Every Plot Hole Bumblebee Makes With Michael Bay’s Transformers Films

Warning: SPOILERS Below For Bumblebee!

Bumblebee creates a number of plot holes that don’t synch up with Michael Bay’s Transformers movies. Directed by Travis Knight, Bumblebee is set in 1987, twenty years before the events of Bay’s original Transformers. While it’s focused on the relationship between Bee and a teenage girl named Charlie Watson (Academy Award-nominee Hailee Steinfeld), the prequel does feature a number of Autobots and Deceptions and it seems to set up the events of Bay’s saga – or does it?

As a prequel that also doubles as a soft reboot, Bumblebee both does and doesn’t adhere to what fans saw in the five previous Transformers films which are set decades later but also contain flashbacks establishing a great deal of Transformers history. The very fact that the robots are all in their Generation-1 designs immediately contradicts how the Transformers looked both in the past and present time periods in Bay’s films.

Related: Every Transformers Film Ranked (Including Bumblebee)

And yet, Bumblebee does take pains to not disrupt other aspects of Bay’s films and sets up some key plot points of the first Transformers (while still ignoring others). The result is a strange muddle where Bumblebee sometimes sticks what was seen in the prior films while also diverging completely at other points. Bumblebee also sets up a possible new direction for the Transformers franchise (that could involve a shared universe with other Hasbro properties like G.I. Joe and M.A.S.K.), but it still tries to synch up with Bay’s films, creating confusion.

Given how Bumblebee ends (and sets up Bay’s first Transformers), the events from 2007 onwards in the films about Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and Cade Yaeger (Mark Wahlberg) could still happen as fans saw (although much of it is tied to the ancient Transformers history that could now be altered). Until Bumblebee‘s sequels provide answers as to what does and doesn’t remain canon, here are all the plot holes Bumblebee creates with Michael Bay’s Transformers:

• This Page: Plot Holes With Transformers History
• Page 2: Plot Holes With The Future Events of The Transformers Movies

The Transformers Don’t Have A Secret Earth History In Bumblebee

Every Michael Bay film showed flashbacks that the Transformers have been visiting Earth for millions of years, while Transformers: The Last Knight went all-out and revealed the Earth itself is actually Unicron, the ancient enemy of Cybertron. Bumblebee didn’t address any of the secret history of the Transformers; in fact, when he evacuated the Autobots from Cybertron at the start of the film, Optimus Prime indicated Earth was a planet he’d just found and dispatched Bumblebee to protect it until the rest of the Autobots arrived.

If Earth is a new discovery for the Transformers – and the main Decepticons in the film, Blitzwing, Shatter, and Dropkick all acted like they’d never been to this planet before – then the complex history Bay’s movies established may no longer apply in this rebooted continuity. This includes the Creators seeding the Earth with Transformium 65 million years ago, the Fallen and the Decepticons hiding the Sun Harvester on Earth in 17,000 B.C., the 12 Knights that formed Dragonstorm helping Merlin and King Arthur beat the Saxons in 484 A.D., and the Ark crashing on the Moon in 1961, which contained Sentinel Prime and the Pillars for the Space Bridge. And if there’s no secret Transformers history to catalog and preserve, then the Order of the Witwiccans may never have been formed.

Bumblebee Didn’t Fight Nazis In World War II

Another plot hole involving Transformers: The Last Knight is that Bumblebee is supposed to have been on Earth since World War II. Then known as ZB-7, Bee fought for the Allies alongside a vicious military unit called the Devil’s Brigade and he slaughtered his share of Nazis. However, Bumblebee makes no mention of any of this.

Related: Transformers 5 Easter Eggs And Secrets

When we meet the yellow Autobot in Bumblebee, it’s 1987 and he’s on Cybertron fighting alongside Optimus Prime’s Autobot Resistance under the designation B-127. When Prime sends him to Earth, B-127 doesn’t behave as if he’s been to our planet before, knows the people and terrain, or has allies he can call upon. That said, Bee does suffer a Memory Core Critical Failure while fighting Blitzwing before he hides as a Volkswagen Beetle and meets Charlie Watson some time later. Until his memory core was repaired, Bumblebee’s lack of knowledge of Earth and humans makes it possible that Bee has been on Earth before and his World War II history is still canon. However, what’s shown in Bumblebee still doesn’t quite synch up with what Transformers 5 established.

Cybertron Is Different

In Bumblebee, Cybertron resembles how it appeared in the Generation-1 cartoons, which should please longtime Transformers fans. However, the “new” Cyberton contradicts nearly everything in Michael Bay’s films. Not only do Cybertron and the Transformers themselves look entirely different from how they appeared in Bay’s films, it raises the question of whether the history of the planet Bay established still applies.

Since the smaller scale of Bumblebee centers on his relationship with Charlie, with the Autobot vs. Decepticon war as a backdrop, it’s understandable that Bumblebee purposely doesn’t deal with the details of Cybertron’s complex history. There’s no mention of Quintessa, one of the Transformers’ Creators, or the AllSpark Cube, for example. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the established movie history no longer applies, but Bumblebee sequels could mean even more changes to the significant retcon fans have already been shown.

Page 2 of 2: Bumblebee’s Plot Holes With Future Events Of The Transformers Movies

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