Bumblebee is the reboot fans need
[WARNING! Spoilers ahead!]
Michael Bay is probably the person most abhorred by Transformers fanboys. Known for his films Bad Boys and The Rock, the film director brought with him into the Transformers live-action movies expertise for making commercials and music videos.
To what extent those credentials influenced Bay-verse Transformers movies — a total of five that received several bad reviews — is anyone’s guess. But the need for the films to be uber-cool is obvious.
On top of the list, Bay’s infamous love for explosions and, apparently, the US military is on show. Eye candy comes in the form of Megan Fox and later, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in the first three films. And, for the lack of better explanations, some robots, notably in Transformers and Revenge of the Fallen, have sexualised attributes: Bumblebee ‘urinates’ on a John Turturro character; a gigantic bot with a pair of dangling steel balls between its legs; and Wheelie, a small robot, humps the shin of Fox’s Mikaela Banes.
Add to that Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky, who, at the beginning of each sequel, seems to undergo a restart of his temperament, with an ostensible absence of a battle-hardened attitude despite having war-like experiences in the last film. Bay tends to exploit LaBeouf’s penchant for goofiness, which went into overdrive in Dark of the Moon as Witwicky wails like someone who forgets to take his meds.
All these could have been forgiven of if the story is done well. Unfortunately, that is sort of an afterthought in Bay filmmaking.
For instance, consider the director’s tendency to emphasise unnecessary details that have little to no consequential impact on the plot: the scene where Rainn Wilson’s (of The Office US fame) cameo gets so much of a bombastic character in less than five minutes, you’d think he would have a prominent presence in Revenge of the Fallen. Or, in the same movie, the incredulous amount of screen time Sam’s mum has in early scenes just to show how funny she is (for that role, Julie White was nominated for a Razzie for Worst Supporting Actress).
The Transformers cinematic universe, in other words, is a culmination of how-not-to-direct-like-Bay quirks. Yet, it was clear by the third film, Dark of the Moon, that Bay should have been axed from future sequels. Instead, he was allowed to direct two more.
Then came Travis Knight.
Making the movie fans deserve
Based on the records of the movie review site, Rotten Tomatoes, most Transformers live-action films received ‘rotten’ ratings. Only one was conferred the “Certified Fresh” stamp of approval via the aggregate of reviewers’ score — and that movie was not directed by Bay.
“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,” Rotten Tomatoes’ critic consensus says about Travis Knight’s live-action directorial debut.
Granted, Bumblebee isn’t the destruction spectacle that the Bay Transformers films are. However, with its discernible action sequences and more heartfelt plot, it’s easier to see where Bay had failed and in which Knight succeeded.
Furthermore, gone are the key features that define the past five films.
Knight ditches the overly sophisticated synopsis that marks the underwhelming stories of Bay Transformers. In the place of the narrative is a simple tale about the friendship between a girl and a robot, a trope not unlike such connections that were successfully implemented in Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant or even James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Interestingly, Bumblebee happens not in the 2000s, but in 1987, the final year of the first Transformers cartoon’s running.
And instead of getting an annoying teenager for a protagonist, troubled girl Charlie Watson (played by Hailee Steinfeld) takes the lead. Steinfeld’s character has more emotional nuances than Witwicky could muster in his oddball jitters, and while both beg for a car at the start of their films, Watson at least bothers to fix it up herself.
Knight’s efforts to distance his movie from those of Bay did not stop there.
In the character design department, most of the robots, including the Autobots leader, Optimus Prime, were created to look more like the first generation cartoon, rather than the edgy, go-for-real aesthetics of Bay Transformers. Additionally, the transformation from robot to vehicle is swifter and more confident.
If these signs are not enough to suggest that Bumblebee is a soft reboot of the Transformers film series, then some story elements would accentuate this push. The appearance of Optimus Prime and (presumably) other Autobots on what’s assumingly 1980s Earth during Bumblebee’s mid-credits stinger strongly suggests a recalibration of the Transformers cinematic universe’s timeline (the first Bay Transformers flick hints that event happens in the 2000s).
The narrative modification would almost certainly means that Bumblebee’s backers are orchestrating the restarting of the Transformers film series — excluding, of course, much of the ‘Bayformers’ elements.
Reboot or prequel?
But, any notions of Bumblebee’s function as a reboot attempt had been rejected by Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, the longtime producer of the Transformer films.
As if the ‘R’ word is part of a sacrilegious lingo, Bonaventura claimed he does not know the definition of the term:
Reboot, I always hate that word because for one, I’m not sure I really understand what it means.
Then he fumbled a little in denying the reboot likelihood, arguing that fans who want the Transformers films to retain its original flavour would find such an approach producing something repetitive:
It’s not like we look at the elements of what we did before and go, ‘Well, let’s not do this’ or ‘Let’s not do that.’ It’s more about how do you evolve the experience for the fans. Let the fan have a new experience. When we did the first movie, at first there was a lot of pushback that we weren’t doing it the way it was done before. My feeling was always that if we’d done it, you would’ve gone, ‘Well, I’ve already seen it.’ So how do you evolve things forward is I think the hardest thing because you’ve got to retain why people love it, but at the same time if you give them the same experience, they’re going to be bored with it.
No surprise, the equivocality in Bonaventura’s assertion could do little to convince the most keen-eyed of fans. After all, Bumblebee has been well-received by fans, who pointed to the film’s return to its roots, as well as praising the impressive opening scene as the Transformers battle fans have been asking for.
On the other hand, let’s not dismiss that the ‘prequel’ term can be loosely applied if Bonaventura chooses to; i.e a prequel to a rebooted film series perhaps?
Plus, pro-reboot fans have good reasons to keep their fingers crossed. In a move that would slightly contradict Bonaventura’s opinion, Paramount Pictures, the Transformers films’ distributor, had Transformers 6 removed from its 2019 release calendar; words are that the studio is “rebooting the entire franchise in the direction of Bumblebee.”
It’s about time, and if Bumblebee proves to be the financial windfall Paramount needs, the lure of lucrative returns might get Bonaventura to think otherwise.
For the first time since the Transformers cinematic universe began in 2007, the notion of a Transformers film that would please both fans and movie critics has finally come into fruition.
