In a movie season brimming with sequels, the one surefire new experience of the summer is director Michael Bay’s “Transformers,” a conk-up-side-of-the-head action film with battling alien robots, exploding missiles and a particular penchant for peril.

The film is long, clocking in at 2 hours, 24 minutes, but is so packed with CGI action, jokes and homages to the original TV ‘toon series that fanboys likely won’t mind at all.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution saw “Transformers” at a critics screening Thursday night. The film officially debuts Tuesday though there will be early screenings for the public on Monday night.

The plot involves gigantic good and bad alien robots who, when they’re not fighting each other over the future of Earth, morph into sleek American automobiles and such (you can smell the General Motors tie-in already). Shia LaBeouf plays a high school student who gets sucked into the fray.

Here’s some of what moviegoers can expect:

The special effects: The robots’ transformations from cars, trucks and jets to Godzilla-sized fighting behemoths are complicated and involving and probably more real looking than any previous Bay film (“Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor,” the “Bad Boys” movies). Look especially for the giant robotic scorpion attack (it starts about 40 minutes into the film) that grabs attention and never lets go.

‘Bot vs. ‘bot: More intricate than robots fighting soliders is the heroic Autobots taking on the evil Decepticons, especially in huge physical exchanges that make a wreck of downtown Los Angeles.

Shia LaBeouf: Hollywood’s newest everykid, the young actor (he just turned 21) seems to have the ability to sell anything, from kiddie TV (“Even Stevens”) and horror (“Disturbia”) to animation voiceovers (“Surf’s Up”) and now this.

The noise: If there are any script deficiencies, they seem masked by not only constant camera movement but continuous, ear-shattering blasts, creaks, shouts and certainly the aural scrapes of metal against metal.

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