The Class of 1999: 'The Iron Giant'
The Class of 1999: 'The Iron Giant'
Is Brad Bird's film a condemnation of guns, or an incredibly compassionate meditation on gun users?
1999 was a historically-great year for film and dramatic narrative as a whole. I’m using my 2024 to look back at, reconsider, and celebrate these stories as they all celebrate their 25th anniversaries. I recently re-reviewed Eyes Wide Shut; next up on the docket is The Sixth Sense. But first… it’s time for…
The Iron Giant - directed by Brad Bird - written by Tim McCanlies & Brad Bird - August 6, 1999
Like too many class of 1999 alum, The Iron Giant was a box office failure upon release. I suspect this is because it debuted during the ascent of Pixar, hitting theaters just about eight months after A Bug’s Life and four months before Toy Story 2. Now that Pixar has been such a valued brand for going on 30 years, it’s hard to convey how exciting their work felt in the early days: CGI animated films were still new, and the company’s technological superiority mirrored their narrative brilliance, resulting in movies that could be enjoyed by children and adults equally. My friends and I were in high school at the time - exactly the age when you want nothing to do with animated kiddie fare - and we even wanted to see Pixar movies.
Point being, on the surface at least, The Iron Giant seemed unhip by comparison. While the title character was created using computers, the rest of the movie was animated in the same traditional style as older cartoons. Its color palette is dominated by autumnal hues, which furthers its sense of nostalgia for a bygone era of American history. Heck, it even takes place in the ‘50s! I think, from a marketing standpoint, The Iron Giant felt “old.”
The rave reviews it received might have normally helped, but The Iron Giant also had the bum luck of being released the same day as The Sixth Sense; while the two movies were intended for different audiences, The Sixth Sense was THE surprise hit of 1999, and by the end of the two films’ mutual first weekend in theaters, it was dominating media coverage and water cooler conversation alike.
The Iron Giant couldn’t even trade on the name of director/co-writer Brad Bird, who has since won multiple Oscars, because this was Bird’s first movie.
So The Iron Giant came and went.
Fortunately, two things happened that allowed audiences to discover The Iron Giant despite its financial failings.
One is home video.
The other is that the people at Pixar recognized the film’s genius and quickly recruited Bird. He went on to make The Incredibles and Ratatouille for the studio; both made a gajillion dollars and won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. Today, The Iron Giant is considered a classic… and rightfully so.
Very loosely adapted from Ted Hughes’ novel The Iron Man, The Iron Giant is set in the town of Rockwell, Maine in 1957. There, we meet a nine-year-old kid named Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal), who lives with his single mother, Annie (Jennifer Aniston), a waitress at the local diner.
As the film opens, a large object plummets from space and crashes near Rockwell; needless to say, Hogarth is the one to locate the object, which turns out to be the titular Iron Giant (Vin Diesel), a colossal metal robot of unknown origin.
Despite the Giant’s size, he seems to have a gentle and simple soul - kind of like a sweet rescue dog, but the size of a house and made of metal. After helping the Giant untangle itself from some power lines, Hogarth does what any good movie kid would do in this situation, and befriends the robot.
Hogarth and the Giant quickly form a bond. Hogarth teaches the Giant about human life, showing him comic books and movies, with a Superman comic becoming especially influential to the Giant. The Giant, who can repair itself, gradually learns about life and morality from Hogarth; this includes emphasis on the idea that the Giant can choose to be a hero, like Superman, rather than the weapon he was designed to be.
Unfortunately, as all of this is occurring, the Giant is being hunted by a paranoid government agent, Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald), who believes the Giant is a threat that must be destroyed. Further complicating matters: Mansley is renting a room in Hogarth’s house, making it all the harder for Hogarth to conceal the Giant’s existence.
Consequently, Hogarth hides the Giant in a junkyard owned by a beatnik artist named Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick Jr.), who reluctantly agrees to help after seeing the Giant’s kind nature.
That kind nature, however, is what eventually gets the Giant caught: he saves a pair of boys from a potentially fatal accident, thus revealing himself. Mansley subsequently calls for a military strike, and the Giant activates a self-defense mode, which of course scares the bejesus out of Mansley. While Hogarth manages to calm the Giant by reminding him about everything he’s learned up until this point, Mansley orders the launch of a nuclear missile.
The Giant realizes that said missile will annihilate Rockwell, and after declaring himself to be “Superman,” intercepts it, sacrificing himself to save the town.
