Since he first appeared in a Japanese Manga comic book in 1953, Astro Boy has been whizzing about, trying to bring peace and harmony to human/android relations, aided by a really irritating voice and some heavy-duty maudlin sentiment, laid on with a trowel.

The remake for the big screen, voiced by, well, everybody in Hollywood  — Nicholas Cage, Freddie Highmore, Kristen Bell,  Samuel L Jackson, Nathan Lane, Bill Nighy, Donald Sutherland and Charlize Theron, just to name a few—attempts to breathe some life back into the franchise.

The story is essentially Astro’s origin story. Set in the futuristic Metro City (not Tokyo! gasp the purists), floating high above the wasteland of  a badly polluted Earth, Professor Tenma (Nicholas Cage) attempts to recreate his lost son (Freddie Highmore) by building an android replica and giving him his son’s memories (along with jet powered feet, heat rays in his arms and machine guns in his butt — as you do). The experiment fails, however. Tenma can’t bond with Astro and to make matters worse, he used the last of a precious experimental power source to drive the boy android, which evil incumbent president, General Stone (Donald Sutherland) wants to use to start a war between humans in Metro City and the rogue robots on Earth, to enhance his re-election chances.

Wounded by Tenma’s rejection, Astro escapes to Earth, where he meets runaway Cora (Kristen Bell) and the RRF — the Robot Revolutionary Front — a trio of wannabe terrorist robots somewhat hampered in their ambitions by the three laws of robotics which prevents them from harming humans.

After many adventures on Earth and the obligatory lessons learned about life, love, family and destiny, Astro is caught by the President and returns to Metro City to be deactivated. At the last minute, Tenma refuses to remove Astro’s power source and saves the android,  leaving him free to fight the evil robot who has absorbed the President and is on his way to destroying everything.

I have a soft spot for Astro Boy and was quite looking forward to this remake, in the hopes they’d made him less irritating to listen to (at the very least), and no quite so heavy handed on the treacly sentiment and the morals to be learned from every episode. I am happy to report writer/director David Bowers succeeded. The story is straightforward enough for kids to follow and sticks reasonably well to the spirit of the canon, if not the specifics. There are lots jokes likely to go straight over the heads of the target kiddie audience that will have their parents chuckling — the president’s banner at an election rally “No, it’s not time for a change” had me laughing out loud. The geek in me loved the RRF, too, and the practicalities of trying to be a terrorist when you’re specifically programmed not to terrorize.

This turned out to be a fun way to kill a couple of hours. My nine-year-old test audience loved it and I laughed a lot, although not at the same things the nine-year-old thought were funny.

And that’s the trick with a good family film, isn’t it? Everyone comes away happy, even if it’s for entirely different reasons.

awesome - I was hoping this film would be ok. I will miss the treacle but :)