Bumblebee

Bumblebee
"You've got people out there that need you. And so do I."
Genre: SF Action Directed by: Travis Knight Produced by: Lorenzo di Bonaventura Tom DeSanto Don Murphy Michael Bay Mark Vahradian Written by: Christina Hodson Based on: Transformers by Hasbro Starring: Hailee Steinfeld John Cena Jorge Lendeborg Jr. John Ortiz Jason Drucker Pamela Adlon Editing: Paul Rubell Music by: Dario Marianelli Production company: Allspark Pictures Di Bonaventura Pictures Bay Films Tencent Pictures Distributed by: Paramount Pictures Release date: December 21, 2018 Runtime: 114 minutes Country: United States China Language: English Budget: $102–135 million Box office: $468 million Franchise: Transformers Prequel: Transformers: The Last Knight (Release) Transformers One (Chronologically) Sequel: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

Bumblebee is a 2018 science fiction action film based on the Hasbro and Takara Tomy's Transformers toy line character of the same name. It is the sixth installment in the Transformers film series, serving as a spin-off and prequel to the 2007 film.

Why Bumblebee is Back to Life

1. It is a HUGE improvement over all of the Michael Bay sequels, particularly Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight.
   • Out of all the live-action Transformers movies, it is the only installment to be classified as "fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, holding a well-earned 90% approval rating.
   • Thankfully, Michael Bay did not direct this movie, instead serving only as producer from now on, starting with this film.
2. Provides a great origin story for Bumblebee, showing how he came to Earth, how he lost his ability to speak, and eventually regained it.
3. The scenes and flashbacks to the war on Cybertron are intense and very visually well-done.
   • Speaking of which, the opening scene that shows a Cybertron fight scene and the Transformers having their G1 designs in live action form is absolutely amazing and it's no doubt a love letter for fans of the original series.
4. Pays a lot of neat homages to movies, TV shows, and music from the 1980s.
5. Every song used in the film, thanks to modern audio remastering, sounds infinitely better than their initial releases, especially in premium format theaters as well as on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray with Dolby Atmos.
6. Having only three Transformers (Bumblebee plus two Decepticons; Shatter and Dropkick) for most of the storyline allows for the three that we see to be given much more personality and character development than the Transformers typically got in the live-action movies. Even other Transformers that appear for short amounts of time, especially Optimus Prime, are characterized much better than in previous films.
7. Speaking of Bumblebee, he's even cuter and funnier than he was in previous films.
8. Unlike the main protagonist in Michael Bay's Transformers movies, Charlie is a very likable and endearing lead character, and her friendship with Memo is pretty cute, showing that it is possible to have a Transformers film focus on the human characters and actually work.
9. Good acting and performances, especially from Hailee Steinfeld (best known for playing as Kate Bishop in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Dylan O'Brien, Angela Bassett (best known for playing Queen Ramonda in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), Justin Theroux, and Jason Drucker.
   • For Jason Drucker, his performance as Otis, Charlie's brother, is an absolute improvement over Greg Heffley from Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul.
10. Agent Burns (John Cena) initially starts out looking like your typical military jock, but eventually shows himself to be a reasonable man who eventually helps defeat the Decepticons.
11. Some great bits of humor, particularly when Charlie, Memo, and Bumblebee play a prank on a girl who's been bullying Charlie.
12. The action sequences, while a little is more understated than the earlier Transformers films, are still visually stunning for the most part and actually easy to follow.
13. The film ditches the increasingly dark, near-apocalyptic scenarios that the previous films were centered around and is noticeably far more lighthearted in comparison.
14. Excellent direction of Travis Knight, who has worked as the lead animator for stop-motion animation studio Laika, the same director behind Kubo and the Two Strings.
    • He made the movie feel like a breath of fresh air with a sense of wonder.
15. The plot is different than other rehashed Transformers sequel directed by Michael Bay since you don't need to watch other sequels, especially fifth, as the newcomers are interested in what they might be.
16. Dario Marianelli provided the amazing musical score for the film, who previously scored Knight's Kubo and the Two Strings, making this the first time Steve Jablonsky has not scored one of the films in the franchise.
17. This is the perfect example of the nostalgic pandering done right, since many movies have overused of nostalgic pandering (regarding if its good or bad).
18. Great cinematography.

Bad Qualities

1. It's never explained how or why one of the Decepticons managed to beat Bumblebee to Earth, or why the other Decepticons are initially oblivious to the fact that one of their numbers was ever on the planet.
2. Most of the Decepticons speak like the generic emotionless robot accent, which can be boring.
3. The visual effects, while generally pretty awesome, are noticeably cheaper in places compared to those of the five Michael Bay-directed films.
4. For some reason they incorporated a rather disgusting effect for when the Decepticons vaporize humans into colorless, transparent slime, as opposed to the effect used in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which just reduced the humans to dust.
5. It still has unlikeable characters with Tripp Summers and Tina Lark (Charlie Watson's rival) being the worst offenders. Charlie's mother is also a pretty annoying and unlikable character, almost to the same extent as Sam Witwicky's mother from the first three Transformers films.

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