Bumblebee

**Bumblebee** (also known as Transformers: Bumblebee) is a 2018 American-Chinese science fiction action film centered on the Transformers character of the same name. It is the spin-off to the *Transformers* series and is the sixth movie in the *Transformers* franchise in general and first installment of the prequel series. A direct sequel, *Transformers: Rise of the Beasts* is scheduled to be released in June 2023.

## Plot

On the run in the year 1987, Bumblebee the Autobot seeks refuge in a junkyard in a small California beach town. Charlie, on the brink of turning 18 years old and trying to find her place in the world, soon discovers the battle-scarred and broken Bumblebee. When Charlie revives him, she quickly learns that this is no ordinary yellow Volkswagen.

## Why Bumblebee is Back to Life

1. It is a ***LARGE*** improvement over all of the Michael Bay sequels, particularly *Transformers: Age of Extinction* and *Transformers: The Last Knight*.
	* Out of all the live-action *Transformers* movies, it is the *only* installment to be classified as "fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, holding a well-earned 90% approval rating.
	* Thankfully, Michael Bay did not direct this movie, instead serving only as producer from now on, starting with this film.
2. Provides a great origin story for Bumblebee, showing how he came to Earth, how he lost his ability to speak, and eventually regained it.
3. The flashbacks to the war on Cybertron are intense and very visually well-done.
4. Pays a lot of neat homages to movies, TV shows, and music from the 1980s.
5. Every song used in the film, thanks to modern audio remastering, sounds infinitely better than their initial releases, especially in premium format theaters as well as on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray with Dolby Atmos.
6. Having only three Transformers (Bumblebee plus two Decepticons; Shatter and Dropkick) for most of the storyline allows for the three that we see to be given much more personality and character development than the Transformers typically got in the live-action movies. Even other Transformers that appear for short amounts of time, especially Optimus Prime, are characterized much better than in previous films.
7. Speaking of Bumblebee, he's even cuter and funnier than he was in previous films.
8. Unlike the main protagonist in Michael Bay's *Transformers* movies, Charlie is a very likable and endearing lead character, and her friendship with Memo is pretty cute, showing that it **is** possible to have a *Transformers* film focus on the human characters and actually work.
9. Good acting and performances, especially from Hailee Steinfeld (best known for playing as Kate Bishop in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Dylan O'Brien, Angela Bassett (best known for playing Queen Ramonda in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), Justin Theroux, and Jason Drucker.
	* For Jason Drucker, his performance as Otis, Charlie's brother, is an absolute improvement over Greg Heffley from *Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul*.
10. Agent Burns (John Cena) initially starts out looking like your typical military jock, but eventually shows himself to be a reasonable man who eventually helps defeat the Decepticons.
11. Some great bits of humor, particularly when Charlie, Memo, and Bumblebee play a prank on a girl who's been bullying Charlie.
12. The action sequences, while a little is more understated than the earlier *Transformers* films, are still visually stunning for the most part.
13. The film ditches the increasingly dark, near-apocalyptic scenarios that the previous films were centered around and is noticeably far more lighthearted in comparison.
14. Excellent direction of Travis Knight, who has worked as the lead animator for stop-motion animation studio Laika, the same director behind *Kubo and the Two Strings*.
15. The plot is different than other rehashed *Transformers* sequel directed by Michael Bay since you don't need to watch other sequels, especially fifth, as the newcomers are interested in what they might be.
16. Dario Marianelli provided the amazing musical score for the film, who previously scored Knight's *Kubo and the Two Strings*, making this the first time Steve Jablonsky has not scored one of the films in the franchise.
17. This is the perfect example of the nostalgic pandering done right, since many movies have overused of nostalgic pandering (regarding if its good or bad).
18. Great cinematography.

## Bad Qualities

1. It's never explained how or why one of the Decepticons managed to beat Bumblebee to Earth, or why the other Decepticons are initially oblivious to the fact that one of their numbers was ever on the planet.
2. Most of the Decepticons speak like the generic emotionless robot accent, which can be boring.
3. The visual effects, while generally pretty awesome, are noticeably cheaper in places compared to those of the five Michael Bay-directed films.
4. For some reason they incorporated a rather disgusting effect for when the Decepticons vaporize humans into colorless, transparent slime, as opposed to the effect used in *Transformers: Dark of the Moon*, which just reduced the humans to dust.
5. It still has unlikeable characters with Tripp Summers and Tina Lark (Charlie Watson's rival) being the worst offenders. Charlie's mother is also a pretty annoying and unlikable character, almost to the same extent as Sam Witwicky's mother from the first three *Transformers* films.

## Reception

*Bumblebee* received the highest praise of all the Transformers films from critics calling it the best film in the series, praising the action sequences, and Steinfeld's performance, as well as the 1980s setting and sense of nostalgia. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 90% based on 249 reviews, with an average rating of 6.90/10. The website's critical consensus read, "*Bumblebee* proves it's possible to bring fun and a sense of wonder back to a bloated blockbuster franchise -- and sets up its own slate of sequels in the bargain.". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 66 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". It is the highest-rated Transformers film on both websites.