Movie Review: Bumblebee

Bumblebee (2018) 

Directed by Travis Knight 

Written by Christina Hodson

Starring Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Pamela Adlon, John Ortiz 

Release Date December 21st. 2018 

December 20th, 2018 

Michael Bay did Transformers fans the best possible favor he could do for them by not directing Bumblebee. Bay, who has directed each of the Transformers movies thus far and delivered some of the ugliest and most unwatchable, bad blockbusters of recent memory, stepped aside in favor of director Travis Knight in a move that has single handedly turned this franchise around. Bumblebee is terrific and is the first indication we’ve had that the Transformers could work as a big screen blockbuster. 

(FYI, I don’t care how much money the Transformers movies made, they are all terrible and I hate them, a lot.)

Bumblebee stars Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie, a teenager dealing with the loss of her father and a strained relationship with her mother, Pamela Adlon, who has remarried. Charlie’s love of cars came from her dad and when she fails to fix up a car she and her dad had been working on, she sets her sight upon a broken VW bug at a local junkyard. What she doesn’t know is that her new car is actually the alien robot, Bee-127, a warrior sent to guard the Earth against the evil Decepticons. 

In a prologue, we meet Bee-127 in the midst of a war on his home planet of Cybertron. When the battle appears lost, Bee-127 is sent to Earth to establish a safe landing zone for his fellow Autobots and to keep Earth safe from the Decepticons. Arriving on Earth, Bee is immediately thrust into trouble with members of the military, led by Agent Burns (John Cena). Bee landed in the midst of Burns’ war games in a California forest and was immediately pursued by the military. 

Unfortunately, Bee is also pursued by one of the Decepticons leading to a destructive battle. Bee is eventually left immobilized and taking the shape of the last thing he sees before losing consciousness, an ancient Volkswagen Beetle. That brings us up to date, Bumblebee is set in the 1980’s and well before the action of the Transformers films that precede it. That distance really helps the story and creates a mystery as to Charlie’s fate that lingers throughout the movie. 

One of the many significant failures of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies was the editing which shredded the robot on robot fight scenes into painfully unwatchable catastrophes. The fight scenes in each of the Transformers movies are clattering cacophonies of chaos where you can barely make out what robot is on which side and which one is hitting the other. And then you add the sound which was a punishingly loud mix of awful scoring and metal on metal screeching. 

No such trouble in Bumblebee. By keeping the camera static, for the most part, and keeping the editing at a readable pace, Travis Knight delivers robot on robot fighting that we can see and enjoy as if the robots were remotely real. That’s not to say that Knight reinvented anything, he and his team just appears to have taken more care to craft fight scenes in a fashion that is not offensive to the eyes and ears of the audience. 

Then there are the wonderful characters of Bumblebee. Knight, who broke into the mainstream with the tremendous animated feature Kubo and the Two Strings, takes great pains to give us characters we believe in, sympathize with and care about. Unlike the cartoon figures of the Bay movies who shout and preen and are nearly as unendurable as the fight scenes, Knight’s characters are warm and funny, fully formed human beings with backstories and inner lives we are interested in. 

Hailee Steinfeld is a wonderful young actress who infuses Charlie with a spiky puckishness that is a delight to watch. She’s not saccharine or mopey, she’s a believable teenage girl with agency and strength. You can sense her strength and character from her dialogue and her manner, her care and compassion when Bumblebee is revealed is a lovely character moment. Bay’s Transformers movies have not one single character with the kind of depth or humanity that Charlie exhibits in any one scene in Bumblebee. 

The supporting cast is slightly more broad but not nearly the ugly caricatures that Mr Bay traded on. John Cena brings a forceful energy to his tweener character. Agent Burns is no paper baddie, he has depths to be unveiled. He’s a loyal dedicated and talented soldier and a believable foe for our hero and our heroes true villains, The Decepticons. Cena is also effortlessly funny and charismatic in this role. And, Mr Cena gets the film’s biggest laugh with a reference to the name ‘Decepticons.’ 

Bumblebee isn’t perfect, the opening few minutes on Cybertron rush by a little and have a slightly awkward vibe. But, once Steinfeld’s Charlie is introduced the film improves immeasurably. The character of Bumblebee becomes whole in interacting with Charlie. Acting like a giant alien robot puppy, Bumblebee exhibits vulnerability and strength in equal measure. Where Mr Bay reduced Bumblebee many times to a gag delivery machine, Knight makes Bumblebee a character and quite a good one. 

The biggest difference in Bumblebee and the Transformers of Michael Bay is Travis Knight’s attention to detail. This attention to detail emerges in small, seemingly unimportant moments that take on meaning once you consider how those moments are lacking from the other Transformers movies. The ending is especially rich with attention to detail with a rearview mirror shot that is surprisingly emotional. 

