WHAT’S IT ABOUT
On the run in the year 1987, Bumblebee the Autobot seeks refuge in a junkyard in a small California beach town. Charlie, on the brink of turning 18 years old and trying to find her place in the world, soon discovers the battle-scarred and broken Bumblebee. When Charlie revives him, she quickly learns that this is no ordinary yellow Volkswagen.
MoviesInMo Review
The first Transformers film was directed by “Mr. Explosions” Michael Bay in 2007. It was a good movie and made a lot of money, but you always felt like something was missing. The second one was worse with “action” which didn’t make sense. The next three got progressively worse, and by common sense logic, that should have been the end of it. Well, it’s not. Michael Bay is back BUT this time he’s not the director, he’s one of the producers, and THAT made all the difference they needed to make the Transformers good (not great) again. One of the main reasons this film is so much better than the rest is the realism factor. The other films tried too hard to have humans and robots together in as many scenes as possible. In Bumblebee, most of the action is between the robots while humans stand by shooting or waiting. That one thing makes Bumblebee so much better than the other films in the series without even trying. There’s also a more emotional connection between Bumblebee and Charlie Watson. Besides the epic opening scene, the rest of the movie doesn’t get bogged down with tons of robots fighting tons of humans. They kept it simple, and it paid off – big time. This movie has focus, feeling, and a sense of nostalgia that the other movies needed. I wasn’t forced to keep up with an army of bots or a platoon of soldiers. Additionally, this film has things we’ve never seen in the others – multiple transformations, Bumblebee’s real name, AND voice, and just how well Bumblebee can fight. Speaking of fights, in the previous films most of the fast-moving robot scenes are very hard to see and at times confusing and hard to visually know what the hell is happening. This was another issue the filmmakers fixed. Don’t know how and don’t care but now you can see all the action without assuming what was happening. Overall, Bumblebee IS the best film of the franchise, and if you were waiting for a good Transformers movie to go see, this is as good as it’s going to get.
OUR RATING – A TRANSFORMATIVE 7
MEDIA
- Genre – Fantasy
- Street date
- Digital – March 19th 2019
- DVD/Blu-Ray – April 2nd 2019
- Video – 1080p
- Screen size – 1.85:1
- Sound – English Dolby Atmos, English Dolby TrueHD 7.1, French Dolby Digital 5.1, Portuguese Dolby Digital 5.1, Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1
- Subtitles – English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese
Extras
- Bringing Bumblebee to the Big Screen (HD): Featuring cast & crew interviews and lots of BTS footage, the five-part short doc covers various aspects of the production, from story genesis, casting, characters and themes to stage design and a return to Transformers G1.
- The Story of Bumblebee (4 min)
- The Stars Align (7 min)
- Bumblebee Goes Back to G1 (10 min)
- Back to the Beetle (6 min)
- California Cruisin’ Down Memory Lane (20 min)
- Sector 7 Archive (HD): Another featurette broken into two parts focused on the mysterious government agency. The first is a brief intro by John Cena, and the other a motion comic.
- Agent Burns: Welcome to Sector 7 (1 min)
- Sector 7 Adventures: The Battle at Half Dome (9 min)
- Bee Vision: The Transformers Robots of Cybertron (HD, 4 min): A fun, closer examination of the individual robots seen in the opening battle sequence.
- Deleted Scenes (HD, 19 min): Nine excised and extended sequences.
- Outtakes (HD, 10 min).