Astro Boy Movie Review
I’m not familiar with the original Astro Boy mythos, but I will say the movie was interesting, and deeper than it would admit.
The film begins in a classroom of the future, where a Charlize Theron narrator explains about “our friends the robots”. It explains that some event happened that caused people to create a floating city, and they could care less about the people on the surface. Yes, the people of Metro City are very elitist, and treat their robots worse than slaves. Essentially, they are disposable servants, and when they break down or become obsolete, they just throw them over the edge of the city.
Metro City is clearly a dictatorship, but for some reason, they have presidential elections. It’s so tyrannical that the citizens are just used to it. In once scene, the current president walks into a professor’s classroom, and swipes his experimental energy sources without any complaint.
This energy was way simplified as blue “good energy” and red “bad energy”. When the president decides to put the red energy into an experimental Peacekeeper robot, bad stuff happens and an innocent boy gets killed. This scene is done as non-violently as possible, so much so that it doesn’t even make sense.
Now, Dr. Tenma, the deceased boy’s father, decides to recreate his son as a robot. Since he doesn’t want his son to ever be harmed again, he equips it with the “blue energy” to make it the ultimate defensive weapon. That actually does make sense if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief.
The experiment is both a success and a failure, and Tenma begins to bond with his robotic son. However, Tenma’s shortcomings as a father come to the surface as he realize that he cannot control his son as much as he would like. In fact, he eventually wants to deactivate him.
Eventually, Astro retreats to the surface where he discovers a different world. At first he believes the surface is more accepting of robots, but soon sees that they share Metro City’s view that robots are just junk waiting to happen.
The film had a lot more plot twists than I would have thought, and had a final battle that was quite epic in scale. Woven in to Astro Boy is an interesting sense of humor as well.
Astro boy has an interesting take on how we, as human beings, must do our best, even in a fallen and prejudiced world. It isn’t really an animated classic as last summer’s Up, but it is worth seeing.
