How Bumblebee Finally Did Justice to the Transformers
The Big Picture
- Michael Bay's Transformers films focused more on human stories, with the Cybertronian robots serving as secondary characters.
- The films framed the robotic conflict around how it affected Earth and its human inhabitants, portraying the Transformers as "the other" and emphasizing their alien nature.
- Bumblebee, however, shifted the focus back to the Transformers themselves, giving them more depth and making them the stars of the film. The Autobot-centric story allowed for a greater exploration of their motivations and characterizations.
Michael Bay’s explosively chaotic Transformers films introduced a new generation to Hasbro’s iconic robots in disguise. Spanning the original film and its four sequels (Revenge of the Fallen, Dark of the Moon, Age of Extinction, and The Last Knight), the war between the Autobots and the Decepticons was fought in high-octane, visual effects splendor across cities, deserts and everywhere in between. Although the titular metallic titans were prominently featured in all five films in a series built around their presence, the films seldom presented them as the core main characters of their own story.
Transformers Movies Mostly Focused on the Humans
On the whole, Michael Bay’s Transformers films are human stories. In each of the films, the cast of Cybertronian robots was ancillary to the human cast and their narrative. Whether it was Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), or Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), the films were built around the audience latching on to the dramas and relationships from a human focal point, putting the robotic conflict as secondary to the emotional core of the flesh-and-blood human cast of Earthling civilians and military men. Thematically, the first three films were more about Sam Witwicky’s journey into adulthood and his romances than it was about the interstellar robot war.
All five films also framed the Cybertronian war around how the battle shaped Earth’s history and how humans responded to it, via underground conspiracies and loads of U.S. military involvement. More attention was often given to political espionage and military defense protocol than developing the backstory of the war or any of the Transformers’ personalities as their own characters. Whatever developments made between the Autobot/Decepticon conflict were presented as story beats for the human characters. When Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) temporarily dies in Revenge of the Fallen, more screen time was dedicated to how Witwicky’s friends and the human soldiers reacted to it over Prime’s own fellow bots. Fundamentally, the human cast carried the films in story and character while the CGI robots provided the spectacle.
While under the lens of the film’s human perspective, the Transformers were heavily framed as "the other." Alien lifeforms have long signified the unfamiliar “other” in the science-fiction and science-fantasy genres, but how the Autobots and Decepticons were depicted in Bay’s films demonstrated different approaches to the trend. Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, and the rest of the Autobots were depicted as “badass” otherworldly oddities because of what they were, not who they were. Scenes of the Autobots transforming and engaging in battle put the spectacle of their mechanized CGI alien nature over the emotion of what they were feeling or who they are. The Decepticons pushed the “otherness” of the Transformers even further by being largely portrayed as rampaging monsters and henchmen with more inhuman features and speaking in an alien tongue, as opposed to the approachable and humanistic Autobots.
'Bumblebee' Makes the Transformers the Stars
Unlike most other iterations of the franchise, the stories of the Bay films never truly belonged to the Transformers themselves as they were supplanted by their human counterparts. However, the 2018 soft-reboot Bumblebee delivered the screen back into the cybernetic hands of the should-be robotic stars.
Directed by Laika Studios head and Kubo and the Two Strings director TravisKnight, Bumblebee pitches itself as a prequel to the original 2007 film, but veers into its own direction as a veritable overhaul of the franchise. The film follows Autobot soldier B-127, later known as Bumblebee, as he flees Cybertron for a special mission under the orders of Optimus Prime. Along the way, he befriends Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld) and defends the Earth from a duo of deadly Decepticon enforcers.
Bumblebee melds elements of the Bay films’ characters and lore as connective tissue to what came before for continuity, but is presented in not only a drastically different tone and voice that favors sentimentality and charm over gratuitous “Bayhem," but also a greater focus on the Autobots and Decepticons as principal characters. Along with featuring designs and characterizations true to the franchise’s roots, Bumblebee is unmistakably the story of Bumblebee and the Transformers.
The film opens on Cybertron during a pivotal moment of the war where, like in the original 1984 animated series, the Autobots must escape their home world after it has become fully overthrown by the Decepticon menace. Bumblebee is sent to scout ahead for a possible new home for his team, where he is met with opposition in the form of the military and a Decepticon spy. In these first moments, the film positions Bumblebee’s story and the urgency of his mission as the plot's most pressing focus. His motivations and the stakes of his mission are made clear almost immediately and are what launch the story forward from every angle with him as the lead.
It is Bumblebee’s point of view on which the film latches onto and who the story’s core conflict is centered around. Although Steinfeld fills the human audience surrogate in the same vein as LaBeouf or Wahlberg, her presence does not supersede Bumblebee’s story and instead serves in support of the emotional core of his journey, not the other way around.
The Combinations of Humans and Transformers Works Better in 'Bumblebee'
Shifting from the primary human focus from the Bay films to the Autobot-centric Bumblebee also changes the extent to which the Transformers’ “otherness” as aliens is portrayed. In still sharing the screen with human co-stars and primarily taking place on Earth, the Transformers are still invariably seen as alien life forms in contrast, but the cross-species dynamics and characterizations prioritize the hearts and minds behind the machinery.
The spectacle of Bumblebee as a character is derived from his inquisitive nature, his endearing innocence, and his sense of justice as he grows an attachment to Watson as her guardian. The film marvels at what Bumblebee does in his environment and who he is as he learns more about life on Earth, making him a fish-out-of-water in behavior, not just in appearance or otherworldly status. The Bay films accomplished this too and even with the same character, but largely kept his alien nature to the spectacle of how he behaved and the pop culture references he made, and not why.
The Decepticons, who were almost animalistic in the Bay films, were also given a more methodical and devious presence that is identifiably human. Dropkick and Shatter, voiced by Justin Theroux and Angela Bassett, took advantage of their human collaborators’ interest in them as alien “others” as they betrayed their trust in order to achieve their goals, giving them an evil that is rooted more in character and intent than as alien monstrosities.
As characters, the Bay Transformers films have done a disservice to Hasbro’s action-figure icons, but Bumblebee’s approach to treating the Autobots and Decepticons as fully-active agents in their own story as opposed to just CGI sidekicks has their narrative presence richer and more than meets the eye compared to what came prior. The Transformers have always been about being more than meets the eye, and with Bumblebee, audiences finally got to see
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