'Bumblebee' Clip: 'Bot Brawl! Bumblebee Battles Blitzwing, Baby!

Almost everyone who has seen it seems to agree that Bumblebee is indeed the best Transformers movie (make of that what you will!). Michael Bay is out of the director's chair, and Travis Knight is in. Knight's take on the material is different than Bay's, and that's paid off. Ahead of Bumblebee's impending release, watch a new Bumblebee clip below where Bumblebee brawls with the Decepticon Blitzwing.

Most of the Bumblebee marketing so far has played up the friendship angle between Bumblebee and Hailee Steinfeld's character Charlie. But this clip goes all-out on the action, presenting a kinetic fight scene in which Bumblebee is engaged in a big, sprawling brawl with the evil Blitzwing. While this is still a bit too chaotic for my taste, I do appreciate how much clearer the action is here when compared to the other Transformers films, which had very blurry battles that were hard to make sense of.

What I'm getting at here is that Bumblebee is clearly going to be a vast improvement on the Michael Bay Transformers movies. I know there are plenty of people out there who like Bay's Transformers flicks – they made bajillions of dollars, after all – but they've never been for me. But this might be the first Transformers movie I'm genuinely interested in seeing. Our own Hoai-Tran Bui gave Bumblebee a positive review, praising the film for having a real heart:

Bumblebee feels like the first Transformers movie to understand what the franchise is. No matter how militaristic, and bombastic, and oddly violent the Transformers movies get, at their core, they're still based on a toy line. Unburdened by the convoluted mythology of the Transformers universe, Bumblebee taps into that core and makes a movie for the child in all of us who just wants to know what it's like to become friends with one of the robot action figures we smashed together.

Bumblebee, starring Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz, Jason Drucker, Pamela Adlon, and Stephen Schneider, opens everywhere on December 21.

On the run in the year 1987, Bumblebee finds refuge in a junkyard in a small Californian beach town. Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld), on the cusp of turning 18 and trying to find her place in the world, discovers Bumblebee, battle-scarred and broken. When Charlie revives him, she quickly learns this is no ordinary, yellow VW bug