Welcome back for another edition of A Second Look with Jeff Stockton! In this segment I will take a "second look" at a past LRF release with a fresh set of eyes.
When Gigantor first arrived in Season 21 as the debut film from writer Joshua Collins, I remember being less irritated by any one specific flaw than by the film’s total uncertainty about what it wanted to be. The story follows Jimmy Sparks (Finn Wolfhard), an awkward freshman sent to live with his eccentric scientist uncle Dr. Bob Brilliant (Paul Rudd), where he discovers he can mentally bond with the giant robot Gigantor, originally built by his supposedly dead father Robert Sparks (Colin Hanks). What starts as a bullied-kid-meets-giant-robot adventure gradually turns into a family melodrama and super-sized city-smashing showdown, as Robert returns, steals back Gigantor with Jimmy’s jealous cousin Johnny (Jack Dylan Grazer) as an accomplice, and tries to use the machine for world domination before Jimmy reclaims control. Back then, my reaction was basically that the film felt stranded between audiences: too garish, broad, and cheesy to work for older anime fans, but too tonally odd and old-fashioned to fully connect with younger viewers who had no attachment to Gigantor in the first place. It reminded me a lot of Speed Racer in that way - another Wachowski project with visual ambition and cult sincerity, but one that seemed weirdly calibrated for nobody. I felt it probably would have worked better as animation, where the sillier elements might have come off as charming instead of awkward.
Revisiting it now, I more or less feel exactly the same. The tonal and audience-level whiplash is still the defining problem: the film wants the innocence of a kid-friendly robot adventure, the melodrama of a fractured-family story, and the candy-colored maximalism of a hyper-stylized sci-fi fantasy, but it never finds a stable mode to hold those things together. The goofy material is not inherently a problem - Gigantor should have some goofiness - but the movie never figures out how to modulate it, so scenes that should feel fun or emotionally big just land with a thud. Wachowski’s direction sinks into the same quicksand that trapped Speed Racer: visual busyness, uncertain tone, and a persistent sense that the filmmakers are making the movie for an audience that only exists in theory. There are bits of charm in Wolfhard and Rudd, and the premise still has some old-school appeal, but the adaptation never solves the most basic question of who it is for.
Original Grade: C-
New Grade: C-
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