While I do like Michael Bay’s first Transformers movie, I feel like Bumblebee finally got it right. I loved the story that it told and I thought that there was a proper balance of good storytelling and action. From what I saw, a lot of Transformers movie fans loved Bumblebee! I’d like to think that most people have a sense of what good storytelling is, but I’m starting to see that fading away these days.
Regardless, Bumblebee, which was directed by Travis Knight, was a big step in the right direction for the franchise, and then Transformers: Rise of the Beasts came out and for some reason, the franchise reverted back to absolute ridiculousness. But, it was actually worse than many of the other films that Michael Bay directed in the franchise.
So what in the hell happened?! Why did the creative team use this film to evolve the franchise? It’s like this movie took the franchise several steps back. Well, it turned out that some fans didn’t like that there wasn’t big Bayhem action in the movie. In one of the special features included on the film’s Blu-ray, franchise producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura shared:
“Well, one of the interesting things about ‘Bumblebee’ was, while people seemed to really love the movie, a lot of the fan base was not entirely happy with the scale of it. It was very intimate, and it was consciously intimate, and there was one refrain that came out of a large group of them, which was, ‘Where’s the explosions? Where’s all the stuff?'”
I honestly don’t recall anyone asking “where the explosions” were in Bumblebee, almost all the reviews I read were positive and didn’t complain about lack of action. But, maybe I missed something. Whatever it was, what we got in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts was in direct response to the producers thinking that people wanted bigger and more action.
In the end, they sacrificed good storytelling for more of all that other stuff. It’s a shame, and it seems like they are just going to continue missing the mark on these franchises, especially now that they introduced G.I. Joe into the franchise, which makes it all even more absurd, especially because they don’t even have a plan in place!
These movie producers and executives really need to get their heads on straight. They have such an awesome opportunity here to make some seriously awesome movies, and they are squandering it and half-assing it.
Via: /Film