This movie should have been terrible. Michael Bay “directing”; writing so bad the audience was moved to groan in unison at several points, and a plot copied blow by blow from from My First Action-Adventure Book for Boys.

Instead, I am pleased to say that it was freakin’ awesome. It starts off with so obvious an E.T. flavour I wondered if Steven Spielberg had been moved to wrench the camera from Bay’s greasy mitts. Sam Witwicky might well be Elliot, all grown up and trying to buy his first car, and Bumblebee does a creditable impression of the plucky, lonesome alien trying to stay hidden and phone home.

So, for forty-five gratifying minutes it is harmlessly amusing, gee-whiz exciting and mildly portentous. Then the rest of the Autobots arrive, Bay’s Armageddon instincts kick back in and it all goes brilliantly, messily overboard. Enter the shadowy (and superfluous) government agency, headed up by a what-the-hell-am-I-doing-in-this-film John Turturro! Hear science beaten to a linguistic and logical pulp!

“I’m not talking Few-rier transforms here!” Then what the hell are you talking?

Scientist #1: “It’s made of an element we’ve never seen before!”

Scientist #2: “We carbon dated it to one million years ago!”

You’ve got to laugh, really. Fortunately it was funny enough so that the derisive guffaws were more or less drowned out by genuine laughter.

It isn’t without flaws (obviously!): someone pulling the cinematographic strings in Hollywood needs to take a stand against Saving Private Ryan-style camera jitter during action scenes; the soundtrack blatantly plagiarises both Kill Bill and The Terminator, and the characters aren’t so much drawn with broad brush strokes as with those whiffy permanent markers.

I’m nitpicking, really. I mean come on: giant transforming robots.