Bumblebee

Bumble Door

Bumblebee
2018 USA
Directed by Travis Knight
UK cinema release print.

Wow... it’s getting really dangerous to see an actual movie at the cinema in the UK again.

I thought the days of Draconian censorship were behind us but, no, first Aquaman (reviewed here) and now Bumblebee have both been pre-cut for the UK market to achieve lower ratings on the advice of the BBFC. So let’s be clear about this... if you go to see Bumblebee at a UK (or Australian, apparently) cinema then you are not actually seeing the film, just a highlights only version because, yep, they cut a full 6 seconds out of this thing. Personally I find one frame of film cut to be appalling vandalism but they’ve cut a whopping 144 frames out of this? Between them the BBFC and the studios should be hanging their heads in shame and refunding our money for making us watch things pretending to be films when they’re not the full version. I don’t think this is acceptable behaviour and I find it damned offensive. I won’t say anything more about it in this review but my hands are tensing up right now from writing about these crimes against filmanity because I’m so enraged. It’s not the only thing which enraged me about the movie.

So, okay... let’s go with the big main positive about this film and say that this prequel is the best follow up to the original Transformers we’ve had. It’s not nearly as good as the very first one but it’s way beyond the follow ups which, to be fair, is not saying too much because Transformers 2 - 5 were all, basically, absolute rubbish which I couldn’t believe were coming from the same creative team as the first one.

Although Michael Bay has stayed on with this one as producer, it’s a bit of a sea change here and the writers and directors have gone for a little change of pace. Sure there’s plenty of action in this one but there’s also lots of small stuff about the way the characters relate to each other and grow... in other words, there’s a lot of heart to this one. Something all the other sequels forgot to throw into the mix while they were similarly busy not allowing themselves to slow down from anaesthetising the audience with non-stop action and forgetting that contrasting action with some less kinetic content is what allows the action sequences to have an actual impact in the first place. This one... more or less... gets the mix between the two right and the result is we have a fairly well balanced film.

That being said, I was almost frothing at the mouth within the first five or ten minutes of what was left of this film after the censors were done with it... so enraged I wanted to yell at the screen and walk out.

Why? Well a complete lack of story logic continuity in the opening sequence which completely kills it.

The film starts off on Cybertron with the Decepticons winning the war against the Autobots (lead by Optimus Prime) and we see Bumblebee escaping to earth to await the coming of the other Transformers. All well and good but when we see Bumblebee on Cybertron he is already in the form of a car. Wait, what? It’s well documented in the Transformers movie universe that the various robots need to scan something before they are able to turn into it... and that’s further backed up in numerous scenes in this movie too. Since a car which is built to carry human passengers would be a completely alien concept to the Transformers at this point, then there’s no way any of the Autobots would be able to change into one. Not unless they’d already been to Earth. Oh, I thought to myself, that means we’ll be finding out that Bumblebee has already visited Earth in his past but... no... a minute or two later Optimus Prime tells him he’s located a planet called Earth they can all go to hide on. So... yeah... it makes absolutely no bloody sense that the first time you see the title character he’s in the shape of an Earth made car when he hasn’t even seen a car or knows what it looks like. This is untenable, people and sloppy writers should really be taken to account for bizarrely poor slip ups like this. Especially since it’s going to pop the average viewer right out of the movie while s/he tries to figure out just what the heck kind of story logic is being followed here. Or in this case... unfollowed.

Okay, now that’s out of my system, when Bumblebee gets to Earth things become more like the early, non-action sequences of the original Transformers, with the friendly autobot stumbling around, breaking things and accidentally bumbling his way through doors etc while covertly befriending the main lead Charlie, played by Hailee Steinfeld who I’d just seen... alright, heard... in another film at the cinema as Gwen Stacey in Spider-Man - Into The Spider-Verse (reviewed here) and also her love interest Memo (played by Jorge Lendeborg Jr, who was so brilliant in Brigsby Bear last year... reviewed here). Meanwhile they have to deal with the military from Sector Seven (from the previous films) plus a couple of Decepticons who have misled the military into helping them locate Bumblebee.

