Astro Boy

To ease the loss of a child in a near-future techno-metropolis, a robot boy is made to help a parent with their grief, but the perfect replacement cannot soothe the imperfect needs of a broken heart. The parent casts the robot child out, where he's lost amid the wreckage and refuse the gleaming city leaves behind. He's taken in by under-dwelling humans and discarded robots, before learning who he truly is and his true place in this brave new tomorrow. But enough about the plot of Steven Spielberg's "A.I.," regardless of how well (and, all things considered, how oddly) the new film "Astro Boy" mirrors "A.I." with its story and tone and occasionally grim moments.

Based on the '50s comic and '60s TV show created by Osamu Tezuka, "Astro Boy" brings one of Japan's most iconic heroes of the postwar era back with what's intended as the perfect mix of punch, pow and pixels. The end result is a busy, buzzy piece of computer-animated sci-fi adventure whose darker moments may be a little much for kids. After an experiment combining state-of-the-art robotics with a cosmic source of "negative" energy ends in tragedy and vaporizes Toby, the son of Dr. Tenma (Nicolas Cage), Tenma, the head scientist of floating techno-topia Metro City, uses all his brilliance and broken heart to create a robot replacement for his son. Filled with Toby's memories, the plucky robot (voiced by Freddie Highmore) figures out he's special -- flying being the one big tipoff -- but can't figure out why his dad's so sad. Pursued by the military and Metro City's power-hungry leader General Stone (voiced by Donald Sutherland) in the name of reclaiming the cosmic source of "positive" energy he's powered with, Astro the robot escapes to the wreckage and trash-strewn underworld on the surface far below Metro City's gleaming spires.

Astro meets a group of plucky orphans, who live with robot repairman and showman Hamegg (Nathan Lane), and grows close with scrappy exile Cora (Kristen Bell). He wants to tell her he's a robot, but events conspire. Meanwhile, General Stone's desire to win the election on a law and order platform leads to lawlessness and disorder. Will Astro Boy save the day? You don't need to worry about that, but you do need to worry if your young ones are going to be freaked out by a good, decent heroic human boy being microwaved into mist by a crazy robot and then the human-seeming robot who replaces him being attacked by a variety of much larger, much meaner robots. My press screening was kid-free, but a peer who went to a matinee that included the general public and their kids reported on plenty of crying from the younger ones in her audience as Toby was zapped off this mortal coil and Astro Boy was beaten, bludgeoned and blasted by a huge metal-absorbing law-and-order droid in the overly action-packed climax. (Any critic who complained about the lack of story in "Where the Wild Things Are" should be forced to watch the escapades and high jinks of "Astro Boy" on a loop until they realize that activity is not to be confused with actual storytelling.)

There are also gags in "Astro Boy" that go on achingly long, like the Robot Revolutionary Front that Astro meets, who long to liberate their peers and use Soviet-style slogans. The RRF don't add much, and reminded me of the People's Front of Judea from "Life of Brian," a joke the 10-year-olds in the audience are sure to not get. Highmore is earnest and cheery as Astro, Bell is suitably sympathetic, Sutherland's velvet croak is used appropriately, and while Cage may be in high-torment mode here ("He's not my son!") he's still perfectly acceptable. Director David Bowers (who co-wrote the screenplay with Timothy Harris) has a good handle on the visual mechanics of animated storytelling, if not the emotional and aesthetic mechanics of storytelling in general. Parts of "Astro Boy" drag, and parts of it are full of wince-inducing action. Much like Astro is somewhere between wide-eyed boyhood innocence and two-fisted robotic power, it feels like "Astro Boy" is similarly split, too intense for younger kids and too juvenile (this is, in the end, a hero known for flying about in a pair of swim trunks) for teens. I have no cultural memory of Astro Boy's original incarnations, no inertia of nostalgia to make me tilt forward in my seat for this new version, and, to be honest, if I hadn't taken notes, I'd have almost no memory of this revamped reincarnation. "Astro Boy" may be shiny and slick and high-tech, but it's no substitute for a kids' film with real vision and real heart.

Also:

'Astro Boy': Anatomy of a Character

On the Set of 'Astro Boy'

James Rocchi's writings on film have appeared at Cinematical.com, Netflix.com, SFGate.com and in Mother Jones magazine. He lives in Los Angeles, where every ending is a twist ending.