Astro Boy Review

Thanks for checking out our Astro Boy review. If you’d like to see a video version of our Astro Boy review you can watch it at the bottom of the written review below.

Like “Speed Racer” before it, Astro Boy was destined to bomb at the box office. Like Speed Racer, a semi-recognizable name that is too far removed from its days of popularity to the point that it lacked enough of a built in audience. Still, that doesn’t mean that the movie itself can’t be good (Speed Racer wasn’t). So off I went to see Astro Boy and I was very surprised by how strongly it started… but not so surprised about how it all went downhill from there.

THE GENERAL IDEA

The synopsis for Astro Boy reads something like this: “Set in futuristic Metro City, Astro Boy is about a young robot with incredible powers created by a brilliant scientist in the image of the son he has lost. Unable to fulfill the grieving man’s expectations, our hero embarks on a journey in search of acceptance, experiencing betrayal and a netherworld of robot gladiators, before he returns to save Metro City and reconcile with the father who had rejected him.”

THE GOOD

Without question the very best thing about Astro Boy was the hard hitting, and rather dark, first act that introduced us to the story. It was NOT what I was expecting. We are introduced to the brilliant scientist Dr. Tenma (voiced by Nic Cage) and his his bright excitable son. Being a kids film, I expected some sort of accident to happen where Dr. Tenma had to turn his son into a robot/cyborg in order to save his life and thus turn him INTO Astro Boy. What the film gave us was much darker. The son dies, and in his grief Dr. Tenma creates a Robot in his son’s image to replace him. He gives the robot all the weaponry and defenses science has conceived of to make sure nothing ever happend to this version of his son like it did to the last one. The emotional depth if this was surprisingly effective, and it got even better as the doctor realizes the robot does not replace his son, and only serves to remind him of what he lost… leading to him rejecting the robot (Astro Boy). This whole component, in my opinion, was handled brilliantly and gave the rest of the movie a solid base to launch from.

Some of the action in the film was quite visually appealing from both the perspectives of animation and cinematography. Those elements help the film become something quite pleasant to look at… if there was no sound… but unfortunately there was. Which leads us too…

THE BAD

After the effective first act, the film just spirals out of control to become the cheesy, cliche riddled, unfunny, uninteresting, ineffective piece of cinematic drivel we all feared it would be.

One of my pet peeves in movies are useless characters. Characters who serve no function other that to take up valuable screen time and whose presence would not be missed in the slightest if they were to suddenly disappear. There are a group of these characters called the Robot Revolutionary Front. A small group of three robots dedicated to freeing robots from human enslavement. They don’t… do… ANYTHING. Their actions and presence have absolutely no effect, positively or negatively on the story or the path of the film. The movie itself acknowleges this at the end when Astro looks to them and say “Thanks for everything” to which the robots respond “well… I guess we didn’t actually DO anything”. So true… so true. If you’re going to have useless characters taking up screen time… at least make them funny or entertaining is SOME way. These things weren’t.

I need to do an editorial post about this later… but WHY DO THESE ANIMATED MOVIES FEEL THE NEED TO USE ALL HIGH PROFILE ACTORS FOR THE VOICE ROLES?!?!?! It’s stupid. The only voice that remotely worked was that of Bill Nighy who voices Dr. Tenma’s best friend. All the other voices were flat, emotionless and usually distracting. What ever happened to using… you know… trained VOICE actors for these movies? But I’ll go into that in another post later.

OVERALL

Astro Boy stars off with a bang, but then echoes out into an android like whimper. Clearly little to no thought was put into this movie other than “Hey, let’s do an Astro Boy movie”. No good humor, no interesting characters, no story and a completely wasted fantastic introduction leaves this film wanting. Because of how effective I thought the first act was, I’ll go so far as to give Astro Boy a 4.5 out of 10.

You can see our video Astro Boy Review below:

About John Campea

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  • pjf

    Couple of things,
    1 the voice acting is fine - the problem with nic cage voice acting is that when I heard his accent for some reason I got uncomfortable not seeing his face. something about his accent needs his face to go with it. but this feeling subsided quick enough.
    2. this is quite a serious film but a film made entirely for kids, genuinely, there is no subtle sexual inuendo, or in adult humour or deep adult themes that you find in most of the animated stuff these days, there is also very little slapstic. Yet it does not dumb down its themes, it treats the kids watching as intelegent human beings. My daughters seemed to love this film adnd I must admit that I enjoyed it too.
    3. The visuals are not supposed to be the same as cars or ice age. I think the visuals team have done a stunning job and shown well thought restraint not venturing too far away from the cartoon roots. It looks and feels very much like a turbocharged cartoon. I really appreciate this and it is the first time I think CGI has been used to update a cartoon and done it well.
    Most of the characters are engaging, the simple hero story is well done, and there is enough emotional content to give it depth.

    I really liked this and I am supprised by the bad reviews. But I think there are alot of adults reviewing a real kids film from an adult point of view and getting it wrong. Cars, Iceage, walle etc, good films but they are adult films cleverly diquised as kids films so we get suckered in. This is a rear example of something purer, and simpler, and truer. a propper kids film.

  • GODFATHER

    I’m 50/50 on your review John. With the use of too many “big name” actors for voice roles and the opening, I totally agree with you. However, as a fan of the TV show, I think that the movie did quite well in keeping true to the story of Astro Boy, but updating it mildly (if memory serves me well) to mainstream it for today. We seem to forget that this show was not that big for some time, and I think it showed with the lack of a big marketing budget, leading to the disappointing opening weekend numbers.

    Could the story have been better? Sure, but I think this is a springboard to relaunch a TV series and not another movie. That’s where this story will find its audience. In TV, you’ll need the “useless, do nothing” characters to fill some storylines, which might be one of the reasons the “Revolution” is included in the film.

    Personally, I’d rate the movie (for entertainment value only) at a 6.5/10. I also wish it was better, but without having the marketing machine blitz the hell out of it, I never expected it to do all that well.

    Anxiously awaiting your post on the Voice Actors vs Mainstream Complancency.

  • Meli

    From the sound of your review it seems they pretty much kept the movie as is after showing an unfinished cut to focus groups.

    The kiddo and I were part of one and we both HATED those stupid revolutionary robots they were worthless, non-funny and a waste of time. The other kids in the group seemed mostly indifferent to them. Every time they popped up (which felt like a lot) I was pulled out of the movie. I disliked Nic Cage voicing the Dr. and Highmore did alright as Astro Boy, but honestly this movie might have benefited from using actual voice actors (I agree with your statement whole heartily) and the deleting of some useless characters.
    The kid and I will probably check out the movie once on DVD only so we can see the completed animation cut.

  • NoName

    beggar can’t be chooser

    The movie is very different from anime and manga furthermore movie theme familiar to Megaman.

  • 420BAND

    Where’s the fight for Albert Brooks?

    Hey, these are cartoons BTW and most of the Non-Pixar stuff does’nt hold water at all…This was a cute flick with a hard hittin’ story and some sweet action sequences. Now were seeing Magna and Anime come hollywood mainstream.. I’m not a fan of this genre but this was a pleasent film…As for voice actors vs. celebrities I agree , some DO totally take away from the final product.. Seth rogan, Nic Cage, are terrible and should not be allowed to do it… but this is something the Studios do so , F-IT!