And you know what...?

Considering how angry I was at the start of the film, the rest of the story is so well written and performed that I even had tears in my eyes during one of the more moving sequences. Actually, being a prequel, this fits in pretty well with the previous films... apart from that annoying start with the car thing. It’s also really well acted and feels much more like an overall coherent story, rather than just a basic frame to hang set pieces on. Some of the action sequences felt a bit ‘samey’ and dull but at least they were well paced and you still felt like there was a reason to be having them... which I guess is at least half the battle with films like this.

Dario Marinelli’s score is nicely serviceable but it didn’t really seem to share any of the big themes created by Steve Jablonsky for the other ones. At least as far as I could tell because, during a lot of the action scenes, the noise was turned up way too much over the score for it to be effectively heard anyway. It sounded appropriate to the subject matter of the film, though, so that’s something.

Other than that... if you’re a follower of the Transformers movies and have been waiting for something which comes at least even a little close to capturing the lightning in a bottle of the first live action movie then Bumblebee is definitely the one to go see. It’s fairly heart warming and the director certainly has a good go at it. Kids would probably like this one too... even though it seems to be targeting itself at people who were of a certain age in the 1980s when The Breakfast Club was one of the main ‘go to’ movies for a certain generation. Don’t you forget about... this one.

Transformers - The Last Knight

Melancholy Bay Bee

Transformers - The Last Knight
2017 USA Directed by Michael Bay   
UK cinema release print.

Okay then. Here we are for another slice of well coordinated but ultimately bland Bay-hem. And it’s a bit of a shame because he’s obviously a very competent director and knows how to construct, shoot and edit action scenes that cram a lot into them without, for the most part in this one, losing you in the edit.

I’ve said this before on this blog but I’ll do so again now... I think the very first Transformers movie that he directed, 10 years ago, was absolutely brilliant and I consider it a modern action classic. I had no idea who the Transformers were (they were somewhat ‘after my time’ when I was a kid) and I really didn’t want to see that first one but I was dragged along to a screening by someone who was a lot more invested in the experience than I was and I was totally lost to the movie. It was a blast. It also had an absolutely classic score by Steve Jablonsky. Imagine my surprise and continued disappointment, then, when all of the sequels, often sharing some of the same cast and crew of this first one, were all so hard to watch.

I’m sorry to say that, even with the added experience and gravitas that Sir Anthony Hopkins brings to his role in this fifth (and possibly final) installment, he was not able to save the film or lift it out of the muddy puddle it seems so desperate to be clawing its way out of.

Actually, there are a lot of reasons why this film should work so lets take a look at those first.

I mentioned Anthony Hopkins was in this right? He, of course, adds a certain amount of weight to the film but he can only go as far as the script constraints will allow. Ditto for Mark Wahlberg who, once again, acquits himself very well and proves himself to be one of the more interesting actors out there today. He is also backed up by his new romantic interest Laura Haddock, his new surrogate daughter played by Isabela Moner (Nicola Peltz did not return after playing the character’s actual daughter in Transformers - Age Of Extinction (reviewed here) and Josh Duhamel reprising his role as Lennox from some (I think most) of the other movies. They’re all very good and, for the most part, don’t let themselves get upstaged by the effects.

Another thing which is good about this one is that it really does try to make as much sense out of the speeding juggernaut that the franchise has become as possible and tries hard to construct a story that makes sense with all the previous installments, tying them up into a perfect bundle. At the end of the last movie we had main Transformer good guy Optimus Prime leaving Earth to seek his creator and they pretty much pick up the story from there. Admittedly, they also add in some kind of weird war between Transformers in his absence and Wahlberg’s character is in nowhere like the happy place which was seemingly in his near future after the previous installment... choosing, instead, a fugitive's life on the run from new ‘misguided good turned accidentally evil because he’s playing for the wrong team’ Lennox and his squad of Transformer destroyers.

The film also, kinda, ties up where those medieval Transformers from the last movie came from and also mentions the Witwikky’s part in the history of Transformers' on Earth... going so far as to show a truly stupid photo of Shia La Beouf when he was in ‘crazy’ mode from an earlier film. I guess that’s Michael Bay’s not so subtle way of getting a little  bit of revenge after La Beouf quit the series... or maybe it’s just a cute in-joke, I don’t know.

