Real Steel is a film set in the near future where boxing is now a sport participated in by robots controlled by humans rather than humans themselves. The film stars Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo and Evangeline Lilly.
When his ex-wife dies, Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is left to temporarily look after his 11 year old son Max (Dakota Goyo) while his legal guardians go on holiday. He takes his son with him when he goes off to compete in robot boxing matches, inevitably they lose the fight and the robot becomes good for nothing but scraps. When they go to a junk yard to salvage parts to fix it up, Max stumbles across an in-tact robot which he digs up and trains.
The main focus of the film is the bonding between Charlie and Max, as in the beginning he didn’t want his son around so he tried to leave him with Bailey (Evangeline Lily), who owns the gym where he spends most of his time training robots. During the film, they enter this new robot into some fights and it does well, earning them quite a bit of money because it isn’t a fighting robot therefore other competitors think they can easily win. Whilst training, Charlie sees Max teaching the robot to dance using its Shadow feature which allows it to copy movements rather than be controlled via the controller, he tells his son to do this before fights to ‘warm up the crowd’.
During the climax of the film, the team behind the robot who is currently champion try to buy Max’s robot, however he refuses to sell. This happens before Max and Charlie are due to fight on live TV. After they win this fight, Max decides to challenge the champion to a fight for the title and they accept. When Charlie hears that they have accepted, Max is back living with his legal guardians who reluctantly allow Max to go with Charlie to the fight. The fight goes as you would expect – the champion and far superior robot clearly winning. However when Max’s robot’s control system breaks, Max switches him into ‘shadow mode’ and Charlie, who was previously a boxer, controls it using his own movements. It starts to look as if they may make a comeback and actually win the fight, as they cause severe damage to the operating system of the champion. However in true Rocky style, the challenger loses and the champion wins.
In my opinion, this is a brilliant film. Although it’s quite long you don’t get bored watching it once they get into the main plot as it is full of twists and turns. Also because it doesn’t end the way films typically end with the underdog winning, the film doesn’t conform to convention. Therefore I would rate this film 4/5 due to the amount of time it takes to get into the main part of the film.
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