Movies: Tetsujin 28

Most of the details of the original story have been lifted intact and transplanted into the live-action production. A young boy whose father was a robot scientist is summoned back to his dad’s old laboratory by a former aide. There’s been a number of attacks on Tokyo by a terrorist using a giant robot to wreak havoc, and the kid’s father had created a similar machine to fight just such menaces. For reasons that only the script finds credible, the kid has been solely trusted to operate “Tetsujin 28”, through the remote control unit hidden somewhere in the lab, and presumably save the world in the process. This leads to a great deal of emotional pontificating that feels ill-suited to an adventure movie (especially one where the adventure itself is just not that appealing), a good deal of trashed Tokyo real estate, and a lot of looking at one’s watch.

The story isn’t the only problem, although it’s certainly the biggest. There is also the robot combat itself, which ought to be the highlight of a movie like this, but just isn’t. What we get for the most part is the two robots standing more or less toe-to-toe with each other and sluggishly trading blows again, and again, and again, and again. Every now and then one of them gets knocked through a building — which looks appropriately spectacular — but for the most part it’s about as involving as watching two windup toys shoving each other off the edge of a table. There’s some throwaway guff about how the kid’s eidetic memory can be used to see through the other robot’s fighting patterns, but it’s just that, a throwaway, and there’s no real sense of strategy or even style in the combat. Maybe it worked as animation, or as a comic, but when rendered as live-action with all of the limitations of the real world weighing it down, it becomes static.

Nothing’s wrong with the effects themselves, though — there’s a very impressive early sequence where the enemy robot cuts a swath of devastation through the city, including (predictably enough) turning the Tokyo Tower into a giant metal junk sculpture. They also do a more than decent job of making these things and their surroundings feel like they have weight and substance, which is something that doesn’t normally come into play when computer graphics are used to simulate real physics. But the rest of the movie just sits there and pretends to be more fun than it really is, and the stuff between the robot battles is unengaging paint-by-numbers dross about the kid’s father and family.

With a movie this draggy and dumb, my mind wanders, and blunders across inconvenient questions: Why is it that in a movie like this, the hero is never chastised or made to feel cautious about causing untold amounts of property destruction? Do they just expect people to believe that Tokyo can be written off as collateral damage or something? And why do they go through the trouble of building these giant robots only to have them function as little more than tarted-up wrecking balls, anyway? And how is it that they can smack each other silly and never so much as scuff their paint jobs? There’s more, but I’ll stop here.