So we have a plot filled with the secret legacy of Transformers and a script involving Mark Wahlberg being chosen by a bit of alien tech to be 'the last knight'. We also have a nice little prologue with King Arthur, Lancelot and Merlin defeating their enemies when Merlin strikes a deal with some Transformers to make a huge dragon machine. Actually, that sequence is a bit confusing/problematic because only a descendent of Merlin can wield a certain object in modern day to help defeat the Decepticon’s evil plot and Merlin is played here by Stanley Tucci, who had a prominent role in the last movie as a completely different character in modern times. So all the way through you are waiting for that character to show up and reveal they are the descendent of Merlin but... no, they don’t. Merlin’s descendent turns out to be another character but... I won’t reveal which one because, you never know, you may actually want to go see this movie.

Okay, that’s the good stuff mostly out of the way.

The bad stuff?

Well the script might be okay in terms of tying everything together but the dialogue is pretty awful, it has to be said. I couldn’t believe these great actors were being asked to speak some of these terrible lines and, especially in the case of the great Anthony Hopkins, I was embarrassed at some of the stuff they were getting him to do. Truly cringeworthy and somehow beneath him is the take away I got here. Special mention to the also great Wahlberg, though, for managing to get some of those lines sounding pretty natural and for injecting his scenes with a certain amount of credibility, for sure.

One thing which could have been great is the return of John Turturro to the series (after his strange absence in the last film). The performance is quite literally phoned in, however, as he doesn’t share any of his very brief scenes with any of the other human characters, instead spending his entire time on the phone to Anthony Hopkins. It looked almost like these were added scenes after part of the cut maybe wasn’t working but I’m just guessing there and that may not have been the case.

I think the bad dialogue combined with the excesses of the action scenes kinda drag the movie down quite a bit, to be honest. The special effects are all fantastic and the action scenes quite rollicking but they all just kinda squash together with no highs or lows in between sequences and I honestly found myself almost drifting off to sleep at one point while the movie was being at its most noisy.

Steve Jablonsky’s score is kinda okay but, from what I could hear of it, joins his sequel scores as being nowhere near the classic that his first Transformers score was (which still gets a heck of a lot of spins per year on my turntable to this day). However, as might be expected, a lot of it is buried under the sound effects so I won’t be able to apprise the score properly until the CD comes out next month and that’s far too late for this review.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Tranformers - The Last Night, to be honest. It’s big and noisy and there’s lots of movement on screen and if you like seeing heavy metal behemoths bashing each other up with as little emotional context as possible, well... there’s certainly room in this world for that kind of cinema and I wouldn’t blame you for indulging in that kinda large slice of escapism one bit. As for me, it’s nowhere near the classic that the first movie was and it’s not something I’d revisit anytime soon, truth be told. Unlike the first movie, this one shares the same qualities as the other sequels in that they're really not ‘more than meets the eye.’

Transformers - Age Of Extinction

Basic Extinct

Transformers - Age Of Extinction
2014 USA/China
Directed by Michael Bay
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Transformers weren’t even invented yet when I was a kid... so I missed out on the whole toys and comics thing with them. However, after being grudgingly dragged along to the first movie in this series, I was more than delighted that the original was such a great film. Pretty much a modern classic.

It’s been painful and frustrating, therefore, to have to watch movie after movie of, frankly, badly written and badly paced sequels to that original bright light of an opening shot. Considering it’s the same director all the way through the series, I find it difficult to believe that these sequels can be so atrocious. And, I am very sad to report, that I believe that extends to this latest venture, Transformers: Age Of Extinction when, in direct opposition to my hopes and well wishes for the movie (which it doesn’t need anyway, it’s made a ton of money ensuring further dire exploits in our collective near future), I found myself constantly looking at the time and wishing the damn thing would be over soon.

The problem is not necessarily the story, I think... it is what it is.

