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Who doesn't love the big and robust robots? Michael Bay's version of the Transformers was an action cinema with a lot of love for the details of the Transformers in the form of CGI. Plus a lot of action where the robots hit each other's heads with very little story and epic music. But to be honest, you had enough of it after the 3rd part. Then came the 4th and as if that wasn't enough we were given a lengthy 5th part. When a BumbleBee stand alone film was announced, I wasn't sure what to think about. Because you were saturated. That's why I didn't really want to watch the movie, but my little nephew had asked me and as his uncle you can't say no to him. So last evening we did a movie night with the little boy.

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The Story:

On Cybertron, the planet of the Transformers, there is a war between the Autobots and the Decepticons. In battle, Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots, succeeds in sending his most faithful helper and friend BumbleBee to Earth to set up a reception camp for his Autobots buddies. Arriving on Earth, BumbleBee encounters a few military men and as he tries to flee from them, he loses his voice. To avoid attracting attention and to hide himself, BumbleBee takes on the shape of an old VW beetle.

The 18 year old Charlie, who is looking for a car, finds the old VW Beetle at the scrap yard where she works and takes it home with her, where she quickly finds out that the VW Beetle is in reality a good-natured robot that likes 80s music. From here on, a kind of mixed relationship develops between the two, consisting of an oversized robot pet and best friend. But how the coincident wants, the first Decepticons already come to earth and they begin to hunt BumbleBee and his human friends...

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I hadn't read any criticisms and didn't know any trailers. I had ignored the movie until my little nephew spoke to me about it a few days before. So we watched it together.

I had expected an action blockbuster like you know it from the previous ones - like you were used to from Michael Bay.

But BumbleBee is something completely different. The movie is a mixture of coming-of-age story, action comedy, a bit of family and adventure movie, has something of a superhero movie and offers childlike elements of a monster movie. What I liked the most were the CGI animations, which weren't as overworked as they were in the previous Transformers movies. The Transformers are very simple this time and resemble the characters from the 80s very much. If you knew the cartoons and had Transformer figures and toys of that time, you will get the feeling of your childhood when watching the Transformers in BumbleBee. The CGI effects are modern and the battles are really well done but are not overpowered and offer just as much as you really need. And then there's the 80s nostalgia with the corresponding musical background.

Michael Bay gave the director's chair to Travis Knight, who did his job really well. If the previous movies were really cool, BumbleBee is a movie with depth. The previous parts missed that. You're not used to it, I know, and now you wonder how? Robots and depth? This movie tells a little friendship story in which Charlie has to prove herself and BumbleBee has to find himself. What the previous Transformers movies missed makes BumbleBee good again, because the movie really has a lot of heart! The story itself is very solid and tells of a friendship between two very diverse and different beings.

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The actors, from Charlie to her clumsy lover or her mother and her stepdad, or her brother, the militarymen and all others, offers to the movie a lot of depth, which goes down very well to the young audience, because my nephew liked the movie. It didn't remind him that the best buddy of BumbleBee was not a boy but a girl. The movie is a mixture of a Steven Spielberg family blockbuster as you know it from "E.T." and a real life movie version of the animation movie "The Iron Giant".

What irritated me a little was that some things in BumbleBee weren't in line with the story from the previous Transformer movies. Yesterday night I read while googling that BumbleBee was supposed to be a kind of reboot and to have ushered in a whole new era of the Transformers movie universe. The old Michael Bay movies are now making room for something new. I don't mind them doing that, because BumbleBee is a movie for young and old and is fun to watch, so why not, a bit more from the old nostalgia feelings would not be bad...

I have rated the movie on IMDb with 7, if I could, I would give it 7.2 stars.

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