The New York Times review
suggested that Bumblebee (2018; dir. Travis Knight)
was, at last, a “good” entry into the Transformers film franchise. That’s setting a low bar. Bumblebee is entertaining on a
certain level, especially a kid’s level. In Hailee Steinfeld, who plays the
main character Charlie, it offers a winning actress. It’s a modern-day film about a teenage girl
coming to terms with her father’s death and her mother’s marriage to a new
husband (who is something of a geek). It also breaks conventions: Charlie is a
so-called tomboy who is repairing her dead father’s Corvette, trying to make it
run. She doesn’t care about clothes and
she’s not boy crazy. She does become friends with a young man recently arrived
in her neighborhood. There might be a
future relationship between them, but it’s clearly in the future, beyond the
end of the film. She rebuffs his attempt to hold her hand at the end of the
film, explaining that “It’s too soon.” Charlie wants her own car and when she
runs across an old and battered VW in a local junkyard, she takes it home and
soon discovers that it is an Autobot, sent to Earth by the Autobot leader (I
assume Optimus Prime) after a major defeat in battle by the Decepticons. One can predict the plot from there. The Decepticons detect the lost Autobot’s
signal and head to Earth to destroy it.
The autobot, whom Charlie names Bumblebee because of the hive of bees
living in the car when she found it, summons the other Autobots to help defend
the Earth, their last hope for survival.
And so on. The special effects are good enough. The action is more or less constant once
we’re midway through the film. Hailee
Steinfeld is a relatively good actor. And everyone chips in to defeat the nasty
Decepticons.
The story of a young person who befriends an
alien recalls the film E. T.: The Extraterrestrial, and the
loose parallels between the two films are evident throughout, enough so that I
recognized them before reading about in the NYT review.[1]
