Movies Third 'Transformers' Is Processed Moon Pie Movies inspired by toys tend to crack like cheap plastic under too much weight.

Bumblebee seems to have more of a family-friendly mandate than Bay's Transformers movies, but the lightness and earnestness serves the material well. Gone also is the leering, dorm-room poster sexuality, replaced by a notably chaste teen romance that doesn't get past first base. Gone is the Bay's risible mix of mythology and militarism, replaced by simplified conflict and an emphasis on the friendship between an outcast and an exile. Though Bay has stayed on as producer, director Travis Knight, who made the wonderful Laika animated film Kubo and the Two Strings, and his screenwriter, Christina Hodson, almost make a point of crumpling up his vision and tossing in the waste basket. It does better than that, imbuing the commercial cynicism of a Hasbro product with the borrowed warmth of E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, Splash, and a soundtrack so chock-a-block with '80s favorites that it gets from The Smiths to Steve Winwood in a hummingbird's sneeze. There's really no scientific expression for how low Michael Bay's five previous Transformers movies have set the bar, but it's not enough to praise Bumblebee, the diverting new spin-off/prequel, for basic visual coherence or evidence of identifiable human emotion.

Mankind has split the atom, sent a man to the moon, and now, in arguably its most unlikely achievement, it has produced a watchable Transformers movie. Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld) and Bumblebee (as himself) are more than meets the eye in Bumblebee.

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