, long before the Decepticon invasion from the first film and way before all the wild mutations that sent the Transformers to the dark side of the moon or King Arthur’s court. Teenager Charlie Watson, still grieving the death of her father, gets a yellow Volkswagen Beetle as a birthday present—who just happens to be a camouflaged robot from the war-torn planet Cybertron, better known as Bumblebee. Contrary to expectations, the main thread isn’t about government crackdowns on aliens or the Autobot-Decepticon conflict.

Instead, it’s about a lost and sensitive teenager who becomes the guardian and defender of Bumblebee—once Optimus Prime’s most loyal soldier, now a mute fugitive suffering from amnesia. Unlike Bay’s films, here it’s not about destruction and non-stop action, but about relationships between characters and that sense of wonder that brings to mind classic adventure cinema, like Spielberg’s E.T.

It seems like the sensibility of the director of Kubo and the Two Strings sets the tone here—but to “re-enchant” Transformers, it really took less than a visionary animator who prefers measured, clear shots and action sequences that feel organic to the story.

All it took was remembering that this brand was always meant for kids—kids who appreciate not just the visuals, but the ability to connect with the adventures happening to the protagonists. Charlie, played by brown-eyed Hailee Steinfeld, is a misfit not only in her reshuffled family (her mother has a new partner), but also in her school and her entire era. Yes, it’s a cliché we’ve seen as far back as The Breakfast Club, which Knight’s film openly nods to, but the “sensitive outsider” angle is handled here better than in the first installments of the robot saga. Setting the story in the ’80s gives it all a nostalgic glow that clearly fits the director like a glove.

The mother-daughter relationship (with a warm Pamela Adlon as the mom) is handled with care, while the genre flourishes—culminating in a testosterone-fueled commando (a charismatic John Cena) hunting Bumblebee—are charming thanks to the director’s confidence.

Of course, there’s still room for car chases, smashed streets, broken bridges, and the occasional ripped-off robot limb, but thankfully it all manages to stir genuine emotion. Yes, there’s plenty of sheet metal flying around, but there’s humanity too. Helping with that is the soundtrack: The Smiths, woven into the narrative, at first feel like sugary overkill—you almost want to spit the tape out of your cassette player like Bumblebee does. But eventually both the music and the bug-eyed gaze of the car-bot work their charm.

Maybe the adaptation of Hasbro’s toy line looks at first like a cynical cash-grab—it does tick every box of a spin-off, after all. But it’s worth giving it a chance, just to see how little it actually took to refresh the concept. Somewhere between the sparks, the explosions, the crumpled steel, and the rockets fired by massive invaders, there’s a girl on a scooter who just wants a friend. And that’s what these stories should really be about—even when they don’t have the ambition to shake up blockbuster cinema.