I am not dewy eyed with nostalgia for the Transformers. I owned some of the Hasbro toys when I was young, but I was more intrigued than delighted by the cheap, albeit cleverly constructed robots. After a day of enjoyment the toys would cease to function as action figures and no longer hold together tightly in their mechanistic disguises. As figurines they were too stiff and boxy, as vehicles unusable because the toy loosened quickly; an inconvenient arm would fall out of an F-15 in mid-flight, or a noble head would fall out from beneath a Porsche chassis to become a tragic-looking middle brake. Besides these I also avidly collected the Marvel comics, but these too left much to be desired. The colors were so primary and the drawings so unsophisticated that the comic art looked like a parody of the Japanimation stuff that was becoming popular at the same time: the crudeness of the dynamic robot designs looked like sloppiness instead of high style.

In short, as wonderful as the concept of the Transformers was, in reality they were junk. Fitting, then, that the live-action movie be directed by Michael Bay. Now, it would be unfortunate to huff indignantly at Bay’s films. He makes bad movies, but they belong to a special sub-category of bad movies, one filled with clunkers so horrendous that to attack them is to attack the very idea of Hollywood itself. His films encompass all the worst elements of humungous blockbusters, true, but no one with any affection for the history of Hollywood—no one who loved Nathanael West, say, or thrilled to dry exposes like Altman’s “The Player”—could ever really despise them. Behind-the-scenes tales of lurid parties, sanctioned insanity, and showbiz hedonism never fail to please, so why shouldn’t the actual films these men make delight us as well?

And “Transformers” is a marvel. It manages to celebrate the dominance of the American Imperium in an adolescent boys’ adventure movie. Only Bay could have magically merged the gung-ho might of the U.S. military with the classic Hot Wheels fantasies of teenaged American boys. So mighty is the American military that despite the overwhelming power and strength of the Decepticons the only thing preventing their immediate destruction is a power outage keeping NORAD from scrambling the Air Force. Of course, just how potent these Decepticons are is a matter open to debate. In an invasion tactic reminiscent of Rumsfeldian arrogance, their leader visits Earth to find their lost Rubik’s Cube only to have a dizzy spell arriving at the North Pole. He falls into a cavern to cool off for a few centuries while his cronies scour the planet looking for him, their advanced alien technology apparently lacking the GPS navigational system of the average minivan.

It’s almost witty, actually, the way “Transformers” uses its heroes (flesh and metal) as exactly what they were in the first place: toys.  This story is CGI jets that whirl and click into bus-smashing robots. This is a baddie monster-bot hissing, “Give me that cube, boy!”  This is Jon Voight taking a shotgun and killing off what remained of his personal dignity along with a robot that looks like a clicking wad of badly disorganized paperclips. This is one of the “top computer hackers in the world” who looks like she walked out of Maxim Magazine. This is bad quips, gratuitous T & A, car chases, the Hoover Dam, grenade launchers, piss jokes, command centers with nerds chattering about “the grid”, hot rods, babes, and Bernie Mac all strung together by a plot so incoherent that it sounds as if each morning of the shoot Bay shuffled the script like a blackjack dealer. In the end “Transformers” is not quite cinema. It’s Bay letting out his id to play in a $200 million dollar sandbox. Seeing this movie feels like watching an endless series of National Guard commercials randomly spliced into a NASCAR broadcast.

None of this would have been apparent to the actors on the sets who, pre-post, were probably delivering their lines to gaffers standing on forklifts. Any more CGI in “Transformers” and it would have been a Pixar production. Perhaps this is why, oblivious to the cartoon images that would later be added to fill the screen with giant robots acting like prat-falling megaton clowns, Shia LaBeouf gave such a fresh, endearing performance as the human sidekick, Sam Witwicky. Sam is little more than a walking cliché, a posterboy for a fascist society in which every boy dreams of girls and fast cars while waiting to grow up and use state-of-the-art weaponry—Bay pauses reverently as a commando proudly tells Sam “You’re a soldier now”—but LaBeouf is so much better than the script that it seems as if he’s in a different movie. As with his turn in “Disturbia”, one hopes that LaBeouf, so winning with his array of charming quirks and unspoiled boyishness, will complete his Hollywood apprenticeship quickly.

For his part, Bay will never grow up, and more power to him. “Transformers” features some fantastic action sequences, CGI so realistic you can smell the exhaust fumes, and enough eye-popping robots to satisfy even the most grizzled hardware fetishist. More than these elements, its saving grace is its director’s dauntless naivete. The difference between Bay’s movies and similar budget-busting monstrosities is that his films are aspirational rather than cynical. They’re stamped with a personality, however alarming it may be, and a bad auteur is always preferable to a faceless hack. “Transformers” is full of the fever dreams of empire, but they belong to the imagination of a young boy, and though it is one of the silliest movies to come along in years, it’s somehow disarming. Bay invokes so many archetypal American qualities that the movie approaches a strange fusion of cyberpunk and Norman Rockwell, “The X-Files” and John Wayne.  There was a telling hint of Bay’s emotional age when he filmed small boys playing with toy Space Shuttles near a JFK/NASA mural at the triumphant conclusion of “Armageddon”. I submit that to love “Transformers” one would have to be brainless, but to hate it one would have to be heartless.