Unexciting Astro Boy Never Achieves Liftoff
After a horrible accident, Metro City scientist Dr. Tenma (voiced by Nicolas Cage) creates a robot in the spitting image of his son Toby (Freddie Highmore). Giving him with the child’s memories (thanks to the DNA remaining in a single strand of hair) and fueling him with a powerful “blue energy” that promotes goodness, the scientist is nonetheless depressed by his creation, nicknamed Astro, banishing him to the Earth below.
Astro flies above Metro City in Summit Entertainment's Astro Boy
There’s more, including a warmongering President (Donald Sutherland) worried about his reelection campaign, a peaceful scientist (voiced by Bill Nighy) who fears his discoveries could destroy the world, a lost child (voiced by Kristen Bell) with a mysterious hatred of Metro City and a seemingly kind robot repairman (voiced by Nathan Lane) with an apparent soft spot for kids, I just don’t feel compelled to spend time talking about any of it. The bottom line is that Astro Boy, a computer animated family film based on the long-running Japanese comic series, isn’t very interesting, and while it isn’t particularly terrible it also isn’t anything close to what I’d call good.
The basics are pretty simple: man has boy, boy dies; man makes new robot boy, banishes robot boy for not being human; man feels bad for getting rid of robot boy, robot boy returns to save the world. I’m not giving anything away as even the youngest viewer has this all figured out within the first ten minutes, and while I’ve kept the specifics a mystery chances are most people will have those quickly clocked, too. There are no surprises here, nothing a devoted cartoon watcher hasn’t seen before or that fantasy and comic book fanatics haven’t fantasized about repeatedly. This is a movie that goes nowhere and offers up little in the way of originality, and while the majority of it is technically well presented the boredom I felt while watching it was almost enough to put me to sleep.
There was one sequence that did catch my attention. Early on there is a particularly horrible death, and while you don’t actually see a body disintegrate the whole thing is presented so matter-of-factly and with such intense finality the younger kids in my preview audience were visibly shaken. It is a brutal and violent moment that I did not expect, and while I appreciate that the filmmakers weren’t pulling punches the ferociousness of the sequence was so off-putting I couldn’t get the taste of it out of my mouth.
As for the rest of the movie I have very little to say. David Bowers (Flushed Away) competently keeps things moving at a brisk pace, while his and co-writer Timothy Harris’ (Space Jam) script follows the stranger in a strange land template more or less adequately. There is some commentary about the previous political administration here in the United States, while not-so-vague allusions to Philip K. Dick and Jules Verne appear pretty much throughout.
In the end, the only thing I can say here is that this movie just wasn’t my cup of tea. I didn’t find it exciting and I never warmed up to any of the characters (although Bell’s almost got an emotional reaction from me during a semi-touching scene between her, Astro and a cell phone). I found the early violence jarring and relatively unnecessary, while the final redemptive moment between father and son was about as authentic as that processed cheese you splatter on your nachos at 7-11. Astro Boy simply didn’t takeoff, its battle of good over evil an unexciting waste of my time I’m a little bit sad that I’ll never get back.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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