Bumblebee - Well, the first five minutes were awesome!

Back in the eighties, no one looked forward to Saturday morning cartoons more than me and my friends, as we religiously tuned in to see the heroic Autobots fight the evil Decepticons in 'Transformers.' I don't know what my friends eventually thought of the way it was handled on the big screen, but, to me (besides the voice acting of Peter Cullen), it all seemed like a load of moving, spiky lumps of metal thrashing around, loosely interspersed with a teenage love story.  I wasn't really a fan.

However, I then heard that the next installment of the money-making franchise would be a 'spin-off' about the little yellow hero, 'Bumblebee.' After what came before I wasn't going to waste my time with this one.  Yet the reviews came in and many people believed that this is what a 'Transformers' movie should be.  I didn't watch it in the cinema, but I sampled it on the small screen.

I was impressed.  Gone were the weird and totally different character designs of the giant transforming robots.  Now they looked exactly like I remembered from the eighties cartoon.  Not only that, but they were battling on their home planet of Cybertron (never really explored on the big screen).  I definitely think that this is what a 'Transformers' movie should be.

Then it moved to Earth at about the five minutes mark.  From there it went down hill (for me).  Gone were the familiar metal faces and now we were back with another teenage romance and pointless human characters, all of which sidelined the true (robotic) stars at every turn.

There was some action thrown in, but it was nothing special and if you enjoy car chases and robots fighting then those scenes are pretty entertaining.  They were good, but too little compared to the teenagers and their families.

Overall, I was really disappointed with the film.  I watched the original 'Transformers' movies (parts 1-3 - I gave up after that) on DVD and ended up just skipping most scenes involving only humans, in favour of actually seeing the (true) 'stars' of the show - those who'd I've been following for around forty years.  If I ever choose to watch 'Bumblebee' I'll probably skip the human scenes again.  Maybe I'm just old.  But then Netflix kindly released 'Transformers: War For Cybertron' and - for me - that's an example of how do to 'Tranformers' right!

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back