Clearly hoping to be a far more sophisticated take on schlock material from the ’60s, ala the fantastic modern Gamera Trilogy, Tetsujin 28 falls far short of that mark.
A live action version of the Japanese ‘kid with giant robot’ cartoon of the same name—known here in the States as Gigantor—the film proves way overlong, much too preoccupied with its ‘more realistic’ human characters, and in (presumably) trying to stay true to the action of the original cartoon/manga series, offers up very well animated CGI robot action, but of a disappointingly mild persuasion.
Shotaro is a maybe 10 year-old school boy with a rote tragic past, involving the mysterious fate of his father long ago, which his mom keeps from him purely to give the plot somewhere to go. (Nowhere interesting, sadly enough.) Meanwhile, an evil-looking giant robot named the Black Ox appears in Japan and causes some degree of havoc, although not really that much compared to what you’d see in your typical Japanese giant monster flick.
A family retainer shows up and informs Shotaro that his deceased father left him the owner of Tetsujin 28, another big robot. Amusingly, the movie does (properly) keep the somewhat humorous, bulbous design of this robot. Shotaro rather realistically botches his first fight with Black Ox, controlling T28 with a video game-like console.
Oddly, the police and the military keep allowing the kid to control the robot, which seems to be their only hope of stopping Black Ox. Maybe I missed it, but it would have been simple enough to toss in a throwaway line about how only Shotaro *could* control T28. As far as I could tell, though, they didn’t–I will cop, however, to the fact that I was leaning heavily on the fast forward button for much of this–and everyone just seems to go along with the idea, even taking T28 out of play after Shotaro loses his nerve following the first fight.
Another really weird thing is that after a Cute Chirpy Teenage Chick (one of several weird characters) who is identified as one of the greatest computer/robotics experts in the world augments both T28 and his control unit, the latter is then designed to give Shotaro pain feedback whenever T28 is struck. Huh? Watching a ten year-old mime falling to the ground in pain, seemingly dozens of times, didn’t strike me as all that entertaining.
The biggest problem with the film is that it’s way too long, nearly two hours (!), and really, because of this the various Shotaro-is-a-wimp-until-he-isn’t thing is stretched out to extremely boring lengths. I give them credit for making the kid more realistic than your typical movie youngster, but there was no reason to drag things out to the extent they did.
The robot scenes are very nice to look at—CGI works a lot better with objects like robots still than organic beings—but the action is surprisingly dull, generally involving the two robots exchanging punches about once every ten seconds. It’s like watching a Rock’em Sock’em Robots match in slow motion. If you like this sort of things (and I presume you do, if you’re visiting here), and get a chance to see this for free, you might want to just skip to the robot stuff. Even then, though, don’t expect to have your socks knocked off.
