BUMBLEBEE - See, was that so hard?

Well, Merry Cussing Christmas to us - there's finally a good Transformers movie!

Took 'em long enough.

For a good while, I was trying to precisely enumerate my feelings on Travis Knight's Bumblebee, and after a day or so, I landed on "What if J.J. Abrams had directed the 2007 Transformers movie, instead of Michael Bay?" Now, this is meant as a compliment, but as anyone who's seen Super 8 or The Force Awakens can tell you, Abrams is no stranger to sprinkling genre adventures with a generous helping of nostalgia. However, where Bumblebee becomes more than the sum of its familiar parts is in both the highly functional script by Christina Hodson (with reported rewrites by The Edge of Seventeen writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig) and the sure-handed and affectionate direction by Kubo and the Two Strings' Knight.

After a rousing intro establishing the Cybertron Civil War between the Autobots and the Decepticons (three guesses which ones are the baddies) and the heroic Bumblebee crash-landing on 1980's-era Earth and suffering memory damage, we are introduced to Hailee Steinfeld's Charlie Watson. Knight and company make her immediately sympathetic to the audience, so that when the gear-headed, scooter-riding, Smiths fan breaks into an air drum solo while brushing her teeth, the audience is already ride-or-die for her and her robot buddy. The film is so good at utilizing its characters, from John Cena's "Definitely not Duke from G.I. Joe" to George Lendeborg Jr.'s awkward boy-next-door Memo to Charlie's initially grating (but eventually endearing) family that it's easy to overlook the handful of scenes that are obviously trimmed just a bit too close to the bone.

The story chiefly concerns Charlie needing to repair Bumblebee in order to access a message from Autobot leader Optimus Prime while Bumblebee helps her to heal from the pain of recently losing her father. There's also a running B-story of pursuit both by the government as well as Decepticons intent on using Bumblebee to lead them to his leader. If you're reminded of E.T. or Brad Bird's The Iron Giant. . . well, if you're going to crib from "a kid and their space friend" stories, you may as well draw from the best ones. You can almost set your digital watch by when certain character details will come up in Act 3 as Climactic Story Beats - but that's a feature, not a bug. If you look closely, you can see where certain characters were likely afforded more backstory or possible connections to the Bay Transformers movies, before course changes during production, but it never manages to break the narrative or make the characters seem inconsistent.

Likewise, the references to the decade in the form of goofy brands, familiar films, various needle drops, and even structural tropes borrowed from '80s classics, range from mere background to earnestly celebratory rather than crass or self-indulgent. If you found Ready Player One exhausting, this isn't nearly as rapid-fire in its pop-culture name-checking. Bumblebee is just as eager to slow itself down so Steinfeld can have a heart-to-heart conversation with a CGI shape-shifting robot as it is to have a wacky chase or a combustive robot right, and is equally adept at both.

It would be tempting to both sing the praises for this film and then easily dismiss them just because it finally does a lot of surface things that the previous movies in the franchise have been, shall we say, resistant to. Yes, the more "classical" designs for the robots and the period flourishes and the fact that the characters actually seem to like each other rather than all being misanthropic, hateful murderers, "thank goodness it's not actively hateful!" could be hand-waved as faint praise indeed. But that would sell the film's genuine quality short. It's no great achievement in singular artistic expression or medium-defining pop masterpiece like a couple other studio blockbusters we've had this year, but it's a highly enjoyable and structurally solid family adventure that is intimate rather than overblown and celebrates its source material rather than actively despising it.

After all, since they'll be making movies in this franchise until after we're all dead, we may as well make the most of the ones that are actually worth seeing.