Review of Real Steel (2011) by Oxana — 23 Aug 2014

I have no great love for boxing movies; I find that they have the same plot, pretty much ("Rocky Balboa" I watched and liked because of Milo Ventimiglia). Robot boxing, as an idea, seemed interesting to me (maybe it has to do with my love for the Transformers franchise), and Hugh Jackman, while not my favorite actor, didn't hurt.

With a slightly slow-ish start, the movie moves forward, and a traditional story of an old star who can no longer stay in the game becomes obvious. Throw in a son from a now-dead ex-girlfriend, whom he hasn't seen, and you have a story of personal growth in your hands. Charlie (Hugh Jackman) makes the same mistakes over and over, and you want to hit him on the head for that. It's good that his son Max (Dakota Goyo) does that a fair bit.

The two seem to have nothing in common until Max finds an old sparring bot and decides it will be his robot. Charlie, who is pretty much struggling at this point, allows his son this small ray of light and eventually finds his son might have an idea or two to give him when it comes to robot boxing and rediscovering the fighting spirit.

Bailey (beautiful Evangeline Lilly) and Charlie have some kind of thing going on, but I think that was really unnecessary. It was good they didn't bring that to the front too much.

The most important relationship is that of Charlie and Max - and their robot, Atom, that in the ends proves that a sparring bot can take on a champion.

I found the whole concept of the movie very interesting, and they explained the past of robot boxing and the system altogether quite satisfactorily.

When it came to the main event, a fight with the unchallenged champion Zeus, you can see one of the most annoying things they adopted from boxing movies; the whole story has been progressing at a fairly lazy pace, at least in the beginning, and when the most interesting part begins, they cut it short by showing the first round, some of the second one, then cut into the last round with slow-motion clips. I know it would probably get boring to watch several rounds of robots smacking each other, but this way, it was underlined how quickly they cut to the finale, instead of giving the audience more of what made the whole movie so awesome.

All in all an exhilarating, brilliant movie that was touching and adrenaline-pumping at the same time.

A special mention for Zeus' creator, Tak Mashido (Karl Yune); they didn't show him too much, or tell too much about him, but he was absolutely one of my favorites in the film!

I also found it quite amusing that in the future, they still haven't managed to create wireless microphones.