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The wooden animation, the stilted, corny dialogue, the moralizing plots that often couldn't find a coherent three-act structure with a divining rod--the 1980s were truly an atrocious time for children's entertainment. So for those of you born after 1975 whose bowels instinctively clenched when you heard that Hasbro tapped überhack Michael Bay to bring Optimus Prime into the stadium-seating-and-THX era, just know that the multikajillion-dollar version of the shape-changing robot saga is actually an entertaining mix of knowing comedy and hyperviolent action. At least for its first hour, until that semicoherent plotting, cost-cutting animation, and classic '80s corniness finally shows up at last--which at least makes it no worse than its source material.

That plot, such as it is: a million billion years ago, the planet Cybertron, home to sentient robotic life forms, was rocked by a civil war over a giant cube, what the Transformers call the "Allspark," which is the source of all robot life and like a cross between the 2001 monolith and that thing the Borg drove around in Star Trek: The Next Generation. When the cube was lost into the depths of space, both races of Transformer, the evil Decepticons and the upstanding Autobots, went to retrieve it, eventually reaching Earth, where--whaddya know--the cube crash-landed and was eventually scooped up by the U.S. government.

Cut to the present day after a U.S. Army base in the Middle East is obliterated by a gargantuan humanoid robot out to tap into the Department of Defense's computers, searching for the cube, and sarcastic teenage geek Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is ripped from his normal, if humiliating, upper-middle-class high school life. See, it turns out that it was Sam's great-grandfather, a 19th-century Arctic explorer, who first discovered the cube, and Sam has inherited the artifacts that contain its location. And if the Decepticons find it before the Autobots do, they'll use it to make all of human technology turn into evil robots.

Got all that? Good, because unfortunately you don't really learn what any of the stuff about the cube means until almost the third act, and even then it's still kind of confusing. The far more enjoyable first half of Transformers plays like a tense, giddy mix of Aliens, Mars Attacks!, and a million teenage comedies, mixing explosive action sequences with a little dread and a wealth of self-referential humor, as the humans scramble to figure out exactly what this mystery menace is that's attacking them and hapless Sam confronts jocks and is terrorized by his new car, which he believes to be alive until it turns out to be a Transformer named Bumblebee. As Sam and the object of his affection--pretty, snobby "evil jock concubine" Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), who turns out to be, duh, "more than meets the eye"--are drawn into the Transformers' struggle, whatever tension and humor the movie's built up gradually dissipates into splashier fight scenes and cornier plot points. Really, it's all over when the Autobots finally show up, with leader Optimus Prime intoning earnest guff about magical cubes, having learned to speak English through the internet, which is how alien robots apparently know how to quip back and forth with each other like they're on a Seinfeld casting call.

Despite the barely digestable creamed corn of the plot, the movie's mostly got its cyborg tongue stuck in its robot cheek--the producers didn't cast Bernie Mac as a sleazy used-car salesman and Anthony Anderson as a roly-poly computer hacker for nothing. John Turturro practically oozes pork fat as an Area 51-esque government agent in a performance so hammy it makes J.K. Simmons' turn as J. Jonah Jameson look restrained. And to enjoy Transformers, you do have to believe in a world where the only two female characters are a spunky, raven-haired gamine mechanic with tanned hipbones that could put out an eye and a barely legal blond government code cracker with a sexy British accent--which is to say you probably have to be a dude.

But all the corniness--and pandering to teenage boys--in the world would be a snap to overlook if the movie's battles--which, along with the transformation sequences, are the whole reason the franchise even exists--weren't so goddamn frustrating. Let's be clear: In repose, these newly CGI'd Transformers look awesome, full of writhing biomechanical detail that makes the crap animation of the '80s come off like cave paintings. But when the metal fists start flying, your eyes start straining to figure out exactly what the hell is going on up there. Any sense of catharsis is undercut by the fact that Bay can't choreograph a fight scene between two giant robots to save his life. Maybe it's directorial ineptitude or maybe Bay was watching the bottom line of his estimated $150 million budget--messy shots of whirring machine parts and flaming debris flying across the screen are probably easier to fudge, and cheaper, than cleanly animated bouts between two 50-foot behemoths.

In fact, the only time the action connects is when you're confronted with the "human cost" of all these massive automatons grappling with one another on crowded city streets. There's not much gore--PG-13 and all, plus no one ever really died in'80s cartoons--but the body count in this movie is kinda mind-blowing. An entire Middle Eastern village of old men, women, and children is brutally wiped out by a scorpion-esque Decepticon that later spikes a U.S. soldier right in the head with its tail. At one point Megatron flicks away a pesky human in the heat of battle--as in, probably breaks every bone in the poor schlub's body. And folks actually cheered when a Paris Hilton-esque snob's steering wheel--brought to life by that pesky cube--leapt off the steering column and attacked her face.

Of course, it's ridiculous to get moralistic about a movie where robots from outer space--robots that speak in jive and transform into Chryslers--are destroying half of California in order to recapture a life-giving Rubik's Cube. And all of this property damage and loss of life is, well, hellishly exciting at times, if we're going to be totally honest. But it'd be easier not to get moralistic about a giant robot movie if the actual giant robot battles didn't devolve so often into smudgy, muddy blurs of digital video, plus heaps of smoke, incoherent gunfire, and screaming bystanders.

It might take a big-screen Thundercats for our generation to finally realize that nostalgia's only good for the toy companies, but for those of us who came home from school one day to discover that our mothers had summarily thrown out all of our Transformers, well, at least we now have new plastic crap to waste our money on.