Movie Monthly - Robot Jox

Edited by Robert Beach 

Ah, November, the middle child of the holiday seasons. October might be the spookiest month, and December is all Christmas all the time, but November often ends up the month without a theme, mainly because there are like three different celebrations that dot the month. Aside from armistice day next week and Thanksgiving a couple weeks down the line, November is, here in America, a sports month. We just had the final game of the World Series over the weekend, and I’m told by more sports savvy individuals and pop culture at large there’s some kind of football to be enjoyed over the rest of this month.  

This November has an additional dollop of sports obsession added to it with Creed coming out later this month, the thoroughly hyped Rocky sequel/spin-off revolving around rising star Michael B. Jordan as the son of Apollo Creed coming to Rocky for training. In the spirit of all this, I’ve decided to dedicate November to sports movies. Because I remain a massive nerd who doesn’t really like most sports films, I’m adding the wrinkle that they have to be sci-fi sports films. So welcome to Cyber-Sports November with our first film: Robot Jox.

Robot Jox was one of the most bizarre entries in the realm of cultural taste making films I’ve ever seen. It was released in 1990, and boy, did it ever show. The movie ended up caught in this bizarre twilight zone between ‘80s jingoism and grit and an FX-heavy, polished vacuousness that was much more endemic to the blockbusters of the ‘90s. It came to us from Stuart Gordon, one of the raining lords of cult genre movies and creator of some of the best H.P. Lovecraft adaptations of all time in Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon. Robot Jox was the most action-oriented film he’s ever made, with his other non-horror entry Space Truckers acting as more of a comedy.  

So, what’s Robot Jox about? Well, in the distant future, a third world war has ravaged the planet. Out of the ashes of that conflict, humanity has settled on a new way to resolve international disputes. Now, instead of going to war or launching missiles, if one nation wants to claim another nation’s terrain as its own, they challenge them a giant robot death battle. The idea being instead of wasting millions of lives fighting over land, it’s just two guys in robot suits beating each other to death. 

The whole situation works off essentially the same logic as Pacific Rim in that the solution humanity has settled on to solve a major global issue may not be the most practical or logical, but it’s the most bad ass. It's cinematic shorthand for asking you to accept a certain fluidity of logic within the events of the film.

Our hero is Achilles, the in-suit pilot or ‘Robot Jox,’ for the American fighting bot.  Well, technically they don’t identify the post-war nations by country name, rather the obliquely western “Market” and the villainous/clearly soviet-influenced “Confederation.” Achilles is a champion jox, but after a botched match at the beginning of the film, the Market is dubious about his continued efficacy and want to replace him with Athena, a gen jox.  

Yeah, it turns out Robot Jox wasn’t content to just be a movie about giant robots hitting each other as a stand in for the united nations; there’s also a whole weird subplot about eugenics. The idea is the Market has started breeding a whole crop of people like Athena, who are genetically engineered to be amazing at Robot Joxing, and they’ve been nicknamed gen jox by the previous generation. 

The weird thing about the movie is that it actually is a lot more like Pacific Rim than the basic premises might lead you to believe.  From the outside, the two might seem very different, but it retains the basic structure: old pro sidelined by an accident has to come in and help foster the hot shot female rookie in a major battle, it’s basically the same exact structure as Pacific Rim. There’s a little more going on in Robot Jox because the villains aren’t just anonymous monsters, but humans who can actually plot, scheme, and chew scenery. 

This shows up partly through a subplot about a traitor within the Market’s robot support team but mainly in Confederation robot jox Alexander, played by Paul Koslo. Alexander spends most of the movie fluttering around the edges of the story and occasionally popping up to threaten our heroes in a thoroughly Russian and hilarious fashion. He’s filling the same theoretical space as Ivan Drago from Rocky IV, but he comes off a lot more like the evil German team from Cool Runnings. 

Luckily, Koslo is more of the exception than the rule acting wise as everyone else is turning in a pretty solid performance. Gary Graham of Alien Nation and Star Trek: Enterprise fame has the main role of Achilles, and he’s pretty solid. Nothing amazing, but he plays the square-jawed, tough-as-nails hero role pretty well.  Danny Kamekona turns in a strong performance as the robot support designer Doc Matsumoto, and Michael Alldredge is fun as strategist Tex Conway; however, all the good acting in the world runs smack dab into the film’s very shaky screenplay. 

There’s a lot of tonal whiplash in the movie, owed mainly to a dispute between writer Joe Haldeman and director Stuart Gordon.  Haldeman wanted the movie to be more of a dark, serious sci-fi film while Gordon wanted a lighter and more cartoon-y giant robot flick.  This all adds up to a little bit of both, which makes a lot of the plot hilariously confused. When the traitor is eventually revealed, he comically jumps to his death while shouting “Geronimo!” in a scene that is absolutely hilarious. 

Really though, all the writing and acting is just gravy, there’s only one reason anyone is going to watch Robot Jox and that’s for the giant robot fight scenes, which are amazing. The robot effects are all done with miniatures, stop motion, and other practical effects; it looks amazing. The robots all move amazingly with a great sense of weight and size to them that’s often lacking from modern giant robot films. Additionally, the design work of the claymation and model figures is top notch; all the robots are easily identifiable no matter the situation and look legitimately different. 

The Confederation robot is this great, inhuman, crab-like monstrosity with a bunch of legs and rocket fists while the Market robot is much more humanoid and with actual mounted weapons.  The fight scenes, especially the final fight between Achilles and Alexander, is pretty spectacular, stretching across several environments: like an amazing space battle that actually remembers there’s no sound in space. 

I’m not sure Robot Jox is going to change anybody’s life, but it’s a fun movie regardless. You could do a lot worse as far as giant robot movies and sci-fi sports go. The basic job of all giant robot movies is to look amazing. That’s something Robot Jox manages with incredible ease, and the detailed, well-realized sets and robots are very much the equal of modern films. If you really liked Pacific Rim, or maybe enjoyed some of Transf4mers but found the plot a little too overburdened to engage with, I’d highly recommend this movie, doubly so if you’re a fan of stop-motion animation. 


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