Age Of Extinction suffers from a similar problem to the earlier Transformers films: it’s massively cluttered, almost to the point where the robots in disguise are reduced to bit-players in their own movie. Even Optimus Prime, brilliantly voiced by Peter Cullen though he may be, is barely recognisable from the inspiring, faintly Shatner-esque leader he was in the comics, TV show and 1986 movie.

This version of Prime is terse and ornery. He solves leadership problems by punching his usurpers in the face. He threatens to abandon Earth in the face of alien invasion – something he promised never to do in Dark Of The Moon, to the best of our recollection – and even goes off on a murder mission in space at one point.

The other Transformers barely register; Bumblebee’s now a clumsy and practically mute sidekick, while Hound is a pot-bellied, bearded gun nut who smokes a cigar (actually a bullet case or something) and shoots caged, harmless aliens in the face because they look a bit odd. Megatron’s now Galvatron, and only appears in the film for about 15 minutes.

The writers of the Transformers films seem to have a certain lack of confidence in the robots’ ability to carry a film on their own. How else do we explain the constant urge to crowd every movie with human characters? Like its predecessors, Age Of Extinction is led by an extended cast of particularly fine character actors. Nominal leading man Mark Wahlberg is joined by Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer, Sophia Myles and Li Bingbing.

While human characters have appeared in Transformers stories since the 1980s, they never barged their way into the frame in quite the same way as they do in the current run of films. When you start to compare Transformers to other recent adaptations of comics or television series, its treatment starts to look a bit odd. Can you imagine an adaptation of the Avengers where most of the story was told from the perspective of ordinary members of the public?