Real Steel

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Real Steel is a 2011 American science fiction film starring Hugh Jackman and directed by Shawn Levy. The film is based in part on the 1956 short story "Steel" by Richard Matheson, though Levy placed the film in U.S. state fairs and other "old-fashioned" Americana settings. Real Steel was in development for several years before production began on June 11, 2010. Filming took place primarily in the U.S. state of Michigan. Animatronic robots were built for the film, and motion capture technology was used to depict the brawling of computer-generated robots and animatronics. Real Steel was publicly released in Australia on October 6, 2011 and in the United States and Canada on October 7, 2011 to mixed to positive reviews. It was released in both conventional and IMAX theaters.

Plot

In 2020, humans have been replaced by robots in boxing. Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is a former boxer who owns such a robot, Ambush, competing in unsanctioned matches and in exhibitions with it. At a rural fair, Ambush is destroyed by Black Thunder, a bull belonging to promoter Ricky (Kevin Durand), when Charlie gets distracted by the cheers of a woman in the stands. Having made a bet that Ambush would win, Charlie now owes Ricky $20,000, which he doesn't pay before leaving.
Charlie is informed his ex-girlfriend has died, and that he must attend a hearing to decide the fate of his preteen son Max (Dakota Goyo). Max's aunt Debra (Hope Davis) and uncle Marvin (James Rebhorn) want full custody, which Charlie gives them in exchange for $100,000, $50,000 of it in advance, on the condition that Charlie take care of Max for three months while the couple are away on a second honeymoon.
Charlie and Max meet with Charlie's childhood friend Bailey Tallet (Evangeline Lilly), who runs the boxing gym of her deceased father, Charlie's old coach. There, Charlie buys a secondhand WRB league robot, the once-famous Noisy Boy, and arranges for it to fight the illegal circuit's champion, Midas, at a venue belonging to his friend Finn (Anthony Mackie). Partly due to his inexperience with Noisy Boy's combinations and partly due to his overconfidence, Charlie ends up losing control of Noisy Boy and Midas destroys it.
Charlie breaks into a junkyard with Max to steal scraps that he can use to put a new robot together. There, Max falls over a ledge, where he is saved from doom after being snagged by a lodged and buried robot arm. After Charlie pulls him back up, Max uncovers the entire robot, called Atom. On Max's insistence, Charlie takes it back to Bailey's gym, where they discover Atom is an obsolete Generation-2 sparring bot built in 2014. Atom has been designed to sustain massive damage, but is unable to deal much damage itself. Partly due to Max's insistence and partly due to Charlie's needing money, the duo takes Atom to fight an unsanctioned outdoor match against a robot called Metro, and Atom wins, earning back some of Charlie's money.
Max later upgrades it to take vocal commands using spare parts from Noisy Boy and Ambush and successfully convinces Charlie to train the robot. Atom's string of subsequent wins and high-speed, human-like maneuvers, which were rarely seen from a robot, attracts the attention of a promoter from the World Robot Boxing league (WRB), who offers Atom a professional fight against a robot called Twin Cities. Atom is almost overwhelmed by the more advanced bot, but Charlie's knowledge of boxing allows him to notice a design flaw in Twin Cities, and Atom emerges victorious. Taking advantage of Atom's subsequent novelty attention, Max challenges WRB champion Zeus, designed by arrogant genius Tak Mashido (Karl Yune) and sponsored by rich Russian Farra Lemcova (Olga Fonda), who had tried to buy the upstart Atom before the match.
As Max and Charlie leave after the Twin Cities fight, Ricky and his men attack them and steal their winnings. Feeling guilty, Charlie returns Max to his aunt and uncle and refuses Max's remaining $50,000 payment, feeling Max will be safer with them, but Bailey convinces him that he can be a better father. Debra allows an apologetic Charlie to take Max out for one last night, to the Zeus-Atom match. Zeus severely damages Atom while also getting injured, a first for Zeus, but Atom refuses to be knocked out. Ricky, who had bet Finn $100,000 that Atom would not last the first round, tries to slip away, but is cornered by Finn and his colleagues. The match continues, with Atom surviving monstrous blows from Zeus while simultaneously landing his own whenever there is an opening. At the end of the second-to-last round of the five-round match, Atom's audio receptors are damaged, and Atom must fight in shadow-boxing mode for the final round, copying Charlie's moves from the aisle. Zeus, now controlled manually by a furious Mashido, rapidly expends its remaining energy trying to overwhelm the defensive Atom, and turns sluggish as a result. Charlie, waiting for this moment, then begins to pummel Zeus, even knocking the seemingly invincible champion down, but is not able to land the winning blow before the round ends. The judges declare a winner on split decision, just barely favoring Zeus, but his reputation is tarnished, and Atom has become famous as the "People's Champion".

Cast

Hugh Jackman as Charlie Kenton
Dakota Goyo as Max Kenton
Kevin Durand as Ricky
Evangeline Lilly as Bailey Tallet
Hope Davis as Debra
Anthony Mackie as Finn
Olga Fonda as Farra Lemcova
James Rebhorn as Uncle Marvin
Karl Yune as Mashido

Production

Real Steel is directed by Shawn Levy and is based on the 1956 short story "Steel" by Richard Matheson.^[4] The film was produced by Touchstone Pictures, DreamWorks, 21 Laps, and Montford/Murphy Productions.^[5] The original screenplay was written by Dan Gilroy and was purchased by DreamWorks in 2005 for $850,000,^[4] or in 2003 (sources differ).^[6] The project was one of 17 that DreamWorks took from Paramount Pictures when they split in 2008.^[4] Director Peter Berg expressed interest in the project in mid-2009 but moved on.^[6] Levy was attached to the project in September 2009,^[7] and Jackman was cast in the starring role in November for a $9 million fee.^[8] In the same month, Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider at DreamWorks greenlit the project.^[4] Les Bohem and Jeremy Leven had worked on Gilroy's screenplay, but in 2009, John Gatins was working on a new draft.^[6] When Levy joined the project, he worked with Gatins to revise the screenplay.^[9]
With Real Steel having a production budget of $110 million,^[2] Levy chose to set the film in state fairs and other "old-fashioned" Americana settings that would exude nostalgia and create a warm tone for the film's father-son story.^[10] Filming began in June 2010,^[11] and ended by October 15, 2010.^[12] Locations include areas around Detroit, Michigan, and across the state,^[13] including at the Renaissance Center, the Cobo Arena, the Detroit Fire Department headquarters, the Ingham County Courthouse, the former Belle Isle Zoo, and the Highland Park Ford Plant.^[14]
Jason Matthews of Legacy Effects, successor to Stan Winston Studios, was hired to turn production designer Tom Meyer's robot designs into practical animatronic props. He said, "We have 26-and-a-half total live-action robots that were made for this film. They all have hydraulic neck controls. Atom has RC [radio-controlled] hands as well.”^[15] Star Jackman said executive producer Spielberg "actually said to Shawn, 'You should really have real elements where you can.' ... Basically if they're not walking or fighting, that's a real robot."^[16] For scenes when computer-generated robots brawl, "simulcam" motion capture technology, developed for the film Avatar, was used. As Levy described the process, "[Y]ou're not only capturing the fighting of live human fighters, but you're able to take that and see it converted to [CGI] robots on a screen instantaneously. Simulcam puts the robots in the ring in real time, so you are operating your shots to the fight, whereas even three, four years ago, you used to operate to empty frames, just guessing at what stuff was going to look like."^[17] Boxing hall-of-famer Sugar Ray Leonard was an adviser for these scenes.^[10]