The Iron Giant
The Iron Giant is a 1999 animated science fiction film, written and directed by Brad Bird, produced by Warner Bros. Feature Animation, and released by Warner Bros. Pictures. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Script (written by Tim McCanlies), and for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. It is based on a children's book by Ted Hughes, The Iron Man. A young boy named Hogarth Hughes discovers an amnesiac "iron man", and saves him from electrocution. Grateful, the childlike fellow becomes friends with him. Now, Hogarth has to stop a U.S. military force led by a general and his egotistical federal agent from finding him and killing him out of paranoia with the help of Dean, a beatnik. There are many sly references to the McCarthy era and science fiction films and TV of the age. The characters are voiced by a cast that included Harry Connick Jr., Jennifer Aniston, John Mahoney, and a then relatively unknown Vin Diesel.
Tagline: It came from outer space!
Synopsis
The story starts in the fall of 1957, when a large, flaming object is seen plunging through space towards Earth, where it crashes into the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Rockwell, Maine. This meteorite turns out to be the Iron Giant, a 100-foot tall robot of unknown origin and purpose.
Hogarth Hughes, home alone as his mother Annie has to work late again waitressing at the local diner (we never see or hear anything about Hogarth's father, but a photograph of a man standing next to a military jet in the boy's room leads one to the possibility that the father was a fighter pilot killed in the Korean War, judging by Hogarth's relative age, the fact that the mother has to work (no alimony from a divorce and the year the film takes place), is watching a cheesy science fiction film on the television when the power mysteriously goes out.
Hogarth goes outside with his BB gun in hand and finds the TV antennae chewed up on the ground. Seeing a trail of destruction leading off into the woods, Hogarth follows a path of wrecked trees to the power station.
He comes upon the Giant in the process of trying to eat the power station (he consumes metal for fuel), but gets shocked into nearby powerlines and is electrocuted. Hogarth heroically saves the Giant by shutting off the station's power (which happens to have a very convient large and labeled power switch apparently for just such a contingency).
The next day, pompous and self-centered U.S. Government agent Kent Mansley arrives at the power station to investigate why it was wrecked as part of his looking into reports of a strange object that landed off the Maine coast. With the recent launching of the satellite Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957 (this is the satellite we see orbiting Earth just before the Iron Giant comes plunging in from space), a shocked America became even more paranoid of the Iron Curtain nations during the Cold War.
Apparently Mansley was sent to Maine to see if the meteorite report and smashed power station were all part of a secret Soviet weapon aimed at the United States. At that time, Americans feared that if the Soviets could place a satellite into Earth orbit with their rockets, they could just as easily launch a nuclear bomb on the U.S. with very little warning in a matter of minutes.
Mansley finds Hogarth's smashed BB gun with part of his name on the remains of the gun stock (Hog Hug). Hogarth had dropped it when the Giant frightened him at their first encounter and had unknowingly stomped on the gun in the process. Mansley is ready to leave the power station and drop the whole investigation as not being important enough for him to waste time on, when he suddenly discovers that half of his car is missing! Mansley tries to find a witness to verify what has happened, but by the time they get there, the entire automobile is gone (the Giant was hungry).
Meanwhile, Hogarth goes into the woods with a camera to find the Giant again. When he does, the Giant tries to follow him home, not understanding Hogarth when he tells him not to. But when the Giant accidentally causes a train wreck, Hogarth changes his mind and lets the Giant follow him home, hiding him in his barn. We also learn from these scenes that the Giant's major parts can function independently to reassemble themselves and that he can ultimately survive the impact of a speeding train.
At the same time, the engineer of the wrecked train tells Mansley that the train ran into "a giant metal man" and tells him that the nearest phone is in Hogarth's house. He telephones his superior in Washington, D.C., who angrily tells him to get more evidence. When he leaves, he realizes that the BB gun he found belonged to Hogarth.
In order to conceal the Giant, Hogarth relocates the Giant to the nearby scrap yard, where the proprietor, Dean, agrees to let him stay the night. At the same time, Kent rents a room in the Hughes house so he can keep an eye on Hogarth. However, Hogarth keeps one step ahead of the agent, but it doesn't last, for Kent manages to catch up with Hogarth, and Hogarth is forced to tell Kent his secret. Hogarth, however, informs Dean, who quickly fools the troops sent by Kent's General boss into thinking the robot is merely art. However--thanks to a mistake made by Dean, Hogarth, and the Giant--the U.S. Military soon discovers everything.
Mansley, eager to be proven right, initially convinces the general that the Giant is a threat, which gets him attacked by the military. The Giant tries to avoid fighting back, as we have learned by now that he is some kind of advanced alien weapon that could easily dispatch Earth's military forces and kill many people in the process. Hogarth has tried to instill in the Giant that he can be whatever he chooses to be in life and does not have to be "a gun."
But when the Giant is shot down while flying with Hogarth to escape some jet fighters and assumes that his best friend was killed by their attack (Hogarth is only unconscious from the impact when the Giant crashlands from the missile strike, but the Giant assumes otherwise), the Giant becomes incensed and goes on a rampage against the military, using the full force of his superior alien weaponry to devastating effect on the 1950s U.S. military machines.
With the Giant smashing his way towards the town of Rockwell and by this time automatically assuming that everyone and everything is his enemy, the military tries to divert him away from the town with some battleships in the harbor, which fire their cannons on the Giant. The plan succeeds temporarily as the Giant turns towards the ships to destroy them.
In the meantime, Hogarth has regained consciousness and makes his way to rescue the Giant. Hogarth distracts the Giant, causing the robot's strange plasma weapon to just miss one of the battleships in the harbor. The Giant prepares to fire on Hogarth until the boy finally gets through to him and reawakens the robot just in time ("I am not a gun.").
When, despite the General being convinced the Giant means no harm, Kent causes a nuclear missile from the submarine Nautilus (also called in to fight the Giant and located just off the coast) to be launched against the robot - who is standing right in the middle of town - the Iron Giant decides he must act and flies into the approaching missile, destroying it and presumably himself in the process. (In reality, the first sub-launched nuclear missile did not become operational until Polaris in 1960.)
Later, Dean and Mrs. Hughes become involved, and we see in the town park a metal statue of the Giant made by Dean in dedication of his noble act. The Giant's body parts are last seen traveling to the Langjokull glacier in Iceland to reassemble themselves.
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