Neither is all of the dialogue that ropey either and, even if it wasn’t quite up to scratch, you have a bunch of actors like Mark Wahlburg and Sophia Myles (the original Girl In The Fireplace... wasted in this but shining briefly) giving it their all and so it never sounds too bad. I think what we have here that screws things up a little is break neck direction and action choreography that is practically wall to wall, once it starts... and, in the odd moment when it does give you time to breath, which is barely, doesn’t give enough of a space in the onslaught to actually allow you to invest in the characters and the stakes enough to care about what happens next... and that’s really a shame because the director is more than capable of giving us a well put together, heartfelt film when he wants to.

When a movie written by the likes of Akira Kurosawa or Sergio Leone is made, it becomes clear that the pauses and, really quite long stretches of character establishment, character build up and dramatic tension, are all a very important part of a movie. You need it there so when you contrast it with a well placed action sequence, that sequence becomes more vibrant and dynamic in contrast to anything else that directly surrounds it. Tension and release. It’s all part of the game.

Or... put it another way.

My daytime job is as a graphic designer. Occasionally you’ll get a really clueless client who insists on one or both of the following classic design mistakes.

Number one is they’ll try to fill every gap or piece of negative (or white) space with some kind of textual or design element. Absolutely the wrong thing to do with a design, people. You need the space there to help lead the eye in to where you want it to focus. If you fill the page the eye will just take it’s natural (and standard to all human beings as far as I know) journey across the page/screen without being particularly caught by anything in particular.

Secondly, another thing they’ll do is try to make three or more bits of information stand out and be more important from everything else by asking for this, that and the other to be in bold type, usually quite close to each other. Of course, all that achieves is all the emboldened words dilute each other’s strength and basically cancel each other out. Instead of one clear message you're scatter-shotting a plethora of them and they all fight against each other causing chaos to the eye. Most people, unless they already have a specific agenda that they have to wade through the content of the design for, will not bother to read something like this. The client has just lost the potential customer by ignoring the key message and bombarding the eye with fighting headers.

And I think that’s why Transformers: Age Of Extinction kind of loses it’s way in much the same way as the previous two sequels did. Instead of highlighting things with the occasional action scene, it’s just non-stop action. The kinetic equivalent of overcrowding the page with too many headers and not allowing any white space to lead you to where you need to be. Relentless and pounding set pieces are the order of the day in this movie and, while there are admittedly rest room breaks to ease the monotony, they needed to have a lot more of an emotional hook to them (and they do try, the scripting isn’t completely terrible... clichéd but not terrible) and be a lot longer so the action scenes felt like something when they kick back in gear here. There’s no real sense of that tension and release I was talking about in this one... just noisy motion and explosions. Which personally I find pretty dull, to be honest.

One of the tings that gets me coming back for these disappointments time and time again is that Steve Jablonsky’s score for the first movie is one of the great movie scores of all time. At least, it is to me. Unfortunately, although all the films have been scored by this composer, the sequels never really come close to recapturing the genius of that first score and, sad to say, that I include the score to this movie in that statement. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some nice music in it, what I could hear of it above the explosions, and it all seems appropriate but, again, it’s not got nearly the “hairs raising on the arms” beauty of the original score and that’s a bit of a pity. It does it’s job but, for the most part, you aren’t tapping your toes in time to the music as you are watching this one.

A big change with this one is that none of the human characters from the previous films are back in this one. That’s understandable given some of the politics and comments that have been made around the previous films in the series, but there were one or two I missed. The real loss in all that, though, is that of John Turturro, who always seems to traditionally turn up in the movies when you least expect him to. Alas... he’s not here.

The actors who are in this one, as I said, do a fine job but another reason they’re hampered is that of the regular characters that do make an appearance in this one, and I’m talking about the autobots themselves. They’re really not that sympathetic this time around. Bumblebee is underused, Optimus Prime is a lot more judgemental of humans than we’re used to and as for the other transformers... I just didn’t like them, period. These are not the robots I was looking for... and I really wanted to move on out of the cinema very quickly.

