Hugh Jackman is the REAL STEEL

Richard Matheson's short story Steel, set in a near future world where boxing matches between humans have been outlawed and the sport is now a spectacle between hand-built robotic fighters, has been locked away in a vault, waiting for someone to unlock it's mysteries, for over half a century. I never thought that man would be Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Cheaper by the Dozen) but, well, what can you do. I can only report, I can't decide how the world works. If it was a perfect world, the story would have found an attraction with Christopher Nolan or David Cronenberg but dear readers, you must realise tis not a perfect world we live in. Variety say Dreamworks are spending $80 million on what they are calling Real Steel, an adaptation of Matheson's short story which Hugh Jackman will topline with filming to begin in June. Matheson/Jackman/Levy... a case of two out of three ain't bad, or does that bad egg stink up the rest of the breakfast? Matheson's short story Steel is more relevant than ever in a world where unemployment is high as machines continue to take our jobs. Written for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1956 and later adapted for aTwilight Zone episode in 1963 starring the great Lee Marvin, Steel explores the depths of human courage and perhaps desperation in an an uplifting reinvention of the John Henry folklore, set in the already familiar grounds of the "underdog against the odds" boxing genre. Imagine if Rocky met a Terminator programmed to win bouts instead of killing Sarah Connor and you get the idea. Can the beating heart of man defeat a relentless and unforgiving machine? Dreamworks acquired Dan Gilroy's (The Fall, Two For the Money) script in 2005 for a reported $850,000. Re-writes and the Paramount/Dreamworks split has caused Steven Spielberg to wait so long until giving the go-ahead but that greenlight was always inevitable. Spielberg has been robot crazy for ten years (A.I, Transformers). Jackman will play a different kind of caged animal than he did in the X-Men franchise. We have the synopsis as thus...

Story centers on a fighter who has to reinvent himself when human boxers are replaced by robots. Jackman will play a struggling Robot Boxing promoter who finds a discarded robot that always seems to win. He also discovers he has a 11-year-old son, and they bond as the robot brawls its way toward the top.

The only warning signal of the mostly faithful synopsis being the 11-year-old son, an invention for this adaptation and not in the original short story or t.v. episode. That's the kind of sweet toothed layer that Levy likes for his movies and hopefully it won't get in the way of what the real subject matter is, the fight between man and machine, in a world where everyday man is being deemed just a little more redundant. What follows is my long kind of synopsis of the Twilight Zone episode, previewed above... The Twilight Zone episode was set nine years in the future and was centered around an aging prize fighter nicknamed Steel whose unblemished record of having never being knocked down was ended when the boxing matches between living human flesh was outlawed (presumably after a string of deaths). As boxing was his passion and livelihood, he stuck with it when so many other fighters dropped off. Maybe he thought he could translate his boxing passion to a robot, live his unfulfilled career through his machine? He initially found good success with the B2 robotic fighter he built up with his mechanic partner Pole, a top of the range second generation model at the time. But as the machine started to break, as the nuts and bolts came flying out and it got worn out, they began to lose matches and more importantly lose prize money. The more beatings the robot took, the worse condition it was in to fight the next time around and because they stopped making parts that would fit their fighter years ago... without repairs it's on it's last legs. Steel has to carry on though. He is broke, he needs to eat. He has talked a promoter into giving his broken down robot a rare fight and they have traveled miles for the only gig he can get. What chance though does their second generation fighter have against the latest B7 model? None is the answer.

Joe Mantell (left) tells Lee Marvin (right) he'll be killed if he steps back into the ring with a robot fighter. But dammit, he needs the paycheck. He makes the audacious decision, like Randy "The Ram" Robinson, to step back into the ring. He knows there's a good chance he'll probably be dead come the final bell, a human who has kept up with his training and is at the peak of his condition wouldn't stand a chance to fight a top of the range robot fighter whose strength, speed, endurance are surely better than his. Not only that but if anyone spotted what they were doing, they would be thrown in jail but he doesn't have to win the fight. Just survive, make it last a few rounds, and he gets his money to fix the robot and fight for another day. The short story ends on a sour note, very un-Hollywood but very pure Matheson, with only a glimmer of hope for humanity in a world where machines are rendering us useless. There's a great Steel vs. Steel theme, and when the crowd shout out at Steel with "get that piece of junk outta here", it's fitting even though he isn't a mechanical being. The ending eschews the usual twist but it's the only ending you can actually believe in and one time when the Twilight Zone, sometimes known for it's hammy endings, got it note perfect. Rod Serling's ending narration goes...

Portrait of a losing side, proof positive that you can't outpunch machinery. Proof also of something else: that no matter what the future brings, man's capacity to rise to the occasion will remain unaltered. His potential for tenacity and optimism continues, as always, to outfight, outpoint and outlive any and all changes made by his society, for which three cheers and a unanimous decision rendered from the Twilight Zone.

What a story. What a tale of potential (like so many of Richard Matheson's stories) for a movie. So much room to explore and expand, just like Matheson's The Box, which allowed Richard Kelly to really play with his own imagination greatly for the third act. I have hopes, and the $80 million budget, of which I'm guessing a decent chunk goes to Jackman and Levy... will hopefully mean not too much money are spent on the robotics as the t.v. episode thrived on how creepy and zombie-like the humanoid robots were. If they are too far removed from humanity, this picture will be boring.