One of the moments I remember most clearly from the slog that is Transformers: The Last Knight comes from Anthony Hopkins. Playing the absurdly serious Sir Edmund Burton, Hopkins explains how a secret society called the Order of the Witwiccans has hidden the existence of Transformers on Earth since the 5th century. He compares them to the Knights of the Round Table, then rattles off historical figures from their ranks with no apparent connection other than the fact that audiences might recognize their names: Leonardo da Vinci. Frederick Douglass. Winston Churchill. Stephen Hawking.
It’s pure word salad bordering on the offensive — and one that could have been improved by throwing in someone like Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift just for fun.
Then director Michael Bay cuts to a photo of Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), the protagonist of the first three films, looking like he was just arrested for peeping through somebody’s window. Even Sam, the hapless and horny teen who lusted after Megan Fox for two movies before forgetting about her entirely, is apparently part of this great Order. An offhand comment confirms that Sam died off-screen, and the movie just breezes right on past it. Minutes later, Burton dies in a ditch. The last thing he hears is his robot butler calling him “the coolest.”
I remember sitting in the theater wondering: Did Sam Witwicky ever actually matter? Why is Mark Wahlberg playing such a toxic father? Were these movies always this bad? What the hell am I doing with my life?
By the time The Last Knight arrived in 2017, the Transformers franchise had become trapped in an endless cycle of escalation. Bigger explosions. Bigger battles. Bigger mythology. Bigger stakes. And smaller human characters. The movies were so busy introducing secret histories and world-ending threats they forgot to make audiences care about the people caught in the middle. The way once-pivotal characters like Mikaela Banes (Fox) and Sam Witwicky are casually discarded made it hard to care about anything.
Then, a year later, a movie about the yellow robot who communicates through FM radio stations actually made Transformers fun again.
Bumblebee, which arrived on Tubi on June 1, remains the best Transformers movie because it knows something the Michael Bay films pretty much always ignored: giant robots only matter when the humans do too.
The movie opens on a breezy, action-packed flashback to Bumblebee’s origin on the planet Cybertron. In the midst of the ongoing war against the Decepticons, the Autobot scout B-127 is sent to Earth to set up a new base of operations. He arrives in 1987 San Francisco, which gives the entire movie a refreshingly retro aesthetic. B-127’s voice box and memory core are damaged in a fight with an enemy Transformer almost right away, so he spends most of the movie as a cute, bumbling giant robot that just so happens to sometimes transform into a 1967 yellow Volkswagen Beetle.
Director Travis Knight very smartly scaled everything down. (Bonus trivia: Knight also directed the newly released Masters of the Universe movie.) The result makes Bumblebee feel less like another Transformers movie and more like E.T. or The Iron Giant — a coming-of-age story about an isolated teenager and the unlikely friendship that changes her life. As I wrote when the film was first released in 2018, it grounded the franchise with a sense of humanity that had been missing for years. (Don’t take my word for it, the movie has a jaw-dropping 91% on Rotten Tomatoes.)
Casting Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie Watson remains one of the smartest decisions anyone has ever made with the franchise. While the Bay films often treat human characters as exposition machines or comic relief, Charlie feels like an actual person. She wakes up one morning with a pimple and frowns in the mirror. She’s grieving the loss of her father, struggling to connect with family, and trying to figure out who she wants to be as she enters adulthood. The fact that she discovers an alien robot in a scrapyard feels like an exciting opportunity for growth. It also helps that Steinfeld is a terrific actor who’s eminently watchable in just about everything she does.
That grounded emotional core gives Bumblebee emotional stakes that actually matter. When Charlie gets hurt, you’re concerned. When she argues with her family, it feels genuine. When Bumblebee is threatened, it matters because of what he means to her. All that stuff about big robots at war feels secondary. You care more about Charlie than you did about entire cities that got destroyed in The Last Knight.
Rest assured, Bumblebee still contains plenty of giant robot action. Big chase sequences. Explosions! Brawls between big Transformers. More explosions! There’s even John Cena playing a military operative obsessed with hunting Bumblebee, barking increasingly ridiculous orders as he becomes convinced a bright-yellow Volkswagen Beetle is a threat to national security. Yet Cena’s deadpan commitment to the bit makes him oddly lovable rather than exhausting, and by the end, the movie even peels back some of his emotional layers to reveal just enough complexity hiding underneath all those big muscles.
Knight understood that spectacle works best when it’s supporting characters rather than replacing them. Even when you position a character like Cena’s Jack Burns as a major source of comedic relief, you can still give him more moral complexity to keep things interesting.
For years, Bumblebee was arguably the most popular Transformer, despite rarely being allowed to function as a character. He was the mascot who cracked jokes through radio snippets while dancing around on-screen, eagerly encouraging children to buy some toys. Yet because this movie isolates Bumblebee as the lone Autobot that gets prominently featured, it’s able to take the time to explore who he is as a person. The movie answers questions fans had been asking for years about his origins, his voice, and even his personality before arriving on Earth.
More importantly, it lets him be funny.
For much of the movie, Bumblebee behaves less like a soldier and more like a giant mechanical puppy. The movie lets Bumblebee be curious, awkward, playful, and occasionally vulnerable. Eight years later, that still feels like a breath of fresh air within an otherwise suffocating franchise. Even Rise of the Beasts, the only live-action Transformers movie released since Bumblebee, couldn’t quite recapture that magic. While it had more warmth and character-focused storytelling than most entries, it ultimately still devolved back into massive battles with world-ending stakes that focused too much on franchise mythology.
Looking back now, what’s most surprising about Bumblebee isn’t that it’s the best Transformers movie — it’s that the formula seems so obvious in retrospect. Take a beloved character. Pair him with a compelling human lead. Tell a smaller story. Develop a bond. Give audiences someone to care about. Then let the robots punch each other.
The Bay films spent years convincing viewers that Transformers needed to become louder and more convoluted with every installment. Bumblebee proved the opposite. It succeeded by remembering what made the franchise appealing in the first place: the friendship between humans and giant alien robots.
Autobots, it’s time to roll out — and fire up Tubi to watch Bumblebee for free.