Real Steel Review 2011

My Review of Real Steel (2011)
-- Dream is not to sell yourself, but to lift your fix up

Finally, the has-been boxer beat the technique-geek otaku. It makes otaku too sad that gaming experience is far less useful then field experience. Boxing Robots can never replace real boxers, because people’s desire to violence will only be satisfied by the fresh blood and destroy.

Who has watched Rocky will surely like this one, including me as well.

Real Steel bears so many things that you can say that it is the sequel of Rocky, and you can also regard it as a greeting to Rocky, and what’s more, Real Steel is saluting to Star Wars, Gundam, The Pursuit of Happiness and Into the West as well.

However, Real Steel is not repeating the classic, just like Million Dollar Baby, The Fighter is not the same as Rocky. This movie expresses what we living in these days should truly think about in a realistic way. And this thing is that we might have not think about much.

When the thing that you have been protecting disappear, what will you do? When the stage where you can perform your dream is gone, are you going to be down forever or giving up?

Times change, it is not the same as that in Rocky in 1970, during which the society develops slowly and you could make your dreams come true here and there, and 10 years did not mean much of difference or changes. Real Steel is in 2020, the boxing stage is filled with robots, boxers have no platforms to perform where they are in the pursuit of dreams, and they come to the end of a falling star, forgotten by the people and time.

Alas, the stage is gone, where is the dream?

However, this movie is telling us that, maybe, it is a good thing to let the stage go, so that we are going to realize that our dreams need no specific stage, but ourselves. Even if everyone leaves us, we still have at least ourselves.

This film is very attentive, the music in the beginning, Alexi Murdoch – All My Days, implies the theme of it:
We are always searching for our dreams on the journey of our lifetime.

What a person on earth is searching for? There might not be such a person who can clearly answer this. But at least, this film and some others are telling us, there are many things that are not so import as they actually are. Both Real Steel and Rocky lose their battles in the end, and life goes on normally.

As we all know, as the classic Hollywood pattern, after the boxing, the child will go back to his mother’s side, and the hero and heroine are not going to live together, our hero will continue his vagrant life. Their story will shine as the hero in the past, only becoming the headline on the newspaper, occasionally recollected by some people, and that’s all.

Even if it goes like this, so what? Is this your reason why you give up? If you do think so, then you misunderstand the meaning of dream. To dream, win or fail do not matter, neither do fame and gain. What really matters is that you have to fight with your own fists. Because the dream belongs to yourself, and you should be accountable for this, it is your obligation and duty.

All in all, please never ever give up your dream; don’t try to sell yourself out, but to hold tightly your fists to punch those who laugh at you. Well these are just my words, not so called authority, if I were, then you can definitely KO me.

My watching list: Firefly, Serenity, The Pursuit of Happiness and Rocky, then Real Steel.

So what is your dream?

Real Steel Casting:  Hugh Jackman, Evangeline Lilly, Dakota Goyo