This was an easy going, kid flick kind of movie, though it has some violent points that point it towards the older child crowd. It follows a boy who discovers a large metal man in the forest and befriends it. From there, we get the cliche "government-wants-to-destroy-it" plot while the boy tries to protect it and discover where it came from and teach it how to communicate.
The weakest part of this story comes at the beginning with two back-to-back contrivances. If one accepts that this is a kid movie, then you can overlook these things since everything else works fairly well on a first viewing.
1) The kid sees something outside, and so he takes his BB gun, his helmet, and a flashlight to check it out. He walks into a dark forest in the middle of the night to find out what's there. Um, yeah...no. Kids don't walk into scary places at night. Besides, the way that flashlight was strapped to the BB gun, any shots he fired would have clocked him in the head.
2) He saves the robot by pulling down a large on/off switch on the side of a power plant. Ok, first, while powerplants might have an on/off switch, they would not be so accessible, and if they were, there would be a big lock on it to stop passers-by from just turning it off like that. That was almost harder to buy than the kid walking into the forest at night.
After these two hiccups, the movie flowed just fine. Kid hides metal-eating robot in scrapyard, makes friends with owner, government tries to destroy robot, robot fights back and saves day when government guy does something stupid. The end.
It's a cute little movie with a feel good ending once you get to it. This one has been called overlooked and underrated, and I tend to agree.
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