Bumblebee Review

Article written by: Griffin Spencer

Staring: Hailee Steinfield, Jorge Lendeborg Jr, and John Cena

Directed by: Travis Knight

Screenplay by: Christina Hodson

Spoiler free

Bumblebee is an entertaining Transformers film with a main character that has heart.

Quick summary, Bumblebee starts off with a war raging on Cybertron. With the autobots losing hope their leader, Optimus Prime, sends B-127 to Earth to set up a base for the autobots. When B lands on Earth he runs into a little trouble known as John Cena, known in the movie as Agent Jack Burns. Not so long later some decepticons land on Earth looking for B-127, blowing shit up in the process. John Cena gets injured during the altercation, which may or may not play a role who knows. B-127 is able to run away and is able to transform into a Volkswagen and ends up in a junkyard. This is were the main character, Charlie (played by Hailee Steinfield) finds B and fixes him to have as her own car. Once Charlie gets this seemingly normal car home she finds out its secret. She harbors this robot/car in her garage and introduces him to music and radio, his eventual way to communicate. One of Charlies classmates find out what is going on and everything spirals out of control. Will Charlie and B be fine? You will have to find out for yourself 😉

I enjoyed the movie Bumblebee. The action in this movie is 10x better than anything in the Michael Bay movies. You can see what is going on in the scenes and who is fighting who. With the Bay Transformer movies all the transformers looked the same and the action scenes where just a big jumbled mess. I grew up on those films so the first Transformers holds somewhat of a special place in my heart (I can now say those movies are no where near as good as I remember, but they are still entertaining somewhat). Bumblebee just takes everything you know from a Transformers movie and throws it out a window. one of the main character, a robot, has some heart and feeling to him. You actually care about Bumblebee and want the best for him.

Performances in the movie where fine, it is nothing groundbreaking. The best performance in my mind was Hailee Steinfield. She brought a good amount of emotion to her role. Also, her character had a good amount of depth to her, unlike Shia’s character in the first. She is dealing with the lose of her father and gaining a “new” father. The second best performance would probably be Bumblebee, and he is just all CG and doesn’t have a voice actor after getting his voice box ripped out. (Dylan O’Brian does his voice before that happens and he does a fine job) I just thought the way they had B reacting to things and basically acting like a dog at first was a good touch. Like I said earlier you care about him, he is not just a jumble of metal with some yellow thrown on him. He has emotions and can show them. Considering the directors last movie was Kubo and the Two Strings I should have known he would do a good job with emotion. John Cena’s performance is nothing special. He does a fine job as a military guy who doesn’t like change.

The problem I have with this movie is that there is a lot of drama movie tropes in it. Just for example the main characters father passing away, some sort of alien coming to earth and a young “kid” has to take care of it, and you got one military guy trying to get (kill) the main alien guy. This movie felt really similar to Iron Giant to me and Iron Giant has to probably be one of my favorite movies of all time. I enjoyed that for what it was but some parts just felt like it was out of Iron Giant, especially close to the end. My brother said that they were probably paying homage but I just felt like it was just a little to much for my liking. I am probably just being weird about it, but I just thought it was weird.

Other than that I thought bumblebee was a good movie. Its entertaining for the whole family and I think everyone will find something in this they like. I would recommenced renting this movie on a nice, chill Friday night with the fam or yourself if you enjoy Transformers. So that is all I have on that and I hope you guys enjoyed! Catch you next time on TheBlamBros.com.