Bumblebee's Biggest Hurdle May Be Rewriting Transformers Movie History

We're just gonna come out and say it: Bumblebee looks great. The first ever live-action Transformers spinoff, releasing on Dec. 21 and directed by Travis Knight, looks from its trailers and promotional photos to finally be the live-action version of the immortal robots in disguise fans have been wanting years for.

But in their collective joy and immediate rush to praise the film for apparently being what they wanted all along, TFans might be asking themselves questions about just when and where this movie is supposed to take place.

Granted, the film's promoted as taking place in the '80s and John Cena's character, Burns, has been listed as an agent of Sector 7, the organization set up in the very first Transformers film as the division of the U.S. government specifically tasked with investigating Cybertronian stuff on Earth. However, the film's new robot designs seem to counteract that.

Granted, the ever-changing nature of the Transformers is part of their appeal, but it has been established in other Transformers canons that to change one's robot mode wholesale (rather than an alternate mode, which can be changed with a simple scan) is a fairly intense procedure.

To give an example, in the IDW Transformers comics, Starscream was rebuilt into a new body at the start of the Dark Cybertron event and was shown having to familiarize himself with it rather than instantly adapting (said body was that of a then-newly released toy of another version of Starscream, because the entire point of all Transformers fiction is to sell toys).

And that's the main thing that frustrates while watching the Bumblebee trailers, no matter how great they are (and to be clear, they're very great). Why, after five movies of designs based on the principle of -- to paraphrase Pablo Hidalgo's extensive 2011 book Transformers Vault -- giant beings with extensively detailed, constantly shifting biology, do all of these robots look like other incarnations of their Generation One selves?

The real-world answer is, of course, because Knight and his production team wanted to do something aesthetically different from the Michael Bay films. And to be fair to those films, the robot designs have been updated for each one. But, in the canon of these movies, it's the size that's the biggest issue.

In all the other movies, each Autobot and Decepticon has been building-sized, physically towering over the majority of the scenes they're in. If they weren't, how could this gem from the first movie have happened?

But in the prequel world of Bumblebee, everyone's favorite yellow pal is barely taller than a person. While that's unquestionably adorable (and closer to other depictions of the character), the thought persists: How did Bee go from a cute little round ball here to the giant we've seen in all the other films?

One wonders if Bumblebee will undergo either some kind of trauma -- possibly at the hands of Decepticons Blitzwing (David Sobolov), Shatter (Angela Bassett) and Dropkick (Justin Theroux) -- or be forced into hiding after the events of the movie. We already know from promotional material that he starts the film as a jeep and ends it as a VW Beetle, which is the form he has at the start of the 2007 movie. Perhaps he got rebuilt to be much larger for his own self defense?

All the other familiar robots glimpsed in the trailers -- Optimus Prime and Shockwave, for example -- also look like their G1 counterparts. Again, it's obviously purely for aesthetic reasons. But, in the past Bumblebee is showing us, maybe those are their proper original forms?

Maybe, given that Cybertron is a long-dead husk by the time the first Transformers film was released, the sharp, jagged robot forms we're used to from the other movies had to be adopted to help them survive in the threatening cosmos?

This is most definitely reading way too much into a simple aesthetic decision, but this sort of No-Prize thinking has entertained TFans for decades and it's fun to indulge every once in a while. And who knows? Maybe some of it will turn out to be true.

Directed by Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) from a script by Christina Hodson, Bumblebee stars Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Pamela Adlon, Jason Drucker, Abby Quinn, Rachel Crow, Ricardo Hoyos and Gracie Dzienny. The film arrives Dec. 21.