There’s something a little different about the new Transformers movie, Bumblebee, judging by the debut trailer that hit the web earlier this week. Is it that the sci-fi saga has restored the classic forms some of us just about remember from the 1980s television show? Bumblebee is directed by Kubo and the Two Strings director Travis Knight, rather than Michael Bay, who directed the previous five Transformers films, and the title character is once again based on a friendly-looking Volkswagen Beetle, rather than Bay’s macho Chevy Camaro, while Optimus Prime has the blocky, retro look of the original toy. Or is it that the new film is a prequel set in the 1980s?
While these are important developments, which will hopefully allow Knight to carve out a new direction for the series following Bay’s shift to a producer role, the most noticeable aspect of the new trailer is the way the new female lead Hailee Steinfeld is presented, in comparison to some of her unluckier female forebears.
Steinfeld is 21, the same age Megan Fox was when she appeared as Mikaela Banes in Bay’s first Transformers movie in 2007. Both actors play characters in their late teens, but while Fox spent most of her movie being gleefully leered at by Bay’s cameras – and her replacement Rosie Huntington-Whiteley got it even worse in 2011’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon – Steinfeld has apparently escaped such horrors.
Instead of being an object of desire for the saga’s presumably mostly male and teenage audience, the tomboyish Charlie Watson is presented through a filter borrowed from 1980s teen movies such as Karate Kid, Risky Business and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, each of which also treated cars as an essential part of the coming-of-age process. We can only hope that studio Paramount won’t now be subjected to the kind of backlash suffered by Lucasfilm over its decision to shift the gender balance among Star Wars characters over the past few episodes. Certainly, fans of Bay’s films may be in for a shock when they turn up to the multiplex to find this is a movie about a girl and her robot, rather than a feature-length throwback to the Loaded magazine era.
Some people may wonder if Knight’s vision for the future of the franchise owes something to the change in attitudes since Transformers first hit cinemas. Surely there would be a few eyebrows raised in 2018, were Bay to ask his lead actor to wash his Ferrari by way of a screen test, which is what Fox was reportedly subjected to prior to signing up to Transformers, or demand an actor perform a “runway stomp” for the film-maker and his crew in the middle of the desert while wearing only “a bra and underwear and a big, billowing, black, floor-length cape and high heels”, as happened to Huntington-Whitely?
The truth is that Transformers never really needed sex in the first place – certainly not the leering, lascivious kind served up in the early movies. Bay is the kind of film-maker who could shoehorn boob and bum shots into a big-screen adaptation of The Care Bears. But Transformers, as Bumblebee seems set to prove, looks a lot more comfortable as a PG offering.
Transformers’ core audience does not necessarily need to be horny male teenagers. The toys are not usually found in the adult section of Smyths, and Optimus Prime doesn’t transform into a Rampant Rabbit when you press his helmet. Bay and his ilk may not like it, but it turns out there are times when cinematic infantilisation can be a positive step forward. Especially for a property that was always supposed to be for children in the first place.
This is where Transformers always belonged, sat next to warm-hearted kid-and-their-robot movies such as The Iron Giant and Big Hero Six, not jostling for space in the DVD bargain bin with old copies of Barb Wire and Hardbodies 2. The only question is why Paramount and Bay took so long to work it out.
