‘Bumblebee’ Receives Rave Reviews and Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score

Bumblebee
Though the Transformers franchise has been a dependable box office success for Paramount, it’s never been a critical success. Until now. The first reviews for Bumblebee hit over the weekend and it sounds like director Travis Knight has managed to not only breath new life into the series, but to take it to greater heights than ever before.

 

Bumblebee isn’t just the first movie in the franchise to be certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, it debuted as 100% fresh based on the first fourteen (now seventeen) reviews posted to the site. That’s an amazing turn around for the franchise which looked to be running out of steam following last year’s The Last Knight.

 

 

 

Taking the series back to the eighties, the height of the original Transformers popularity, and focusing in on a single character rather than world ending events proves to be exactly what the franchise needed. “Though [Michael Bay] should certainly be credited for proving that a Hasbro toy line could support a massive global franchise, Bumblebee is basically the movie that fans of the 1980s animated series wanted all along” wrote Peter Deburge for Variety.

 

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Justin Lowe agreed; “By taking the Transformers universe in a new, more intimate character-driven direction, screenwriter Christina Hodson plays directly to the franchise’s roots. Skillfully shaping what’s essentially a coming-of-age story for both Charlie and Bumbleebee, Hodson layers in the sense of wonder and discovery that effectively recaptures the innovation and energy of the 2007 original. It’s an effective reimagining that also bears a knowing resemblance to classic youth-oriented films from Bumblebee executive producer Steven Spielberg.”

 

Lowe wasn’t the only one to bring up the Spielberg comparison. The majority of the reviews so far also note Spielberg’s influence. As Empire‘s James Dyer says, “Spielberg’s DNA feels baked into Bumblebee, resulting in an ’80s movie not just in setting and aesthetic but also sensibility – a high-octane concept Transformed into an Amblin love letter.”

 

 

The cast are praised throughout the reviews, with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Justin Lowe saying that, as Charlie, Hailee Steinfeld “draws on previous roles in both drama and comedy, shading her performance with infectious enthusiasm and an appropriate dash of evolving maturity.”

 

“Dropkick (Justin Theroux) and Shatter (Angela Bassett”) embrace their roles as sneering antagonists, despatching civilians with insouciant sadism,” writes Empire‘s James Dyer, “but it’s John Cena, as walking side of beef Agent Burns, who proves the most flat-out enjoyable, hurling macho epithets as all ’80s villains should.”

 

The special effects sound as good as you’d expect in a blockbuster such as this. IGN‘s Jim Vejvoda notes that the transformations look better than ever; “Thanks to a cleaner stylistic redesign that more closely resembles the original Transformers cartoon characters, each ‘bot is more distinctive (especially during the fight scenes) than they sometimes were in the Bay films – you can actually appreciate the transformations here without them devolving into digital blurs of a million moving parts, and you get an idea at a glance what vehicle a given robot might transform into.”

 

From these initial reviews it certainly sounds like this is the course correction that the franchise needed. As The Guardian‘s Phil Hoad notes, “In a better, truer cinematic universe, Travis Knight would have been in charge of the Transformers franchise all along.”

 

Bumblebee hits cinemas December 21st.