Movie Review: Real Steel

            Okay, I’ll admit something: first time I heard about Real Steel it was in the pre-movie trivia slides. The picture of the robots in the ring was blurry, not giving me a good idea of what to expect, and I thought, “Oh, great, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots 2.0. That will be terrible.”

            I was wrong. (I say this with pride)

            The movie was surprisingly poignant and touching. It was less about robots and more about a man reconnecting with the son he abandoned at birth, about the underdog taking a stand and rising to the top (or, at least, close to it), about redemption. While I didn’t approve of eleven-year-old Max’s (Dakota Goyo) language habits, Charlie (Hugh Jackman) proved to be a better dad than he thought, and I was moved close to tears near the end, at Atom’s and Zeus’ fight. (I LOVED the look on the Japanese guy’s face when he broke the glass panel in frustration. Priceless!)

            Anyway, the story moved at a good pace, introducing us to the main characters and possible problems right away and not lagging at all. It moved to show us dilemmas (broken robots, no money) and Charlie’s arrogance and isolation in the world—until he meets Max, that is. While first I found myself indignant he would try and sell his son (as Max puts it), he redeemed himself later when he let Max keep and work with Atom, the generation 2 sparring bot that Charlie doesn’t think stands a chance in the ring. Well, he turns out to be wrong.

            Charlie’s relationship with Max progresses into a father/son one and less of broke-deadbeat/cling-on-pest. Charlie starts boxing again—at Max’s wish—to get Atom ready for fights he never thought the bot would win, and at the end he uses Atom’s shadowbox technology to nearly take down Zeus, the bot-boxing world champ.

            One thing to note is the smooth integration of a high-tech society into what we would see as a modern-day world. There’s no super-robot-servants or flying cars, but technology like 20-year-from-now-phones and boxing bots and their controls are super-high-tech and very impressive, making me feel less like an outsider looking into the future and more like someone who could walk into Detroit and see the bot-boxing ring any day of the week.

            Also, characters were connectable and real, a pleasant change in the world of Hollywood. I was on the edge of my seat the entire last 15 or so minutes, begging Atom to take down Zeus…but then I realized at the end: it’s not a story of a robot winning the title of bot-boxing champion. It’s a story about the people reconnected in a common cause, about redemption of a deadbeat dad and his young son who was disappointed in him. It was refreshing and touching at the same time, and I would see it again any day. 5 kernels out of 5.