Movie Review : Bumblebee

Rumble of Emotions!

Bumblebee

Who isn’t a sucker for Blue round Iris full of vivid Emotions? We all have treated our gadgets, cars, vehicles etc with lot of love and emotion. If ever they returned the favor? Who wouldn’t love to see their car’s mechanical face with big, blue eyes full of emotion reflecting the same love you hold for it? This prequel part of Transformers is all about the emotional connection and chemistry between a teenage girl and the first Transformer that landed on earth and how B-127 became Bumblebee.

Travis Knight the Oscar Nominated director for best Animation film sets the emotional tone for Bumblebee. The look and every shot of emotion is captured and executed to perfection. According to me this exceeds expectation to be the best among all the Transformer movies so far. Bumblebee will definitely give us the vibe of revisiting ET. We will learn why exactly the transformers landed on the planet earth and their planetary history reminds us of the Alien Superman and the destruction of its planet Krypton. Bumblebee is flawless synchronization among Emotions, Comedy and Action giving you a wholesome package and satisfaction of watching a complete movie the way it should be. It is all in the details. The story of Bumblebee the movie is set in the 80’s San Francisco where B-127 crash lands in the middle of military exercise led by secretive government agency and its commander Jack Burns (John Cena). Followed by the arrival of a deception pursuer intent on destroying Bumblebee, threatens to tip the movie over into the series of overindulgent action set pieces. Bumblebee escapes, and ends up losing its memory and ability of speech turns into a Beetle. Later a teenage girl Charlie played by (Hailee Steinfeld) from a dysfunctional American family mourning her father’s death finds it among car wreckage. She wanted a car that her mother couldn’t afford so she decides to repair the Beetle the way her father had taught her to.  Comically B-127 reveals itself that makes both Charlie and Bumblebee afraid of each other, only later to help each other emotionally as both try to adopt. In the process what entails are a series of hilarious, emotional and comic instances similar to that of ET. Knight has served the audience a gleeful movie with wit, warmth and whole bunch of heart. It’s a skillful shaping of what’s essentially a coming of age story for both Charlie and Bumblebee.

The filmmakers portrayal of Bumblebee as the mid-‘60s Volkswagen Beetle may seem like a strange choice, but this model was the character’s original configuration in early stages of the Transformers timeline before morphing into the more muscular Chevrolet Camaro in later movies.  Knight adequately incorporates the Beetle’s familiar, friendly shape into both rowdy action sequences and the more emotional dramatic scenes to form Bumblebee’s immediately recognizable secondary character.

But Bumblebee’s generally warm demeanor isn’t the prequel’s only appealing upgrade. Where earlier Transformer Movies often objectified its female characters, Bumblebee gives us a young woman who’s smart, vulnerable and nuanced. Some of the strokes in the story are stiff and the awkward shift into action pieces can be shaky but Bumblebee has such obvious fondness for its characters that those shortcomings can mostly be put aside. Who Knew underneath all mechanics and action this franchise cultivated a little heart?