So that’s all I’ve got for you on that one. Special effects are all spectacular but somebody on the payroll really needs to realise that the biggest special effect is when you slow the pacing down and let the spell of the characters overtake you. That’s when you have a film. Transformers: Age Of Extinction is more of a big budget, travelling carny show. Alright as a curiosity but not somewhere you’d want to explore very often. It seems to have made a lot of cash already in the USA though, so “Yay!” and “good for them” to the people reaping those rewards. However, the downside for me to that is that this probably means there’ll be another sequel at some point. I really don’t want one.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Bay For Night!

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (aka Transformers 3D) US 2011

Directed by Michael Bay

Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Yeah, there’s going to be some big, twisty, Rubik cube-like spoilerage on this one... but, frankly, how spoilery can it get on a movie like this?

Okay, I had my reservations when I took my long suffering cinema companion Orange Monkey to see the new Transformers movie. This took on more of an edge when I got in the car and she drove me down to my local as I was soon made aware that she hadn’t seen the first two movies in the series. Ignoring my own initial concerns as to why you would want to see the third movie in a series first (okay, so I like to watch things in order, no big deal) I then gave her a brief rundown of my personal experiences of the first two Transformer movies which I will repeat and elaborate on here so anyone reading can get a handle on where I’m coming from on my review of the third one and which goes a little something like this...

I was dragged kicking and screaming to the cinema to see the first Transformers movie back in 2007. I really did not want to go and the toys were something I’d missed out on as they arrived just past the point where I had stopped playing with kiddie toys (don’t worry, I’m happy to play with them now... I just don’t have any Transformers) and I’d not bothered with the old cartoon show or the comics back in the 80s and... well I just didn’t get it and wasn’t interested okay? But then an odd thing happened... a friend of mine, who is a mother of two, wanted to go and see it because she remembered buying the toys for her boys when they were kids. She didn’t get out to the movies much and... well I’m never one to intentionally disappoint the ladies (unless dancing or weddings are involved). And so we went to see it...

I was blown away by that first one big time.

It was a really great movie in all the right ways a summer blockbuster should be (for once) and everything just seemed to work on it. You had some cool visual effects, which are always the last thing on my mind but they were quite visually striking in that first one. Then you had the amazing opening sequences of total balls-to-the-wall, 21st Century cinema, state of the art action flick Bayhem... and then something really strange happened because the "other" storyline, which was set up to run simultaneously with the action heavy sequences, was an absolute throwback, but done really well, to those old mid-80s family movies which I remember living through when I was a teenager. The sequences with Shia LaBeouf and his Transformer pals were written, performed and shot with all the sensibilities of those much loved romps like Back To The Future and Gremlins. So already we had that strange juxtaposition going on.

And where it really worked was where director Bay pushed those storylines together and merged them for the final act... it was incredible that he managed to pull off that massive juggling act without the two different genre-types cancelling each other out. It was entertaining as hell and it had, from composer Steve Jablonsky, one of the most well crafted and best movie scores of the entire decade. The original score release, which is now quite hard to find as it was deleted very quickly (for some bizarre reason) was not out of my player for very long for a couple of years.

But then Bay ruined it with a sequel... Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen which, frankly, was one of the worst movies I’ve ever had to sit through in my life. I was so looking forward to it on the strength of the first film but instead I had to bite back on my disappointment that Bay had dropped the ball quite this badly and just find a way of moving on. Surprisingly though, even Jablonsky’s follow up score was not a patch on his first one... what could have been the second movie’s one saving grace felt kind of thrown away and lazy and I think it would be true to say that the best musical moments of the second movie were the parts which were just tracked in from the first.

And so I had really mixed feeling when I went to see the third... especially now I’d found out that my friend Orange Monkey had not realised fully what she was letting herself in for when she’d accepted my invitation to see Michael Bay blow things up in 3D. Still, not to worry... I told her that whatever happened, it was impossible to make a movie worse than the second one... so we armed ourselves with chocolate raisins and Cadbury’s mini-eggs and settled down to the watch the film.

Okay, now I have to say that while I wasn’t particularly entertained by the third movie... I was impressed by a few things. First up was the plotting which started off in the space-race of the sixties which turned out to be a response to discovering footage of an Autobot ship which had crashed on the darkside of the moon. It then went on to show us what “really” happened when Neil Armstrong and co went to check out the crashed ship. It then catches up to present day and we are back with Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky character and we meet his new girlfriend... with barely a reference to what happened to the Megan Fox character from the first two films (Hitler insults and dumb Lohan-like publicity aside... they should have stayed with the continuity and kept her in the movie).

After this, though, as the plot about the resurrection of the Einstein of the Autobot world in the form of a character called Sentinel Prime continued on... I was getting more and more impressed about the actors and celebrities appearing in this movie, often for large chunks of screen time.

John Malkovich as the bizarre managing director of a company where Sam gets a job, for example, is an amazing thing to watch. And then we had Dutch, played by Firefly/Serenity’s Alan Tudyk and Frances McCormand as a CIA (or is it FBI?) director ... not too mention Mr. Buzz Aldrin playing himself (in a small cameo really) and looking quite chipper. And to really top things off you had the voice of Leonard Nimoy playing Sentinel Prime... and there were some very blatant Star Trek references to be found in his lines (The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few) and a fair few little Star Trek moments scattered throughout the movie as it happens. Now I won’t give away too much about Sentinel Prime’s character here (although if you’re a Star Trek fan I might mention that perhaps he should have had a beard... if you know what I mean) but I do have to say... for someone who is supposed to be, as I said earlier, the "Einstein of the Autobot World"... well I don’t remember Einstein punching and kicking people and wielding big hot-metal swords when he wanted to push a point about his brand new spanking Theory of Relativity... and that’s all I’m saying about that particular character right there.

The acting in this movie is all solid (as I would expect from the very professional cast and crew assembled to make this movie) but it was with some of the returning characters from the first movie with whom I was mostly disappointed... and then, in terms of the scripting of them, not their performances. Josh Duhamel, for example, had very little to do in this movie and he’s almost entirely absent in terms of screen presence here until the second half of the final “Explosions R Us” third act set piece of the movie. John Turturro was also badly scripted in this one and in some ways he was very much treated as an add-on (we gotta get him in because he was so good in the first two movies) to the rest of the cast... most of his scenes focussing on his personal assistant Dutch. This is a great shame because Turturro kinda stole his scenes in the first movie and had pretty much the only funny lines in the second movie. A real waste of this actor this time around but... let’s be fair... I’d be moaning even more if he didn’t turn up in it at all.

This movie was pretty much an okay piece of popcorn fodder which, I think I would be reporting in a far better light if, unlike Orange Monkey, I didn’t have the fantastic first movie to compare it to. The action is spectacular and doesn’t feel too truncated as it did in the second movie... seriously people, that "Optimus Prime is back from the dead" one-on-one fight at the end of the second one needed to be way longer than the minute or two it ended up being. Such an anti-climax to something that almost the entire running time of the movie had been building up to.

Similarly with Jablonsky’s third score for the series... nice enough and not the disaster that underscored the second movie... just nowhere near as good as the first. He did remember to write in some riffs from the first and revisit the leitmotif he had established in the original... but the main melodies did seem a little delayed or slowed down and lacked the emotional punch of that initial work of musical genius. It may, however, play a lot better as a stand alone listen if the studio decide not to delay or cancel the score release CD scheduled (and rescheduled) for later on in the year. I’ll give it a go anyway.

All this added up to a not too terrible time at the cinema... and certainly not as disappointing as the last time around with the franchise. Orange Monkey actually seemed to have enjoyed it a lot more than me... which holds up to my theory that if you don’t have the better movie to compare it to, Transformers: Dark of the Moon can be a pulse-pounding thrill ride of a cinema outing. I’ve urged her to seek out the first movie if she really wants to see a well made piece of hokum.

And that’s about it for this one. If you loved the first movie and was let down as much as I was by the sequel... and are planning to see this one too... you won’t come out of the cinema feeling as angry as last time. On the other hand... if you didn’t get anything out of the first one... this movie has “Stay Away... Move Along... Nothing to see here” written on it’s armour-plated, metalmorphosising forehead. You have been warned!