I have to be honest, when I heard that Dreamworks were set to make Real Steel, a big-screen remake of (or at the very least a film based on) a memorable episode of a 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone (called "Steel") starring Lee Marvin in which human boxing has been made illegal and replaced by robot pugilists, I wasn't hugely excited. And when I read the synopsis below, I again turned my nose up:
Real Steel is based on a short story from Richard Matheson, the legendary sci-fi writer of I Am Legend and which clearly has been inspired for the screen by the Rock em Sock em toy robots. Set in the near future where instead of human boxing, we get 2000-pound, 8-foot-tall robot mashers Hugh Jackman plays Charlie Kenton, a washed up former boxer who is forced into retirement when human boxing is outlawed and becomes a small time promoter/trainer to the robots taking over the sport. With his estranged son Max (Dakota Goyo), they manage a junked and outdated robot that begins to rise through the ranks in the classic underdog story with a mechanical, hi-tech twist.
Yikes. But it's not all bad news, thanks to a new trailer that has appeared today. My main problem was, I just couldn't stomach the idea that Real Steel would be an amalgamation of Rocky and Transformers, but the latest trailer has actually convinced me that there might be some merit here, where I initially suspected none. Yes, it is plainly silly, and those are unmistakably some boxing robots, but I do like the underdog sport sub-genre (Disney do it brilliantly by the way) and there seems to be enough of a suggestion of heart, and the right amount of focus on Hugh Jackman's own story to allay at least some of my initial fears. What do you think?