Before the rise of Marvel movies and the "Fast and Furious" series, China's first Hollywood IP was "Transformers" .
There are a total of 5 "Transformers" series, but it is a pity that after experiencing the glory of the third film, the situation has deteriorated. The fourth film is only a work that has no box office and has a very poor reputation. In the fifth film, even the box office was lost.
Therefore, in order to restore the decline of the "Transformers" series, the filmmaker Paramount chose to restart the entire series, and the first part after the restart is the "Bumblebee" to be talked about today .
What Bumblebee means to the Transformers franchise
Unlike the other big four in Hollywood with many IPs, Paramount has run out of cards in the past decade, only "Star Trek", "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", "Mission Impossible" and "Transformers" can be considered. have a certain reputation.
Among them, "Star Trek" has been suspended, and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" has been temporarily frozen after the failure of the second part in 2016. The only thing Paramount can come up with to compete with the other four major Hollywood is "Mission Impossible" And "Transformers" two series only.
However, unlike the "Mission Impossible" series, the "Transformers" series focuses too much on special effects and the production of big scenes, which makes the audience's reputation tend to be polarized. Most of the evaluations of this series of films are: "The special effects are very good. "The hidden meaning is that other than the special effects scenes, other aspects are very mediocre, which is obviously not a good reputation.
However, because the style of Michael Bay, who directed the "Transformers" series of movies has been deeply imprinted in the original five-part series, it is not a good choice to extend the sequel from the original, so Paramount finally chose this A series restart can also be said to be a more appropriate decision.
However, this decision is still accompanied by extremely high risks , because if the quality of the restart of a series is not strong enough, it will fall into a situation of "not drawing much new blood, but throwing away old audiences and old fans". Sony's "The Amazing Spider-Man" is a typical example.
If "Bumblebee" fails, it will not only put the entire "Transformers" series in a dilemma, but also make Paramount, which has been losing money for years, even worse.
It is worth mentioning that Taravis Knight , the director of "Bumblebee", is the son of Phil Knight, president of the world sports brand Nike, but he loves the road of directing and does not want to be in business, so he took the responsibility at that time. Since the filming of "Bumblebee", if the film fails, Taravis can only bid farewell to his dream and go back to inherit the family business.
Therefore, whether it is for the director or the manufacturer, "Bumblebee" is a film that must not fail, and in fact, Taravis has indeed injected a lot of novel elements into the film.
innovative styling
Since "Bumblebee" is a reboot, the first thing that needs to be done is to let the audience know the difference between this film and the previous five-part series.
Regarding the story background, characters and other elements, the audience needs to watch the movie to know the difference, but there is one place that allows most people to see the difference between "Bumblebee" and "Transformers 1~5" at a glance.
Yes, it's the shape.
The "Transformers" series has always focused on visual effects . The first impact of this huge transforming robot on the screen is very easy to impress the audience.
Therefore, the car robot in "Bumblebee" abandoned the fragmented shape of the original five-part series, and changed it to a concise style that is very close to the original. It is the first to tell the audience from the visual effect - "We are different from before."
In addition to the shape, "Bumblebee" has also made great efforts in color matching. Different from the "Change 1~5" villain Decepticons, most of them are all bronze-colored bodies. The villain of "Bumblebee" uses eye-catching mecha. The red and blue color scheme is obviously far better than the original five-part series in terms of recognition.
Of course, just visual innovation is still not enough for a reboot movie, so director Taravis has also made great changes in the distribution of scenes.
human and car robot
The "Transformers" series has always had a problem that has plagued audiences, and that is the problem of human role distribution.
After all, the audience is here to watch robots fight, not to watch humans make irresponsible remarks.
But "Bumblebee", as a reboot work, has a low production cost. It is obviously not enough to make a pure Autobot story based on the planet Cybertron, the hometown of Transformers.
If the earth is used as the background, it is easy to fall into the endless loop where the human scenes of "Change 1~5" were dispensable.
What should be done then?
Director Taravis gave the answer, completely "merging" the two lines of human and car robot, and used this as the driving core of the plot.
The reason why the human scenes in "Change 1~5" are criticized is mainly because these human scenes are basically imposed, in other words, in order to prevent humans from appearing too "vase", so deliberately added some energy to the plot. The plot points that let them play, and in addition to these plot points, their significance to the whole movie is almost dragging time, which is why the audience feels very awkward to watch.
And "Bumblebee" tightly binds the growth of the heroine with the bumblebee, so in the story line, it does not feel that the heroine is superfluous. From the perspective of character design, this is also more conducive to the creation of human beings The bond with the car robot makes the character's emotions more delicate.
Of course, doing this is also very risky, because it will make the car robot become an accessory similar to the heroine to a certain extent, and the setting of Transformers itself is a higher-level life body than human beings, and high- level life gives Low-level life "strikes" will have a more inconsistent feeling.
In order to eliminate this sense of inconsistency, director Taravis took another approach, which is to change the positioning of Bumblebee in the movie.
Location of the bumblebee
There is an innate level difference between the settings of Transformers and humans. To eliminate the sense of distance between the two, there are only two easiest ways, either to "weak" the strong party to the same position as the weak party, or to put the weak party in the same position. The side "strengthening" is raised to the same level as the stronger side.
"Bumblebee" uses the former, so the audience can see that Bumblebee was beaten up by the villain shortly after the opening of the movie, and even the sounder was broken, and when they met the heroine, they were already covered with scars Tired, is an old-fashioned dilapidated car.
Yes, the setting of Bumblebee is still a high-level life form like a car robot. It also shows its own power when it fights the Decepticons at the end of the movie, but this does not prevent it from giving people a lot of time for most of the movie. A feeling of equality with the heroine, an ordinary human being.
In the movie, the "weakened" Bumblebee follows the heroine most of the time, and there is a lot of interaction between the two. Bumblebee sometimes learns how to hide itself in human society, and sometimes it will The new surroundings are very interesting and cause a series of jokes.
Despite this, it will give people a feeling that the bumblebee is the heroine's favorite pet, but in fact these interactive details have greatly shortened the distance between Transformers and humans.
Especially in the end, Bumblebee's red eyes broke out in order to protect the heroine. The heroine desperately jumped into the water for Bumblebee. To say that this is the script of the hero and heroine, I am afraid there is no problem. Since they can do this for each other, the sense of distance? nonexistent.
It can be said that the director Taravis put a lot of thought into the story and character design in order to reinforce the most critical human scenes in the original five-part series and according to the production budget of his own film.
Thanks to the careful production, the quality of "Bumblebee" itself cannot be regarded as the best grade, but it still won the box office of 468 million US dollars at a cost of 135 million US dollars, and also won the film review website such as Rotten Tomatoes. Quite a good score, and for a reboot, it's a job well done.
Let's see what kind of road the Transformers will take after the restart of "Bumblebee".
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