Real Steel

The source is Richard Matheson’s 1956 story Steel, filmed once before as a Twilight Zone episode with Lee Marvin in 1963. Its decisive moment has a boxer climbing into the ring in place of his broken machine, and the producers have said they spent five years reading draft after draft looking for an equivalent, because robots built seven and eight feet tall leave no room for a man inside one. Their answer was a shadow control mode in which Charlie throws the punches and the machine copies him. Knowing that changes how the bouts play, because the entire engineering of Shawn Levy’s film exists to reach a single shot: the actor back in the centre of the frame. Every result is legible from the opening bell, so the suspense is never who wins but when the father finally looks at his son. Legacy Effects supplied twenty six and a half full size robots, so Dakota Goyo is usually acting opposite a real object rather than a tennis ball on a stick, and those scenes carry more warmth than the digital fights. Sugar Ray Leonard advised on the boxing and trained Hugh Jackman. Michigan locations include the Renaissance Center in Detroit and the Highland Park Ford plant, and the film was nominated for the visual effects Academy Award.