The Transformers themselves don’t work that well on the small screen. All that beautiful detail gets lost, so the creatures most often look like a jumble of nondescript moving bits. Couple that with director Michael Bay’s perpetually moving camera and short shots and you’ve got visually incoherent robot-on-robot combat. You can’t tell who’s who, let alone what they’re doing.

Apart from that (and the pitiful excuse for a story), everything is dandy. Lots of stuff blows up, and the action set pieces get bigger every time. Some are imaginative, particularly the ball-bearing robots and the sinking of the aircraft carrier.

The cast pumps out energy to match the bang-bang, with lots of laughs from Kevin Dunn and Julie White, returning as hero Sam’s (Shia LaBeouf) parents, and John Turturro back as Agent Simmons.

It’s so much fun, you almost don’t notice the story: bad robots want to destroy the Earth and need the stuff in Sam’s brain to do it; good robots like the Earth.

Along with the usual how-to elements, the feature-length making-of doc is remarkably candid about the mercenary motivations for making the movie and how the filmmakers cobbled together the story. It also provides a good portrait of Bay that seems designed to justify his reputation for being hard to work with.

EXTRAS Disc one: Bay and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman commentary. English, French, Spanish audio and subtitles. Disc two: seven-part making-of, Bay in Tokyo, Transformers and pre-vis docs. Widescreen. English audio. English, French, Spanish subtitles.