It’s not just nice that Bumblebee comes back to save the day, and it’s not just that we get to watch him blow stuff up good. (For the record, he does blow stuff up real good.) But it’s the style that Caple Jr. brings to the sequence, making it pop rather than feel like a hollow resurrection dictated by corporate overlords. It’s also, in my humble opinion, one of the best needle drops in recent memory, with LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” ushering our hero out of the plane and onto the battlefield. It’s a perfect music cue, particularly given that the film is set during the ’90s. Chef’s kiss.
I can only speak to my own experience here, but this moment gave me actual goosebumps. I am and always have been a blockbuster junkie. 2007’s “Transformers” was an important movie for me, and one I’ll defend to the death to this day. But I was right there with so many of you when “Age of Extinction” and “The Last Knight” bit off more than they could chew. More than that, I am now a man closer to 40 than he is to 30. It’s easy to lose that childlike sense of wonder that I, as a kid fresh out of high school, was able to have in ’07. This moment brought me right back to that fateful summer and satisfied the popcorn movie junkie in my heart. I can only hope I’m not alone in that.
There’s also the notion of what the Transformers, as characters, represent. Optimus Prime and the Autobots are inherently optimistic characters. Despite all their species has endured, there is goodness in them. There always exists hope. There is an unshakable moral compass. Bumblebee is the best of them, and that moment was heroically optimistic. That’s “Transformers.”
I tried to make the case for this as one of the 50 best movie moments of 2023 on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which you can listen to below: