The other day I went to see the Michael Bay film Bumblebee at Rochester Cinema. On the way to the cinema the tide was low, but was lower on the way out, possibly at a minimum, all the mud banks were showing. Out in the river there’s a crane on a barge! A proper crane with wheels and stuff, just sitting on a large barge. I do love the big stuff we make. So, I started looking for a satellite picture of the mud flats at the edge of the river and ended up getting excited about the historical photographs available in Google Earth. I probably owe them something for using these clips.
If you move slightly further east from this picture you can see the Shorts Brothers Flying Boats resting on the river Medway, that must’ve been such an amazing sight. Sunderlands taking off from the Medway before Shorts was relocated to Northern Ireland.
Next up are the 60s decade of sex and drugs and rock and roll. No motorway though.
The original Medway motorway bridge opened in 1963 and on closer inspection I think the construction work in the photograph is the building of the supports.
By 1990 you can see the bridge and then the area that will be reclaimed for the entertainment complex.
In this photograph the cinema and nightclub are there, along with the new Channel Tunnel Rail Link bridge for the high speed train network and another road bridge. I think the original is also being “beefed up”.
The bridges are complete and it looks like there is a trail bike track the other side of the railway.
This last picture has the new housing estate in the Medway Gate. I’m not sure what their sunlight is like as they live in the bottom of a pit.
Back to the process of writing this film review. I rated the film on IMDB, as usual, and there’s a communication buried in this site to explain the rating process. I tweeted this result, because it makes this site look prettier than me just writing the result.
I rated Bumblebee (2018) 4/10 #IMDb https://t.co/7HMrwujRr6
— Ian Parish (@iparish) December 28, 2018
Well, this film was the usual mess of a Michael Bay film. It starts somewhere and leads us in the knowledge of how Bumblebee and the others got to Earth along with some stuff about saving the world. It really wasn’t an interesting film and I got bored with the middle hour. Worth a watch if you want to complete your set of Transformers movies. But much like the very first movie the transformers were too “busy and quick”.
Would robots fight each other the same way that humans do? Would they try to hit each other about the head until they pass out? Would they have a voice module in the same place as a human? Would they have independently developed bullets and missiles that look like our Earth weapons?
I think not.