Bumblebee - Bayformers prequel

As the owner of a yellow Camaro with transformer badges I’m afraid I have to boycott this movie. :-/

I prefer a Bug over a Camero.

I remember that one of the robots had metal balls. That’s all I remember from the movies. Does he have big metal balls?

Took my 11yo son to see it this morning and we both liked it well enough. Definitely benefited from not having Michael Bay involved: no gratuitous crotch/ass shots, no Cade Yaeger, no creepy sexual innuendo, no stupid parental hijinks, better action sequences where you could actually see what was going on, and overall a pretty strong E.T./80s movie vibe, which was baked in.

I watched this yesterday in 3D - it’s definitely a huge improvement over the Michael Bay movies and I much preferred the newer 3D designs over the old.

A few random thoughts on the movie itself…

  • The 3D doesn’t add anything to the movie
  • The mix of 80’s camp and the action scenes didn’t seem to mix very well, although each scene in by itself was fine.
  • I still have no idea what kind of damage causes transformers to actually blow up vs reflect off harmlessly.

Transformers are fine until their plot armor runs out.

It’s good. Criminal lack of Transformers Movie music though, and they totally could’ve used more than just the Touch for a few seconds.

It looks like Bumblebee and Into the Spiderverse are the two movies this holiday season with the best reviews.

My brother was supposed to come visit from Portland, OR this week though, but he was too sick. He is supposed to come next week, but I don’t know if he’ll be well enough for us to sneak off to the movies together or not.

One thing I forgot to mention is that it’s no longer a prequel, it’s pretty incompatible with the previous movies timeline.

I saw this over the weekend. Not bad.

It was written by Christina Hodson, who has only written a couple of movies before this one (neither of which I’ve seen). And directed by Travis Knight, who has directed an animated movie that I haven’t seen yet.

Not bad for a couple of newcomers who were handed the keys to a big franchise I guess. I felt the opening of the movie (which takes place on Cybertron) was a bit of a misstep. But I say that as someone who doesn’t like the Bay Transformer movies. The object of that setup was obviously to pull in the Transformers fans. The movie really settled into a good place when it became about Charlie, a girl who is looking for freedom from her family, who is still grieving over the death of her father. That stuff was really great.

I was really impressed that unlike the Transformer movies of yore, Bumblebee for the most part actually talks by playing actual songs. It’s only at the end of the movie that he’s magically able to find clips of all the words he wants to say, which is as stupid as it always was.

Charlie is a great character, and I was really glad that even at the end, the movie resisted the temptation to do some kind of giant battle with transformers that ignores Charlie and her role.

So good stuff. I look forward to more movies from Ms Hodson and Mr. Knight.

Finally managed to pick this from my Prime backlog and I found it to be… charming?

Had its heart in the right place. And for the first time, the transformers themselves as well as the action was, you know, readable and not a confusing mess. And that’s not down to there just being three of them for most of the movie - the Cybertron scenes were easy to follow as well. Also, the movie managed to have an ensemble of likeable characters whereas the Bay ones largely consist of insufferable caricatures who shout most of their lines and are only tolerable if they can chew the scenery the way Stanley Tucci does.