Review of Real Steel (2011) by Birdmannavy — 26 Jan 2014

I kept on waiting for a "ghost in the shell" plot that never materialized. I don't have a problem with the father/son story, but remote controlled robots as a big time event is too silly for me. Perhaps if they had gone a little closer to reality and featured a father/son robot story based on what has already been done in robot fighting, i.e. Battle Bots, and kept it small time I would have accepted it. But I really needed the kid's bot to turn out to be another Sonny, from I, Robot; or B1-66ER of The Matrix; or Andrew of Bicentennial Man; and to give that line of the story a lot of face time. At the end it seems clear that Atom, the robot, was indeed working autonomously but it comes too little too late. (Also, it's not super clear weather or not this is a robot with a human soul, or 'Ghost', or simply a learning computer AI being slightly evolved...).

Also, "Who, Boy, let's fight a bull!" not being a tragedy but a hokey way to introduce the father's loosing streak? Not cool. You want to feature CG animal abuse, fine, but you don't treat it like fun.