I could happily have gone my whole life without enjoying a Michael Bay film. Bay, for those who don’t know, is the director responsible for such travesties as the Bad Boys movies, The Island, and Armageddon–a film that abandons logic and cause-and-effect to such a degree that, when viewed as surrealist comedy, it actually borders on genius in places. (It also has Liv Tyler.)

It’s not so much that Bay is a bad director, (in many ways he isn’t), or that he’s incapable of good work, (The Rock is at least fairly enjoyable), but his self-indulgence tends to ruin projects that in other hands might work out so much better. The Island is a case in point – the first half is a fairly entertaining rip-off of Logan’s Run, complete with hammy acting and skintight Lycra jumpsuits. Then Bay gets bored with the plot, and the second half becomes a long and eventually tedious series of action set pieces that slowly saps your will to live. Bay’s trademarks are big explosions, and lots of them, extreme slow-mo shots of just about anything and everything, and violence so exquisitely shot that it’s faintly pornographic. Personally I tend to reach the end of his films feeling exhausted, half-deaf, and convinced that my eyes should be bleeding.

All of this is true of Transformers – and it’s still ace. It’s also radical and probably even bodacious (because somehow, only 80′s superlatives can really do it justice). It has the faults of all of Bay’s other movies, often all at the same time – a silly plot, bewildering lack of pacing, inconsistency of tone, and those mammoth set-pieces that leave you feeling as if someone’s been kicking you in the head for twenty minutes.

But it also has giant robots beating the crap out of each other – and anyone who doesn’t enjoy watching giant robots fight is clearly insane. Whatever the credits may say, this is Industrial Light and Magic’s film, and after a long period of having their crown stolen by upstarts like Weta, ILM are now unquestionably back at the forefront of CG effects work. The transformers look magnificent – very little like their counterparts from the comics or cartoon, but magnificent nonetheless. And that’s when they’re standing still. When they’re moving, particularly when they’re transforming, there really are no words for how astonishingly cool they look. ILM have achieved something that probably deserves to be considered art, and if there was nothing else in the movie then it would still be worth watching purely for their handiwork.

Fortunately, the rest of it is better than you’d expect. The acting is mostly fine, and Megan Fox and Shia LeBeouf make for charismatic leads. The story is fairly silly, and made more so by Bay’s not really caring about it, but it holds everything together and at least the script is decent – in places, in fact, it’s even very funny, though it tends to go for laughs when gravitas would benefit more. Take away the giant robots and it’s a solid summer movie, well made and competent in most regards.  But include them, complete with some of the most astounding effects sequences ever committed to film, and it becomes something altogether more special.

Transformers trailer