SHINOBI GIRL: THE MOVIE (2015)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

The only thing I slightly like about this cheapjack item is the subtitle. "Shinobi Girl-- the Movie?" As in contrast to-- Shinobi Girl the absolutely-nothing-else?

OK, OK-- from what IMDB tells me, it looks like the material for this "movie" may have appeared as an 8-episode TV series in some venue *somewhere.* But that "logic" still doesn't justify a "The Movie" indicator.

SHINOBI just barely qualifies as a "superhero-adjacent" film. Noriko (Alexandra Hellquist) gets raped by a Wall Street executive (the film barely mentions the event) and so decides to don masked ninja-gear and launch a crusade against "one percenters" in defense of the 99 percent. The man she killed was the husband of Tiffany Brooks (Molly Fahey), and Tiffany sends various henchmen, led by her hot bodyguard Raven in pursuit of the vigilante. Oh, and just to prove how evil the "one percent" is, Tiffany and her cohorts hold slave-auctions in the basement of their Wall Street complex, the slaves being downtrodden 99-percenters.

What follows are various badly choreographed battles, both with swords and with fists, where Noriko-- nicknamed "Shinobi Girl" by the media-- appears mostly alongside other hot girls with no acting talent, all in nondescript locales like garages and office buildings. There's one odd scene where Noriko seems to appear out of nothingness to thwart a bad guy, but since she has no super-powers, one must assume this was supposed to be a "ninja trick."

Damn, now NINJA CHEERLEADERS begins to look pretty good after I suffered through this tripe.

BLACK WIDOW (2021)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

"The best part of my life was fake"-- Yelena Belova, Natasha Romanoff's fake sister.

At the time that BLACK WIDOW was released, some critics caviled against its implicit "girl power" theme. But as I watched the film again in 2024, WIDOW seems like a model of nuanced subtlety next to a bore-fest like last year's MARVELS.

That said, I agree that WIDOW was extremely compromised, though not for any reason of gender politics. I've long been baffled by the decision of the MCU show-runners to kill off Natasha in AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. It served no purpose save to add an extra beat to the evolving Hawkeye story, though his descent into vigilantism was predicating on losing not Natasha but his nuclear family. Nevertheless, the Black Widow's only feature film was doomed to be sandwiched in between the events of CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR and AVENGERS INFINITY WAR. 

WIDOW is like the better MCU films of the previous Phases: an admixture of weaknesses and strengths. One of the biggest narrative weaknesses involved the assertion by previous MCU films that Natasha gained her skills from a Soviet training program devoted to subject young orphan girls to rigorous training, so that they became perfect spies and assassins. I don't remember why the original comic book continuity concentrated the program only upon young girls. But whether the comic book came up with a good justification or not, WIDOW needed one. Without such a rationale, there seems no good reason for the Soviets not to train male children as well-- except that credited screenwriter Eric Pearson wanted to focus on female disempowerment. 

And yet, WIDOW actually validates the structure of the American nuclear family, which is usually an object of mockery by writers on the extreme Left. This is one of the movie's strengths, since, as the above quote suggests, even a fake family is better than no family.

In 1995, four Russia agents infiltrate suburban America for three years, pretending to be a regular family while stealing secrets from the U.S.'s spy-organization SHIELD. "Mom" is Melina (Rachel Weicz), an older Black Widow assassin, trained in the Soviet "Red Room." "Dad" is Alexei (David Harbour), whose previous distinction was not for being an undercover agent (which one might think a requirement for a deep-cover mission), but for being The Red Guardian, Russia's imitation of the then-missing Captain America. "The kids" are little Natasha and Yelena, both orphans inducted into a spy-program, though not yet into the aforementioned Red Room. However, SHIELD tumbles to the illicit espionage. The four spies are forced to flee to Cuba, and Melina is wounded, with the result that she's believed, falsely, to be dead. The spy-team's grateful director Dreykov (Ray Winstone) rewards the escapees by sentencing the girls to become Black Widows and sending Alexei to prison for no clear reason.

Following this prelude, the action proper begins. Natasha (Scarlet Johansson) is on the run after having defied the American government over the Sokovia Accords. She goes into hiding but is contacted by a letter from fake sister Yelena (Florence Pugh). Yelena has somehow come across a chemical that can reverse the brainwashing tech used upon the Black Widows. (When did Natasha escape said brainwashing? No MCU ever addressed the matter, probably because the tech was a belated retcon.) Natasha contacts Yelena in Budapest, where the two of them are assailed by the forces of Dreykov, who objects to their interference with the Red Room program. He even has his own costumed agent, a skull-masked individual named The Taskmaster. 

