Saturday, October 1, 2011

Real Steel

Real Steel produced by Dreamworks. Rated PG-13 for some violence. Released 2011.

I went to a free showing of this thinking that it was suppose to be a cheesy sci-fi movie for adults, but it turns out its actually a movie for kids and I thought how sad for their marketing campaign if they didn't get it to the right audience. For kids, it was a pretty decent movie.

It's a story of redemption for a man both in his boxing career and for the love of his son that he's never taken care of before. It's set in the future, but a believable future, where things are shiny and glossy, just an amped up version of what we already have. But in this future, humans don't box anymore because spectators wanted total destruction, so now robots do the fighting. After destroying all his fighting bots, the father, Charlie, goes with his son to a junkyard where an old sparing bot's arm saves the boys life when he falls off a cliff. He decides to rescue this bot and bring it into the ring without his father's approval. It turns out that this little bot (whose hinted at having some level of Artificial Intelligence but its never confirmed) packs quite a punch. The two guys hit the road winning fight after fight and challenge the reigning champion for a full on battle.

While this movie has a PG-13 rating for some violence, I thought it would have been PG because there is no blood or human killing and no sex and no cuss words. It seemed pretty wholesome as far as movies go these days. Obviously, the robots do fight to the death so if you don't want to promote violence of any kind then I guess this wouldn't be the movie for you. I just hope it gets to the write audience.

Book connections: Based on a 1956 short story called "Steel" written by Richard Matheson. The Twilight Zone also based an episode "Steel" off the same story.

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