I adore Bumblebee. This movie ranks behind only Black Panther as my favorite blockbuster of the year. This movie is fun, it’s hilarious and it is exciting. Most importantly, it’s the first time I have been able to enjoy the Transformers on the big screen. I was never deeply offended, I didn’t feel like the movie was actively hateful toward the audience and, when I walked out, my eyes and ears didn’t hurt. That alone could have made me admire Bumblebee, but Travis Knight made me genuinely enjoy Bumblebee.

Movie Review Replicas

Replicas (2019) 

Directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff 

Written by Chad St. John

Starring Keanu Reeves, Thomas Middleditch, Alice Eve, John Ortiz

Release Date January 11th, 2019

Published January 11th, 2019

Replicas isn’t as bad as I assumed it would be. Instead, Replicas are just bad in a more bland and general fashion. Where I have spent the last couple of days praising Keanu Reeves’ blank slate approach to being an action hero, here that blankness is more dead eyed and bored. Reeves isn’t holding back to give the audience an avatar, he’s checked out in the way that big time actors can tend to check out when they are just collecting a paycheck.

In Replicas, Keanu Reeves stars as Bill, a big shot scientist attempting to copy a human mind into a computer. We watch as a dead body arrives having only died hours before. This dead man volunteered to have his brain mapped and attempted to be copied and put into a robot. Unfortunately, the man’s mind rejects the robot body, even going so far as to try and punch its own mind out.

With this failure it appears that Bill might lose his job and the company itself may go out of business according to Bill’s boss, Jones (John Ortiz). Meanwhile, Bill is leaving on vacation that same day. Bill’s family are going to take out a boat owned by Bill’s co-worker Ed (Thomas Middleditch) but unfortunately, on the way to the boat, Bill and his family are in a car wreck that kills Bill’s wife (Alice Eve) and their three children.

Devastated in the immediate aftermath of the accident, Bill doesn’t contact the authorities. Instead, he calls Ed and has him bring his brain mapping equipment. Bill then sets about copying the minds of his wife and children as he did the dead man in his experiment. You might assume from this that he is going to make robot copies of his family, given that is what has been introduced already but you would be wrong.

Turns out, Ed is an expert in cloning and Bill wants Ed to clone his dead family. The two then set about stealing 4 million dollars worth of company property and taking three cloning pods and various genetic materials to Bill’s home. They do this despite the security protocols the script setup prior to this scene. Ed tells Bill that in 17 days, if all goes well, he will have three members of his family back but it will be up to him to choose which three and whether he can give them the memories and personalities they once had.

Have you got all of that nonsense because the film is so convoluted you might need to take notes. And yet, the film is equally as empty headed as it is overcomplicated. Keanu Reeves could not possibly care less about this movie. Take for instance the car wreck aftermath scenes. Keanu reacts to the death of his family with the same level of concern one might have for being cut off in traffic, he appears aggravated with a touch of confusion.

Middleditch meanwhile has exactly zero chemistry with Reeves despite the two apparently being close friends, according to the script. Middleditch is a mess of tics and awkward attempts at humor and while it is similar to his work on HBO’s Silicon Valley it doesn’t fit the serious tone cultivated by director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, a television veteran whose only other feature was the similarly sedate and confused Traitor in 2008.

Nachmanoff also wrote the screenplay for the similarly overstuffed The Day After Tomorrow. Much like that film, Replicas is a jumble of competing ideas. We start with a robot and then leap over to cloning. The cloning is relatively meaningless as it only leads to a series of action movie confrontations and a chase scene. The clones wind up being a plot driver but there is little consequence to the clones as characters.

Alice Eve is completely wasted in the role of wife and clone wife. The young star who made a strong impression in Star Trek a few years ago has almost zero presence in Replicas. You might expect from this premise that the clones would have a sinister air, perhaps a Twilight Zone like consequence, but no, they’re just perfect copies of Bill’s family, minus his young daughter because he only had three pods.

The film tries to mine some depth from Bill erasing his youngest daughter from the clones’ memories but Keanu Reeves can’t be bothered to express any genuine angst over this development and thus we don’t care much either. Much like how he reacted to the death of his family, Reeves’ Bill appears mildly befuddled by the decision to erase his daughter. Then, with no build up or drama, he eventually just tells his wife she’s a clone and that he erased their daughter. What should have been an important moment plays like Bill admitting he was the one who ate the last of pudding pops.

Replicas are really dopey but, to be fair, I was expecting a trainwreck. The film’s trailer and marketing campaign made the film appear to be something akin to a Tommy Wiseau movie, minus the charm. Keanu Reeves is bored, Thomas Middleditch is irksome and Alice Eve is absent. Replicas are forgettably bad, just competent enough for it to slip your memory just as quickly as you leave the theater.