A new Russian advertisement for ‘Bumblebee’ has arrived, featuring previously unseen footage from the upcoming ‘Transformers’ movie, including an oh-so-short glimpse of Decepticon Soundwave in full old school cassette player glory, complete with Ravage cassette.
Unfortunately, as stated, this is a Russian clip, so unless you speak Russian, the dialogue and written language on the screen is incomprehensible. But even so, if you are looking forward to the new film, you should enjoy seeing a bit more of it, before it arrives in December.
‘Bumblebee’ is in a precarious position. The regular ‘Transformers’ films have seemingly run out of steam after five installments. The critics have always hated these movies, but audiences still turned out in full force for them, until last year’s ‘The Last Knight’. Paramount reportedly scrapped plans for a sixth regular ‘Transformers’ installment, but ‘Bumblebee’ was already in the works. Paramount is alleged to be plotting a reboot of ‘Transformers’, but what happens if ‘Bumblebee’ proves to be a huge hit? Do they bench the others in order to let this little guy dominate theaters for a few years?
As with all of the previously seen ‘Bumblebee’ clips, there seems to have been a serious effort to make this film “sweeter” or “cuter” than the prior testosterone-heavy installments. The inclusion of Hailee Steinfeld makes it clear that the creators are hoping to make this the most female-friendly ‘Transformers’ so far. Others have already pointed out a similarity to what has been shown of ‘Bumblebee’ to the beloved animated film, ‘The Iron Giant‘.
And setting ‘Bumblebee’ in 1987, closer to the heyday of the first generation ‘Transformers’ allows the creators to more accurately draw from the original designs, most notably Soundwave, who was depicted as a satellite in ‘Revenge of the Fallen’, after plans to change him into a helicopter outraged fans.
Directed by Travis White, ‘Bumblebee’ stars Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Len Cariou, Kenneth Choi and John Ortiz with the voices of Angela Bassett, Peter Cullen, David Sobolov, and Justin Theroux, and opens on December 21, 2018.