Natasha and Yelena want to find the Red Room to free all the enslaved females, but they don't know where it is. They break their former "dad" Alexei out of a Siberian prison, but he doesn't know where Dreykov is. Unlike the two "daughters," though, he knows that Melina survived her injuries and where to find her. (I guess if the two "sisters" had known all that, they would have left "Dad" in prison.) All of these coincidences serve to unite the fake family, and the four Russian agents are obliged to deal with their feelings toward one another-- easily the best part of the film, though not without flaws. Tensions aside, the foursome unite (albeit with some glitches along the way) to take down Dreykov and free the other Widows-- none of which sustains much emotional interest. (How much does it mean that the female agents break their programming, given that they're still stuck in Mother Russia?) Natasha reaches the end of her emotional journey and leaves to synch up with her actions in AVENGERS INFINITY WAR. A post-credits sequence, taking place after Natasha's passing, sets up a story-beat for Yelena to participate in the forthcoming HAWKEYE teleseries.

Director Cate Shortland had only made three previous indie films, so that probably explains the unexceptional, mechanical feel of all the action-scenes. She probably just turned all that stuff over to the FX technicians. But she probably deserves some credit for the better dramatic scenes, and possibly for some of the humor that works (though, not surprisingly, a lot of the jokes don't land). Of the four main characters, Melina is the least successful. While her "daughters" are serving the Soviet state as assasins, their "mom" works for Dreykov, and she only rebels against him when the other three members of her family give her a chance to fight back without risking her own death.

I also didn't think Alexei's character was injected just to make men look bad, though I don't doubt that Pearson was partly recycling a trope from his previous outing on THOR RAGNAROK, which was a "toxic female" MCU movie. Alexei becomes the Red Guardian out of loyalty to his country, and he doesn't quite realize that his superiors have made him into a show-pony, much as the American authorities did with Captain America during WWII, according to THE FIRST AVENGER film. He's got fatter in prison, and that was certainly for some lame comedy, but he remains a stand-up guy for the most part, in contrast to the deceptive Dreykov. And though he never gets to fight his opposite number Captain America, Pearson gives his version of the Taskmaster a Captain-like shield, so that when Red Guardian fights Taskmaster, this battle indirectly fulfills Alexei's desire to serve as the Champion of Russia. He has some good lines and is much more likable than "Mother" Melina-- all of which I attribute to the writer's desire to validate "family values" against those of a ruthless and unfeeling state. (Just try to find a negative characterization of modern Russia in any MCU film released after WIDOW.) I wish this flick had been more stylish and colorful, but I respect the basic intent of the story if not all aspects of its execution.  

THE CROW (1994)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

It's axiomatic that adventurous stories of vengeance give rise to more measured dramas about the problematic nature of revenge. Euripides' CHILDREN OF HERACLES wrought social commentary out of the violent myths of the Son of Zeus, while Shakespeare's HAMLET undermined the uncomplicated revenge-plot of the medieval "Amlethus" tale. 

THE CROW, based on James O'Barr's underground comic book, is not the same kind of serious drama as those older works. But both as comic and as movie, it counterpoints the violent action with intense sentiment about what it means to lose friends or family members to the specter of death.

The Detroit of the film is practically a "city of dreadful night," with few signs of life or light. Gangs of murderous thugs rule the city, committing theft and murder as they please, with the broad implication that the Detroit PD has been paid to look the other way. Yet a few good people still persist. An ersatz family-feeling arises between rock musician Eric Draven (Brandon Lee), his girlfriend Shelley (Sofia Shinas), and a little girl, Sarah (Rochelle Davis), whom the couple watch over in the absence of her cocaine-addicted mother. Good cop Albrecht (Ernie Hudson) becomes loosely allied to the trio under tragic circumstances, investigating the case when a gang ruled by the evil Top Dollar (Michael Wincott) has Eric and Shelley killed.

One year later, on "Devil's Night" (the night before Halloween), Sarah still lives with her addict-mother but mourns for her lost family by visiting the graves of Eric and Shelley. When she leaves, a mysterious crow lands on Eric's headstone. Eric breaks out of his own grave, fully restored to a quasi-living being. Confused, he returns to his deserted loft, and there he dons black clothes and his only "superhero mask," white clown-makeup with black markings. He finds that he has an empathic link with the crow, from whom he divines his mission: to wreak divine vengeance upon Top Dollar and his gang.

Director Alex Proyas brings a fine sense of style to the battle-scenes, in which Eric, now immune to permanent physical harm, takes out various freakish gangbangers as the avenger works his way up to the leader. But THE CROW is most distinguished by its displays of honest sentiment, as both Sarah and Albrecht become aware that the dead man they knew has come back to life. Moreover, Eric's powers are not limited to violence. After killing the gangbanger with whom Sarah's mother is entangled, Eric purges the woman of her addiction, making it possible for her to be a mother to Sarah again. That said, the main villain gets the chance to undermine his undead foe's advantage. Top Dollar's skanky sister Myca (Bai Ling) has noticed the presence of the crow that accompanies Eric during his crusades, and so finds the hero's Achilles heel. Yet Eric triumphs in the end, in part by using his emphathic power in reverse, infusing the villain with the same drug-agonies he removed from Sara's mother. The undead hero survives to fight again, although the first film was the only one to do justice to the concept's dramatic themes.

Eric was the role of a lifetime for the son of Bruce Lee, who had only played a handful of roles before landing this part-- and unfortunately, his lifetime was cut short by the mishandling of a prop gun during filming. (Strangely, on a DVD voiceover for the film, the two speakers barely address the subject of Brandon's on-set demise.) Hudson and Davis are excellent, but Wincott scores as one of the best villains of the nineties, in that he's not motivated by mere gain, but by a Sadea desire to wreak chaos. But for the most part, later adventure-films, with or without costumes, made few if any attempts to emulate the mordant poetry of THE CROW.

KICK-ASS (2010)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

I don't have much more to say about the movie KICK-ASS than I did about the original Mark Millar graphic novel. Millar presented a very schematic idea-- that of an ordinary high school boy who decides to play superhero-- and director/co-scripter Matthew Vaughn followed the schema very faithfully, only riffing a few new scenes along the way.

Though KICK-ASS is replete with the same sort of bloody ultraviolence one might find in a hardboiled adventure movie, the movie like the comic book has enough wry humor thrown into the mix that I judge it to be a comedy. It's one of the most visceral comedies ever made, but it is not, as one ad claimed, "black humor." Black humor is the domain of the irony, the literary locus where most if not all nobility has vanished. There's considerable absurdity to be found in the green-clad Kick-Ass (Aaron Johnson) and his more skillful comrades, Big Daddy (Nicholas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz). But at base, their desire to fight back against the forces of organized crime remains admirable.

In keeping with Millar's design, Kick-Ass is only to function as an amateur crusader because an accident screws up his nervous system, so that he doesn't feel much pain, and replacement of many of his bones with metal rods makes him somewhat more resilient than the average human. Big Daddy, who has a vendetta against a New York drug-dealer, raises his daughter Mindy, eleven years old as the film begins, to become a prodigy in terms of martial combat and weapons-use. The sight of a pint-sized girl-child as a superhero was naturally formulated by Millar to undercut the usual image of heroes who were either teenagers or adults, and Vaughn delivers the combination of bloody action and absurd excess with great elan. 

Johnson and Moretz are the key players and accordingly deliver the best performances. Cage's depiction of Big Daddy seems somewhat off, as if he wasn't all that involved in the character. Most of the support-characters, both high-school teens and ruthless gangsters, are as underwritten here as they were in the graphic novel.

Like the graphic novel, the film is a decently executed formula-work, memorable mostly for Moretz's energetic embodiment of Hit-Girl.

INVASION OF THE NEPTUNE MEN (1961)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Despite NEPTUNE being on many "worst film" lists, it's not quite bad enough to deserve that dishonor. It's not good, but it's bad in a fairly pedestrian way, and it has just a couple of moments that keep it from being a total waste of time.

To be sure, though I probably saw the MST3K version, which used an English dub of the Japanese film, this review is based on a subtitled version found on streaming, which probably removes a few of the more absurd moments. That said, the only scenes I liked a little were in the first half hour.

The film opens at a Japanese elementary school, with a bunch of boys talking about an impending satellite launch, apparently by the Russians (the dubbed version changed the launch to one from the U.S.) One of the kids happens to be the nephew of a Doctor Tanigawa, who's a consultant on the spaceflight, and the kids enthuse about the possibility that Japan may someday have its own space program. Their teacher Tachibana (Sonny Chiba in a very early film-role) approves of their enthusiasm and sends the boys out for recess.

The kids start fantasizing about what it would be like to have their own superhero, who would be much cooler than staid Mister Tachibana. They christen their imaginary hero Iron Sharp (usually pronounced "Ion Shawp.") Then they see a strange airship and run to investigate. In a nearby field, a spaceship has landed, and when the kids get closer, aliens with pointy helmets attack them. But conveniently enough, a flying car descends, and out jumps-- Iron Sharp! He kicks the aliens around a little and they retreat. The hero (a masked Chiba) converses with the kids a little and takes off, but not a single boy wonders how the hero they just made up has manifested out of nothing.

Clearly the writers were having a little fun here. They knew they were writing a story aimed at small kids, so why not give the kids in the audience the pleasure of seeing their fictional peers conjure up their own superhero? But having tossed out that metafictional touch, the script then devolves to a standard low-budget alien invasion flick, recycling a fair amount of footage from a Japanese WWII movie. In between the stock footage there's lots of talk about the invasion but not much real action. The aforementioned Doctor Tanigawa comes up with a force-field barrier against the "Neptune Men" (not sure I heard them called that, or anything). The invaders counterattack, in part by infiltrating the Japanese military forces with their own men, who look like Japanese guys wearing heavy makeup. Iron Sharp shows up a couple more times and finally sends the ETs packing. 

Since Chiba was a genuine martial artist, I have to assume the unexciting action-scenes were the result of a disinterested director or some other similar factor. Aside from the mildly precocious setup scenes, NEPTUNE is just an ordinary bore and doesn't deserve to be deemed "so bad it's good."

   

THE SPIRIT (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I've long put off reviewing THE SPIRIT, because it's difficult to talk about the process by which a Good Artist seeks to adapt the work of another Good Artist and ends up producing Bad Art.

When the movie debuted in 2008, most of the fan-reaction was negative. Will Eisner's SPIRIT-- a specialized type of comic book that ran for a little over ten years, from the early forties to the early fifties-- had started out as a straightforward adventure-strip about a domino-masked vigilante in the pre-war period. But what most SPIRIT fans favored was Eisner's so-called post-war period, when Eisner began utilizing his formidable gifts to focus on the literary forms of drama and comedy. 

In contrast, Miller hit the big time in the later eighties and the rest of the nineties with a variety of works-- DAREDEVIL, 300, SIN CITY, and two major Batman projects-- which all fit the form of adventure. (Elsewhere I've argued that ELEKTRA ASSASSIN best fits the form of the irony.) Miller often stated his admiration for Eisner, and the two artists were friends up until Eisner's passing in 2005. Because of these factors, I believe that Eisner-fans expected that Miller, when he wrote the SPIRIT film, would seek to emulate some aspects of the drama-and-comedy stories that the fans had esteemed. 

This was, to put the matter mildly, a false expectation; there was no way that Frank Miller, master of comic-book ultraviolence, was going to follow the sort of low-key SPIRIT-stories those fans wanted. Yet, all that said, I found my own experience of the 2008 movie left me less than enthused with the result.

The problem I see in Miller's adaptation is that since 2001-- the year that he came out with a fifteen-years-later sequel to THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- the artist became increasingly fascinated with the form of irony, which stresses a type of dark, potentially nihilistic humor. This YouTube video by one Salazar Knight puts forth a detailed analysis of 2001's THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN in which he argues that this limited series hugely disappointed Batman-fans because Miller delivered not a respectful take on the Bat-mythos, as had the 1986 KNIGHT, but a wild and confused parody of the superhero genre as it had developed in the 1990s (at least partly in response to Miller's influence). I won't pursue Salazar's argument in detail, but I believe that Miller had analogous motives in his approach to adapting Will Eisner's SPIRIT.

By 2008 Miller had accrued great Hollywood repute thanks to the successful 2005 adaptation of his 1990s SIN CITY stories. These stories, while not without moments of acerbic humor, were dominantly adventurous film noir narratives. Miller thus got the nod to write and direct THE SPIRIT on the strength of the SIN CITY movie's success. However, since 2001 Miller's creative priorities had changed.

If my terms for literary forms might seem a bit abstruse, I might also cite some better-known terms for the differing ways that Eisner and Miller treated humor. Eisner's SPIRIT hews closest to what film studies call "the screwball comedy," where the humor's very light and sprightly. But Miller's SPIRIT piles on overbaked noir-tropes so heavily that he creates a self-aware burlesque of the genre. When the film starts out with the hero (Gabriel Macht) leaping about the rooftops of Central City, fantasizing that to him the city is like a "good mother" that does not paint itself like a gaudy hooker (I forget the exact wording), clearly Miller's head is in a different place.

Technically Miller keeps the skeletal of a dramatic Eisner plot, from an early 1950s storyline in which the crimefighter met a long-vanished girlfriend, Sand Saref (Eva Mendes in the film), who showed up in Central City as a part of a new crime-scheme, thus setting up the conflict of the two former lovers. Miller had used elements of the "Sand" story for his "origin of Elektra" tale, and so it was perhaps natural enough that he would choose the same narrative for the SPIRIT film. And to the extent that the movie even comes close to an Eisner original, Miller's script is moderately faithful.

However, everything else is Looney Tunes. In the Eisner story, Sand came to the city seeking to sell a germ-warfare weapon, and something similar happens in the film's first half-hour. However, the Spirit is alerted that his frequent enemy the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) has some scheme going on. So when the hero shows up at Sand's entry-point, he's attacked by Octopus, who engages Spirit in a furious battle that culminates in the villain slamming an old toilet over the hero's head.

How does the hero survive? Well, Eisner frequently showed his vigilante protagonist getting the tar beat out of him, but in a loosely realistic manner. But Miller was hugely invested in ultraviolence, so he reworked both Spirit and Octopus into Wolverine-like beings able to heal rapidly from massive injuries. This rewriting was also Miller's way of justifying the hero's reason for calling himself "The Spirit," because he literally died but came back to life due to a super-serum. He even talks to a death-spirit named Lorelei (Jamie King), whose voice is heard only by "sailors and cops," and who continually bids him to return to her "cold embrace."

Octopus fails to get the item Sand brings to Central City, despite being aided by Doctor Silken Floss (Scarlet Johansson) and her crew of identical goofball clones. (The "Silken Floss" in the comics was not a villain, incidentally.) But I'll give away what the movie doesn't reveal until the last hour: Sand hasn't smuggled in a germplasm, but "The Blood of Heracles," which is supposedly the genuine blood of the Greek demigod. Octopus-- who seems to be the only person interested in this prize-- thinks that if he drinks this substance, it will transform him into a god who can conquer the world.

Yes, we're a long way from film noir here. And to keep up the Looney Tunes mood, Miller constantly gives almost every character bizarre lines, ranging from Floss making some comment about drugs that make people's "teeth turn into graham crackers" to Octopus frequently ranting about "eggs" for unknown reason. Next to some of these gems, the hero's soliloquy to the city almost sounds rational.

While the Spirit chases around trying to track down both Sand and Octopus, he's frequently waylaid by such beautiful women, where they're femmes fatales like Sand and the dancer "Plaster of Paris," or relatively good girls like Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson). In the comic she's the hero's faithful girlfriend, and here she's upgraded to a doctor who constantly cares for his wounds but is no less motivated to hogtie the vigilante to her alone. In fact, one of the few worthwhile things about Miller's version of the Spirit is that the crimefighter can't seem to turn off the charm when in the presence of hot women. Certainly, the hero's sex appeal works better than any of his exaggerated athletics.

Macht is decent in the role despite its problematic concept, and most of the actors deliver what Miller wanted of them. But Samuel L. Jackson is awful from start to finish. Perhaps he justified his wild histrionics with the idea that he had to be "the over-reactor" to Macht's "under-reactor," but he unlike other performers seems to relish all of Miller's absurd dialogue.

It's amusing that Miller somewhat name-checks his own creation by having a lady cop claim that Sand Saref suffers from an "Electra complex." However, the Spirit would seem to suffer from the opposing Oedipus complex, for instead of choosing any single female with whom he might "settle down" and protect, he devotes his existence, both at the opening and closing, to the Great Mother of the City. Some of these loose insights are what makes Miller's SPIRIT into "bad art," and not just your average "bad movie."

ASTRO BOY (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

As of this date, the 2009 ASTRO BOY stands as the only attempt to translate the charms of Osamu Tezuka's most famous creation into a feature film. ASTRO was a notorious flop in most markets, but it's far from a bad film. In addition to showing respect to Tezuka's original story, the filmmaker added a handful of interesting myth-tropes. The main objection to the film is that it simply wasn't the work of a genius.

I confess I've only read a handful of the manga stories, but I enjoyed the dubbed ASTRO BOY animated series in the sixties. As an adult, I esteem the great visual inventiveness of the cartoon, and I even have more tolerance for some of the show's corny humor than I did as a kid. My impression of the anime show is that, even while the robot-hero encountered assorted menaces, Tezuka had a recurrent trope that gave this kids' cartoon an adult theme: the realization that bad treatment of robots by humans is immoral despite the artificial nature of the entities being so treated.

The 2009 film is very forthright, even transparent, in putting forth this trope. While the Tezuka origin takes place in a standard future-city where the use of robots has become routine, the filmmakers set Metro City in the clouds, far above the polluted surface of the Earth. The Earth is still inhabited by people, implicitly those not wealthy enough to escape to the city. But the denizens of Metro City treat the surface-domain like a garbage-heap, disposing of their junk by tossing it below-- particularly the parts of non-functional robots. This stratification between high and low appeared in many previous SF-works, ranging from Fritz Lang's film METROPOLIS (which loosely inspired a Tezuka work of the same title) to "The Cloud Minders," an episode of Classic STAR TREK. The specific setup of Metro City most resembles a similar scenario in the 1990s cyberpunk-manga BATTLE ANGEL ALITA, though of course there's no way to prove any influence.

Another new element involves humankind's temptation with a stone of Good and Evil. Said stone is a meteor that falls to Earth and is harvested by the leading scientific institute in Metro City, headed by Doctor Tenma (Nicholas Cage) and the huge-nosed Doctor Elefun (Bill Nighy). Analysis reveals that there are two disparate elements within the meteor, both of which might be used as possible power sources for the betterment of mankind. Yet one element, the red one, is "evil" in the sense that it stimulates aggression in human and robotic entities, while the blue element stimulates healing. Elefun preaches that these power sources might even restore the ruined Earth to its former glories.

But President Stone (is he President of the country over which Metro City hovers?) is an ambitious political hack running for re-election. He wants to launch a war with the people on Earth's surface to make himself look like a decisive leader, and he pays the institute's bills as part of military research. The scientists have constructed a giant battle-robot, the ironically named "Peacekeeper," which Stone hopes to use to prosecute his needless war. The President forces the scientists to experiment with powering the robot with the red element. Result: the battle-robot goes berserk, and before it can be turned off, it kills young Toby, son of Doctor Tenma.

Tenma is so distraught at losing his only child that he steals the blue element and uses it to power a robot replacement for Toby, into which he downloads Toby's memories. For a time, Tenma convinces the robot-boy (Freddie Highmore) that he is Toby, but little things ruin the illusion, like the fact that "Toby" can fly using jets built into his feet. (The script's fuzzy on why Tenma installed weapons systems in this copy of his son.) However, even without "Toby's" input, Tenma comes to believe he made a big mistake, and he rejects his robot son. Further, when the soldiers in employ of Stone come looking for the missing blue element, Tenma allows them to take his creation away. Using his powers, the robot boy escapes the soldiers but falls to Earth, one more robot in the junk-pile.

Through contact with a group of feisty kids, the boy takes on a new name, Astro, and tries to conceal his true nature. However, he's outed by Hamegg (Nathan Lane), a Fagin-type who scrounges the remains of robot toss-offs to construct fighter-robots for a death-match tournament, to entertain the locals. Hamegg recognizes Astro as a robot and seeks to make him into an arena-fighter, semi-rechristened "Astro Boy." But in the resulting tournament, Astro learns the true extent of his powers, which end up benefiting him against the forces unleashed by the evil President.

The main characters from the manga-- Astro, Elefun, and Tenma-- are all reasonably well handled in terms of humor and drama. The villains, though, prove disappointment. Hamegg, though based on a Tezuka original (one named "Cacchiatore" in the dubbed anime), is remodeled so that he looks less fiendish, while original creation President Stone is flat and uninteresting. The Earth-kids are all bland cute-types, and though some of the support-character robots are amusing, none of them are as well designed as Tezuka's wild creations. But at least the character of Astro Boy has a combination of innocence and determination that does credit to Tezuka's template.