No spoilers: I saw Bumblebee.

[camwyn]

Went to see the sneak preview of Bumblebee on Saturday.

Thank you, Travis Knight and Christina Hodson. This movie is vastly better than TF2 and TF3. (I really liked the first Michael Bay movie, I admit, but others' mileage may vary.) It feels like an Eighties Movie, complete with Eighties Teenager Issues and Eighties Teenager Tropes and Eighties Giant Robots behaving the way aliens in Eighties movies do. Nobody was obnoxious enough to make me cringe. *eyes Judy Witwicky*

The robots had actual recognizably distinct personalities. The robots are all visually recognizable instead of looking like piles of broken shovels.

The action sequences weren't quite as frequent as I would have liked, but they were present and decent, and unlike the first three movies, I didn't tie my optic nerves in knots trying and failing to follow them.

Angela Bassett makes a hell of a Decepticon. John Cena is an eminently respectable Sector 7 soldier and has some funny lines. The human lead character has a good actress and the comic relief family members aren't overblown about it.

There are one hundred per cent more female-voiced Autobots in this movie than there were in the first three. (Which is to say, there is one, Arcee. With an actual line, rather than a sexy sexy human hologram that smolders at the camera without speaking. I won't complain about how little screen time she got because she got the same amount as Ratchet and Wheeljack.)

I miss the Steve Jablonsky score, but this one wasn't too bad. Just nothing that stood out enough to remember. The soundtrack songs were all 80s stuff, small surprise. What was a bit of a surprise was the use of the Smiths on multiple occasions, but it works.

The movie can work as a prequel to the Witwicky movies- confession time, I stopped watching the Bay movies after TF3: Leonard Nimoy Goes EVIL- but it isn't a seamless join and frankly I kind of prefer it this way. Wouldn't be the first time an alternate timeline was established for Transformers continuities.

This was a decent Transformers movie and one that felt like it was made by someone who genuinely liked the source material, which is more than I can say for Michael Bay.

Comments

[bjornwilde]

This is all good to know! I have it on my want to watch list, so it's good to know it's worth it.

[cameoflage]

Same!

[sdelmonte]

The number of female robots is now exactly equal to the old cartoons, since outside of the one episode that took place on Cybertron, I think Arcee was it. I know that there wasn't much in the way of female representation on any cartoon that wasn't actually "meant for girls" but you would think the toy company and animation company that at least gave us Lady Jaye, Scarlett, and the Baroness could have had a few more female robots. And it kind of stayed that way for a long while, since Beast Wars also had one female robot. (Why do robots even have gender in the first place?)

I will probably wait for this to land online, but yes, Bumblebee was pretty much my favorite Autobot, and nostalgia is a powerful drug on occasion. (My favorite character was Starscream, though.)

[camwyn]

Angela Bassett's character, Shatter, is deep red and has lines approximating something vaguely female when in bot form. Since Ms. Bassett makes no attempt to disguise her voice I'm assuming Shatter is supposed to be female. So that's two. Which... is still better than Michael Bay given that Shatter is the primary Decepticon in this (we only see Megatron briefly on Cybertron itself) and therefore has plenty of screen time, spoken lines, and badassery.

No Starscream in the movie, although I honestly thought I was seeing G1 Starscream for a while. Turned out to be Blitzwing instead.

(And I am sticking to my precious theory that Cybertronians have a massive number of social roles based on one's function and relation to the manufacturing process that would ordinarily equate to at least seventeen different genders, but that humans are sufficiently unclear on how robot society is organized that sixteen of those genders are just rendered into most Earth languages as 'male'.)