IN the realm of mega budget blockbusters, no other franchise has felt as much like dead weight as Transformers. Sequel after sequel has bombarded us with near-incomprehensible action sequences where giant robots smash into one another, leaving the audience in the wind as to who exactly is fighting whom and for what and why we should even care.

It is with great relief that the latest in the series now takes things in a different direction, back into the past for a comparatively more intimate origin story about the most visually distinctive and likeable of the Transformers bunch. It turns out the more grounded you make a film about a giant transforming alien robot, the more impact it has on a gut level.

We jump back to 1987 where teenage girl Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld) is trying to find her own place in the world on the cusp of her 18th birthday. She’s weighed down by grief over losing her father, with whom she shared a passion for fixing cars, and feeling increasingly alienated from her family.

One day while scavenging at the local scrapyard for parts to fix her dad’s old car, she happens across a beat-up yellow Beetle which she eventually brings home in the hope of making it driveable. To her surprise the car transforms before her into a giant yellow robot.

Freaking out at first, she soon forms a bond with the machine she nicknames Bumblebee who, as it turns out, has been sent to protect earth by leader of his Autobot clan Optimus Prime. Charlie does her best to help protect him from government agents (led by John Cena’s gruff Agent Burns) and the villainous clan of Transformers, the Decepticons, who are trying to track him down.

The garish sensibilities of previous franchise director Michael Bay is replaced with a crisper, cleaner approach from Travis Knight. With the exception of the inevitable big final showdown – which succumbs somewhat (though thankfully never to the same fatal extent) to the messiness of the franchise’s worst rough-and-tumble beats – the action is well staged and often quite inventive.

Knight comes from the world of stop-motion animation, having previously made the Oscar-nominated Kubo And The Two Strings, and you can feel some of that idiosyncratic playfulness seeping into his approach here. You also feel his delightful reverence for the toys that inspired the franchise and the general idea of playing make-believe as you give your toys voices and personalities, something that was so often missing before.

That idea is sold more easily to the audience by the very fact that it’s set in the era in which the toys were first big; the sense of time and place is done in broad strokes and can be a little too on-the-nose. But its accentuated evocation of the era, including a killer pop soundtrack, is a fun backdrop for the action.

What makes it work more than anything, however, is that sense of the human touch embodied in the character of Charlie. Steinfeld’s committed and endlessly likeable presence really makes the film and she really sells the idea of a sweet-natured human-robot friendship helping an alienated teenage girl find her way in the world.

Despite its status as a prequel to what we know will come to pass, as well as an obvious setting up of a new offshoot franchise of its own, it works surprisingly well as a stand-alone piece.

In contrast to the mangled pile of spare parts the series had become, we now have a Transformers film that remembers to have fun and, most importantly, realises that even a little heart goes a long way.