Mix Rocky with Paper Moon, add in robots, and voila! A really fun, highly enjoyable hit of a movie
Real Steel, directed by Shawn Levy, is one of the very few movies I've seen in recent years where the audience I was in actually broke into applause in various scenes. A masterfully done tale of underdogs - a boy and his dad and a discarded robot - going against the odds, it really does get you pumped up to that level. I got a bigger kick out of this movie than I have from any other this year. It really is that much fun to watch.
The germ idea for Real Steel comes from a 1956 short story by Richard Matheson that was made into a classic Twilight Zone episode, and the look is right out of the Transformers franchise, but the heart - and there's a lot of it in this film - comes in equal measure from two films one would ordinarily have never linked together: John Avildsen's boxing classic Rocky (1976) and Peter Bogdanovich's Depression-era con-man & kid road trip classic Paper Moon (1973).
The plot is set in the not so distant future of 2020, where human boxing...
Grab the popcorn!
What a great movie. Sure, the storyline is predictable, but the entertainment value is huge. The thing about this movie is that I could see the depicted robot fights, the computer technology, basically everything about it, as coming about in the normal course of our society. A wholly believable story, probably one of the easiest SF movies to watch in terms of suspending disbelief in quite some time -- and it's worth mentioning that this actually *is* science fiction in the classic sense; a little technology, all of it reasonable, around which wraps a good story. It's not a fantasy, as are many so-called SF stories today.
So here we have really great robots, some awesome robot fighting, a not-overly annoying kid, and scenes that are (obviously intentionally) reminiscent of big-arena sports today, all combined with some feel-good stuff in the classic sense.
It kind of looks like a kid's movie before you watch it; then when you watch it, there are adult-ish...
The best - action for husbands and a tear jerker for wives
Technically a Sci-Fi movie, this movie is really a story of a father redeeming his relationship with a son he never knew, and of the character change that occurs in the father throughout the movie. The story is very well told, drawing you into the characters experiences, and although my wife loathes Sci-Fi movies, she loved this movie and cried during some scenes. It's got a lot action in it as well and is fun to watch. I do not watch many movies twice, but I'll be buying this movie and we'll be enjoying it repeatedly. The robot they prepare together serves as a device for a David and Goliath storyline as well. Hard to believe when reading this, but you'll be cheering for the father and son and their robot as well.
Click to Editorial Reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment