'Real Steel'

We love our machines to death. Nothing made this more explicitly clear to me than walking by the Apple store the other day and seeing bouquets, notes of condolence and sympathy cards covering the outside wall of the store. These expressions of grief over the death of Steve Jobs struck me as kind of strange, since most of the people leaving these notes had probably never met the man, only his machines. Whether you have an iPad, an iPod, or a good old Mac Classic, chances are that the technology Jobs invented has entered your life in some fashion.

I couldn't help but think about the great departed Jobs when I was watching Real Steel, a film that is also about machine love. It is a very strange beast, this film. In one corner are all the classic conventions of boxing films -- the washed up fighter with one last great bout still in him, an adorable moppet, and a supportive woman. In the other corner are the whirring circuits of technology in the form of CGI fighting robots. There is one critical thing missing though, and that's genuine heart.

After taking my 10-year-old son Louis to see the film, we came out of theatre and he said, "I'm really into boxing now." I tried to tell him as gently as I could that the film wasn't actually about boxing, and that if someone punched you in the face as hard as they could, it hurts like hell. He insisted that this was a new type of boxing that didn't involve any real fighting. I gave up after a while trying to convince him that Wii boxing wasn't the same as the real thing. It's a Wii world now, we're just watching from the sidelines.

Meanwhile, in the near future

The film begins on a dark flat plain, populated by wind turbines, silent sentinels revolving in precise order. There is no time period cited, but we are given to understand that the action takes place in some version of the near future. This is made evident the moment a down-on-his-luck conman named Charlie Kenton (played by Hugh Jackman) drives into a small town fair, and rolls out his fighting robot to do battle with a cow. While you're wrapping your head around this, the cow in question swiftly dispatches the robot into various metal chunks. This is the only scene in the film in which flesh meets metal, but the remainder of the film is very much concerned with the battle between the real and the steel. Once upon a time, when humans still fought other humans for fame and glory, Charlie was a contender. But when boxing shifted from flesh to circuitry, he hung up his gloves and replaced his heart with an ATM.

With debts piling up faster than hunks of dead robot, Charlie has a rare piece of good luck, when he is handed a summons to determine custody of his 11-year-old son Max. After abandoning the kid at birth, Charlie has little interest in fatherhood, but he is very interested in the large chunk of cash Max's would-be adoptive parents are willing to fork over. A deal is made, cold hard cash for the kid, no questions asked. After essentially selling his son, Charlie blows his wad on another fighting robot, determined to stay in the game. But Max has spunk to spare, and an enormous body of knowledge about robots. The kid has moxy, as they used to say, and he is determined to stay in the picture. 

Father and son get over their mutual antipathy and begin to form fragile bonds while making the rounds of the underground robot fighting circuit. But it isn't until they stumble upon a mysterious junkyard robot, buried in the mud, that their collective luck begins to change. Enter Atom, a whirring clanking punching bag. With his battered tin can appearance and glowing blue gaze, this iron giant forms a bridge between father and son. Before you can say "Deus ex Machina!" things begin to pick up the pace.

Beep, beep, whir

Like any fighter, Atom needs to prove himself, and his race towards a title bout has a bounding momentum that pulls you along. Almost in spite of myself, I got caught up in the drama of this underdog's race to the top. Such is the power of the cinematic conventions the film is working with. As the shades of all the would-be contenders shadow box in the corner, the degree to which Real Steel borrows from earlier films such as The Champ becomes increasingly apparent. All the same notes are there, solemnly intoned like an old-fashioned love song. The critical difference between these earlier works and Real Steel only becomes clear in the final moments of the film. Both versions of The Champ were renowned for being tearjerkers of the first order. Real Steel is not concerned overly with emotion, nor genuine sacrifice, at its heart it is essentially a video game. 

Standing between Atom, and eternal glory is one hell of a big bad 'bot, a veritable killing machine named Zeus, the world champion robot boxer. Designed by a surly Japanese genius and managed by a jug-eared Russian billionaire, Zeus is Apollo Creed and Ivan Drago rolled up into a shiny metal ball. "Whatever he sees, he kills," says his steely owner, as Zeus fixes little Max in his glare.

I don't need to tell you the rest, since all boxing films lead up to this one moment. When the bell rings, and the fighters come out of their corners, the real action takes place. Everything else has been but a warm up event. But when Atom enters the ring against an unbeatable opponent to take on the ultimate risk, exactly what is at risk? Is machine death the same thing as human death? There's no blood, no pain, and thus nothing really at stake. I can forgive a ridiculous premise, corn prone sentiment, even direct lifts from other films, but what I find troubling is something that looks like what it isn't. Remove the human body from boxing films, and what do you have? A board game, essentially, rock 'em, sock 'em robots.

Heart, soul and risk

The romance of boxing, whether you believe in it or not, is that fighters take on the ultimate risk. Both versions of The Champ end in one last long brutal fight. King Vidor's 1931 version, starring Wallace Beery and little Jackie Cooper, and Franco Zeffirelli's remake with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder understood that the essential tragedy is the love story between father and son.

Both Beery and Voight end up battered to death at the end of the story, but in Real Steel, real dad never even makes it into the ring. Machines have rendered us obsolete in many ways, and nothing makes this more clear than the scene in which Charlie manically air boxes at the side of the ring, flailing at nothing, like he was fighting the bout of his life. It borders strangely on the pathetic. All this power and strength rendered meaningless.

Whether you can draw conclusions between the current generation who love machines more than life itself, I don't know. But there is something there. Uneasiness moved in my gut watching the film trot through its paces. It's slick and engaging, but does the difference between waving your hands in the air at an invisible opponent, and actually punching someone in the face need to be actually experienced to be understood? Maybe it does. Violence by mechanized proxy is ubiquitous, in every first person shooting video game, and in this Real Steel is not unusual in its conceit. But there is a cost to be paid for genuine suffering, and as we humans insulate ourselves from life, reality has a way of intruding. 

Which brings me back Mr. Jobs. It is a death of a real human being that caused people to write cards, leave flowers, and various other forms of memento mori. When the millions of machines that Jobs created end up in a landfill in Nigeria, not a tear is shed.