Superhero Rewind reviews the film that turned “superhero” into a genre, Superman, from an in-depth, historical perspective. Enjoy!

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

I had no hope for this movie, which may have influenced my opinion, but I found it enjoyable.  Astro Boy is surprisingly touching in all the right places, and not surprisingly noble in all the typical ways.  Ultimately, it’s a concoction of an exciting yet familiar formula, and a few good laughs in the middle of more bad ones.

The major reason I enjoyed this movie was that it had more emotion than I thought possible.  I thought that Dr. Tenma, the creator of Astro Boy voiced by Nicolas Cage, would be happy to create his invention and then send him out into an excepting world where the boy-like robot would protect humanity.  This is simply not the case, and could potentially convey my ignorance of the source material.  Astro Boy is a robot created in the likeness of Dr. Tenma’s son Toby.  During the first act of the film Toby is the victim of a fatal accident that weighs very heavily on the mind of Dr. Tenma.  Tenma’s newly shaky psyche leads to his creation of the robot who becomes Astro Boy.  The original intent was for Astro Boy to replace Toby as a convincingly surrogate son.  Fortunately for the narrative, and unfortunately for Tenma, he grows more dissatisfied with his creation since he knows that the robot isn’t truly his son.  This plot point adds much needed and effective emotion that drives the film.

The plot hinges on Astro Boy’s status as an outsider.  He’s not human even though he appears to be one.  He’s not a robot because he looks like a human.  And Tenma rejects him, so he has no family.  This is all interesting, but each rigidly divided segment of the film detracts from its overall cohesiveness of narrative.  But that’s a small complaint.

The films biggest problem is something that I’m going to call Bull Science.  A source of never ending power has been created prior to the start of the film.  In doing so they created two power cores: a blue, positively charged core and a red, negatively charged core.  Even though the terms positive and negative have actual meanings to science, this doesn’t stop the writers from using it interchangeably with good and evil.  During the film, both cores are said to be unpredictable.  So why is the blue core safer than the red core?  It’s as if they think electrons are angry little troublemakers who circle the nucleus ready to invade if it weren’t for that pesky electric charge.

The major villain in the film is a militant President named General Stone, voiced by Donald Sutherland. I feel this type of villain is shallow and used to death.  At this point the horse is dust and they’re still trying to beat it.    His only motivation is power, and there’s no logic to what he does.  Despite the pleas of his scientists he still decides to use the somehow more dangerous red core to power his war machine.  In its own stereotyped shallow way, General Stone’s motivation makes sense, but it isn’t as intimidating as an intelligent villain.

This leads me to more Bull Science.  Every robot has a personality and consciousness.  They’re not just mindless machines.  Even the window squeegees have personality.  This is intended to draw a parallel between the average human who abuses robots and the governmental villain who abuses humans.  It’s also used to bring in more mediocre humor in the form of three bumbling useless robots who want to rebel against humans.  The parallel is ultimately shortchanged in favor of the main plot and the eventual reconciliation between robots and humans boils down to a small gesture from Tenma to his robot butler.  I can’t help but wonder why the writers would devote precious screen-time to something that ultimately doesn’t matter.  The time would have been better spent establishing a more complicated villain. 

Another instance of Bull Science: The villain has the technology to track and instantly locate Astro Boy’s power source, but conveniently looses the ability for most of the second act, and completely forgets in the third act.  Maybe Astro Boy fell out of range, but with all the speedy technology I doubt that would have been a problem for more than an hour or two.

The climax of the film, while epic, is contrived.  The major villain ends up being a giant robot that can absorb and fully utilize organic and inorganic matter.  The robot absorbs quite a bit of the city to become giant and then bumbles around the city unable to successfully locate Astro Boy despite the fact that he probably absorbed the tracking technology.  And since the robot has no qualms about destroying the city why couldn’t the robot just keep absorbing until he found Astro Boy regardless of whether he could absorb Astro Boy himself.

The Verdict:  I enjoyed this film, but I have to give it a 2.5 out of 5.  It suffers from the opposite problems that plagued Where the Wild Things Are.  Astro Boy was entertaining, but poorly thought out.

-Vince