High school student Sam Witwicky is thrilled when his dad offers to buy him his first car. He ends up with a battered Ford Camaro that turns out to be more than meets the eye. In fact it's a heroic Autobot warrior from the planet Cybertron, by the name of Bumblebee. Their deadly enemies are the villainous Decepticons. Both groups find themselves on earth searching for the whereabouts of the Allspark, which has the power to destroy the whole planet. And only Sam can help the good guys to find it first before the Decepticons get their hands on it and awaken their master Megatron.

You can see every cent spent on developing the Transformers robots. The design of the robots is a master-class in how to animate CGI automata. For a start, they look the business; there are a range of textures and reflective qualities to the metals, right down to different paint effects such as metallic sparkles or matt brushed steel. The animation is fluid without being too slick and there's a good sense of weight and movement. The bots aren't as chunky and clumsy as in the cartoons, so there is a lot more fine detail, especially in the smaller creations. You can see the amount of effort the animators have put into each robot, figuring out exactly how each component would have to move interdependently to enable transformation from robot to vehicle mode. You can sense all the cogs and gears underneath the facades that enable this and can even see some of the tiny moving parts. The transformations are of course accompanied by the traditional sound effects from the cartoon series to keep the fans happy.

The screenplay by Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzmann is short on character development and long on incident. Sam Witwicky is the usual geeky but nice accidental hero of the piece, mooning after the beautiful Mikaela. The Autobots are paragons of goodness while the Decepticons are two-dimensional villains that never explain their motivations. At times Optimus Prime feels like a lazy plot motor because of his function as narrator over the opening and closing credits and also because his dialogue is exposition heavy. Otherwise he's just another heroic archetype. He covers the whole origin of the Transformers in a single monologue. The peripheral characters lack depth; there's a bunch of computer geeks who exist solely to chivvy along the plot or provide comic relief. The army unit is just there to provide muscle when the big fight comes and Agent Simmons is intended to obstruct the characters and inform the audience.

Shia Laboeuf is rapidly becoming one of my favourite young actors. He can play everyman types without being bland and has good emotional range and comic timing. Possibly more importantly in this film he can convince the viewer that he's seeing things that aren't really there and interacting with them. As Sam he's geeky but likeable and cheeky but sarcastic and he's not your average production line square-jawed hero. As an actor he's growing in confidence and I hope to see more from him in future.

The original music by Steve Jablonsky is heavy on big orchestral arrangements and epic brass, as you'd expect from an action movie score. But it is mixed with occasional bouts of synthesized choruses that reference the futuristic characters. The scene is set for chaos by forbidding percussion and deep-voiced choruses as the Decepticons attack and sweeping strings accompany the arrival of the Autobots who are then referred to with heavenly choruses. Sam is represented by twanging acoustic guitar. Insistent rhythms add excitement to action sequences and there's plenty of heroic brass that brings an epic quality to the production that matches the scope of the movie. The other soundtrack choices include a series of musical gags as Bumblebee tries to help Sam get the girl with tracks like "Drive" by The Cars, (which features the lyrics "Who's going to drive you home tonight?"), "Sexual Healing", "I Feel Good" and "Baby Come Back" and the usual crunching rock associated with action movies. The music is appropriate and effective throughout.