Mansley is arrested by his superior officer, General Rogard (John Mahoney); Dean and Annie become a couple, and Dean builds a statue of the Giant to commemorate his heroism; and Rogard gifts the only recovered piece of the Giant, a single bolt, to Hogarth.
At the end of the film, Hogarth is home in his bedroom when he sees the bolt start to move on its own. Remembering the Giant’s ability to repair itself, he allows the bolt to leave. We follow it to a glacier in Iceland, where the Giant is, indeed, reassembling himself.
The Iron Giant is one of the most Spielbergian films ever made with no involvement from Steven Spielberg, and I suspect that even Steven Spielberg feels that way. We know he’s a fan at least, ‘cause he used the Giant in his 2018 celebration of pop culture, Ready Player One.
In fact, Spielberg is credited with the basic premise of the 2007 Transformers movie he produced in 2007, and I’m not entirely convinced didn’t cop that premise from The Iron Giant… which is fine, because The Iron Giant clearly owes a tremendous amount to Spielberg flicks like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and, especially, E.T., with which The Iron Giant shares a basic logline (i.e., “A kid with no dad discovers and befriends an incredible alien and must help protect it from the government”).
But the similarities to vintage Spielberg don’t end with the plot. The movie’s visual language is also distinctly Spielbergian, as is its score, by the late, great Michael Kamen (Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, etc.). Take, for example, the largely dialogue-free scene in which Hogarth first encounters the Giant - particularly the moment when the Giant is revealed to be standing amongst the trees in the background. Try and tell me this isn’t pure Spielberg:
But the most supremely Spielbergian element of The Iron Giant is the way it uses B-movie tropes to explore profound moral and philosophical questions.
The Iron Giant, you see, was born from deep pain. In 1989, Bird’s sister was shot dead by her husband; subsequently, Bird pitched the movie as an exploration of the question “What if a gun had a soul?”
Unsurprisingly, the film’s perceived anti-firearm message really pissed off the right. The New York Post’s Rod Dreher wrote an editorial decrying the movie’s alleged “strident political correctness” and “Soviet apologist” mentality (“Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, this robot’s for you”) while shaming the movie for daring to take an ethical stance at all (“It’s a pity that politics, and of an especially pernicious kind, intrude into a discussion of this entertaining, heartwarming kids’ movie”).
More amusingly, the old message board from a pro-gun website contains gems like this (which was so important that its author just had to post it at 3:30 in the goddamn morning):
As is usually the case, the conservative outrage missed the larger point altogether. It is definitely possible to read the film as an argument that violence (violence - not even specifically gun violence!!!) is soulless, you can also read the film as an examination of what it even means to have a “soul.” Which it very explicitly lays out in a scene where Hogarth tells the Giant “You’re made of metal, but you have feelings, and you think about things, and that means you have a soul.” As Sam Adams so wonderfully put it in a 2016 essay for Slate:
“The assertion that the Giant has a soul is where the idea that The Iron Giant is at heart a movie about war or weapons starts to break down. After he begins to remember his previous existence as an alien killing machine, the Giant concludes, ‘I am a gun,’ but that’s only a provisional understanding… He was a gun—or, more to the point, a weapon of mass destruction—but now he’s developed a conscience, and guns don’t feel guilt… The framework that is most helpful in contextualizing the Giant goes back way before the Cold War: This is really a story about the dark side of human nature… ‘You are who you choose to be,’ Hogarth advises him, and the Giant chooses to be Superman.”
Adams’ last assertion is especially valuable: to have a soul means not only to have a conscience, but to be able to act on that conscience. In the director’s cut of the film, there’s a scene where the Giant has a vision of being part of a robotic army that conquers the planet. This may be the Giant’s intended purpose, but as a being with a soul, he knows that purpose is evil. What’s more, he acts to prevent it.
The Iron Giant posits that choice is the defining feature of identity. I mean, the Giant very literally repairs and remakes himself, for crying out loud. It’s not a subtle metaphor, and it suggests that The Iron Giant was intended less as a condemnation of guns than as an incredibly compassionate meditation on gun users (like the one who murdered Bird’s sister).
Finally, I think it’s worth considering The Iron Giant as a powerful fable about the power of fables. The Giant’s hero, the figure he aspires to resemble, isn’t a historical figure; it’s another fictional character. Bird understands the inherent value (especially for young people) of these very broad myths that teach us (and, in some cases, remind us) about right and wrong. Boiling down concepts as complex as morality, identity, and redemption into their simplest elements is no small feat. And it’s what makes The Iron Giant - like the Pixar films that once overshadowed it - such a great watch for kids and grown-ups alike.