Bumblebee 2018
I was too old to get into The Transformers when they came out and the animation always looked really awful and cheap to me. I liked the idea of toys that could transform. I did watch the first The Transformers movie which I thought was okay. The sequels got worse and worse reviews and I never saw them. Bumblebee was supposed to be a better re-boot to the series, getting pretty good reviews. I wound up buying it on Black Friday and hoped for the best.
The movie is decent enough, but it seems like it still suffers from a lot of the same problems. It doesn’t seem that realistic for a super-powerful missile resistant robot to turn into a Volkswagen Beetle, one of the most fragile cars ever built. And the robots fight and battle and seem to be destroyed, but then get better somehow, unless they don’t. It seems arbitrary. I will say that they capture very good expressions from the title character and it is fun watching the relationship between Bumblebee and Hailee Steinfeld. Steinfeld is good, but her character has a lot of issues that don’t seem particularly natural. John Cena plays a government agent who wants to destroy Bumblebee, but again not for much of a reason, and Cena is neither completely menacing or completely comical. The rest of the cast are unknowns and are generally pretty weak. The government does dumb things like give the Decepticons access to national security computers (Cena’s character makes one good point: “You’re trusting them when their name is ’decepticon'?!"). In the end, the movie is too cartoonish for its own good, even if it is based on a fairly bad cartoon. They are talking about sequels, so I guess they will do this all over again, but I will probably opt out.
Written: 15 Mar 2020
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital