Quote of the year. Bay did a lot for this franchise (for one, putting on the map for many people) and it's easy to forget that when you think about Devastator's...um, wrecking balls. Still, I am all for the Bay movies riding into the sunset. He clearly burnt out after DOTM. I remember reading about how the Dinobots would never show up and how he didn't like Welker's Megatron all that much. I remember hearing that Bay believed the VW Beetle already made an indelible mark on cinema through Herbie, so Bumblebee would have a different vehicle mode. All decisions and opinions based on Bay's personal creative ideas. You may not agree with his decisions and opinions, but at least he put some thought into the first few movies.

 

Fuck. Goodbye protoforms..

Can they at least change the designs for future films? The cybertron scene looks too toy-ish for my taste.

They redesigned Bumblebee to look modern and simplified, they can do the same for all.

 

I hope the real Ratchet shows up in Red and white, and puts Bee's mouth back on....or gives him his faceplate....


then he could leave his battle mask off for good.

 

So if this is a full reboot, does that mean that we can ditch the whole "mute Bumblebee" idea?
It was a really shitty concept and only served to further emphasise the human characters and sideline the robots. That was always one of my biggest gripes with Bay's movies ("one of" mind you, there were plenty of others) - how they made the human actors the main characters and the actual transformers where just sidekicks. Transformers was always about the robot's and the human characters where supposed to be the sidekicks - not the other way around.
This new Bumblbee movie still seems to be doing that at least a little with the little girl, but the scenes on Cybrtron and other flashbacks let me hope that we are finally going to focus more on the robots.

There's no need for the stupid "Bumblebee talks with the radio" gimmick. It was mildly amusing when Eric Idle did it in the '86 movie for the Junkions, but for the title character of your movie? Let him speak for himself!!

Sadly, the info we have so far about the movie with talk of Sector 7, a silent Bee in the trailers and the timeframe of the movie itself, suggest to me that at the best this will be a soft-reboot still heavily influenced by (and IMO held back by) the previous Bayformers stuff.

 

I think this will be a reboot in the same way 'Mad Max: Fury Road' was.
I hope this film manages to be as good as it needs to be to right the brand.

 

Tbh I think the mute Bee things was to save costs and that Bay hated letting the bots have natural conversations.

For the record I don't mind the movies if you pretend TLK didn't happen.

 

Mute Bumblebee was a compromise between Spielberg's opinion that none of the Transformers should talk and the reality that conveying necessary plot information to the viewer is next to impossible without letting the characters who are driving the plot speak. Allowing Bumblebee to remain mute through the rest of the films (particularly when his voice is clearly fixed at the end of the first movie) was one of the dumber decisions made by the filmmakers. Personally I think they had no idea why the movie was so successful and were therefore unwilling to make any changes to the robots in the sequel, and at that point not speaking was an indelible part of Bumblebee's character.

 

It's interesting to see such an attitude shift with so many people here... people who have otherwise been ardent Bay supporters to the point of being belligerent pseudo bullies about it to anyone that said boo about his movies. I've mused for 3 sequels now how convinced I was that the main reason people think the movies are/were supposedly so good is because they're the only thing we've ever gotten, and we have nothing else (read: better) to compare them to. Now we do... and look what's happened. It's already been seismic... and all base off nothing but a few millisecond clips, pictures, and these increasingly vague comments from the 'powers that be" about what this movie is (now).

Anyway, not a pro or negative judgment - just an interesting evolution of things. I hope this solo outing turns out to be as good as, if not better, than what a lot of people clearly hope & want it to be.  

 

Was it Spielberg? I heard it was Lorenzo who didn't want talking robots.

 

You made an excellent point. That was always my biggest reason for not despising the Bay films, was because that was all we had. There was opportunity for fans to develop their own stories because, a lot of the time, plot points, lore and deaths in Bay's movies were incredibly vague. I thought Barricade was killed in DOTM, but there he was in TLK (does he survive TLK? I still haven't actually seen it). As a result, for someone who likes writing such as myself, there was plenty to explore. Maybe a bot steals Ratchet's spark back from Lockdown, infiltrates KSI to take his parts and Frankensteins him back together? Maybe in the aftermath of DOTM, some Minicons patch up Shockwave and give him a new eye (yellow, because Geewun ;P), there was opportunity to take something lackluster and make it okay.

That said, we now have the possibility of Bumblebee acting as a franchise soft-reboot, which I am 100% percent okay with in comparison. The Bayverse existed, but Transformers is built on the premise of multiple iterations and timelines. Why do we need a single, linear timeline for the movies? My answer is that we don't.

 

Come to think of it, we've circled this carcass before, haven't we? It was one of the two of them, not really much difference it makes now. Maybe it was both.

 

Huh. Hadn’t heard that story before. Which ever one it was, he clearly missed the entire point of the franchise which is that the robots are the main characters. Not wanting the robots to talk makes it clear that the main characters to that person where the idiot humans. And considering how bad the acting, dialogue and human stories where in every single one of the movies, that’s unfortunate. It’s generally agreed that the few highlights of the movies came from the Transformers themselves, and they weren’t even being considered as drivers of the story. Wasted opportunities abound.

 

You know I do not know how I feel about this I absolutely love Transformers 1-3 I really liked 4. 5 was kinda meh-bla(my opinion I respect other people's opinions I try not to judge). I don't want the bay films to end,from the ages 6 to 13 they were my life. But at the same time I'm a huge G1 and the aligned contiguity fan. This new film reminds me of those two(actually prefer those last two over the films)
But I respect Bay and what he did he brought me and so many others of fans into the franchise.
Even if you don't like his choices numbers and for recognition sake he did a lot for the franchise in a good way.
I'm nervous but really excited for the new direction it is going in.

 

In terms of not 'getting' Transformers, that would be Lorenzo. Everything that man did with the first film seemed calculated to try and make it as little like the original G1 series as possible. To the point he allegedly tried to sabotage Cullen's voice test for Prime by having the guy (who was supposed to be Ironhide in the test) not show up, all because Lorenzo didn't want the cartoon Prime. He got shown up when Cullen simply did both parts and impressed Bay enough to override his protests.

 

That was definitely Spielberg who wanted the robots not to talk.

 

I hope they don't reboot. It feels like a prequel of the Bay movies to me. Bumblebee has a very similar face and can't talk, a couple things they could have changed for a reboot...