Great visuals wrapped around a horrendous infantile morality play

Rating: 3/10 (26 May 2009)

This movie is beautiful, and full of neat details. Visually, I'd give it at least an 8. There's lots to love technically, the sound is great, the characters really work, and there are a lot of laughs.
Unfortunately, the story is wretched at best, and actively evil at worst. The message is hypocritical in the extreme. Where Spiderman told us (rightly) that "with great power comes great responsibility" this excuse for a moral tale says that with great power comes nothing but danger, and suicide is probably the best course of action. All violence is bad, and we can all choose what we want to be; even giant killer robots can be transformed into giant pu$$ies by the miracle of a small boy's love and friendship. Barf.
As a moral tale, this is hypocritical and irresponsible garbage at best. The boy solemnly lectures the robot about death, saying "guns kill" as if that's a bad thing. They mourn the death of a deer at the hands of evil hunters. But the boy is not a vegan, nor is his mother. So killing is okay as long as someone else does it, at a distance. That's amoral hypocrisy, nothing more.
It gets worse- obviously the Iron Giant is a symbol, and he is the hero of the story, because he is the only character who changes. What is he a symbol for? Well, for Man's "destructive" and "flawed" nature. But the Iron Giant is obviously and explicitly a creation of something- he's a built artifact. So this implies a Creator metaphor; we're talking about God as Creator here. But God in this story is flawed, defective: He built a good, tender, sensitive creature and made the mistake of encasing that gentle soul in the form of a weapon. Or, He built a weapon and made the mistake of giving it a tender heart. Either way, God is flawed. Worse, the giant killer robot can't even distinguish a toy from a real threat, and thus self-defense is portrayed as unacceptably dangerous. And the only way to remedy this flaw is for the unfortunate creature to "nobly" sacrifice himself rather than taking responsibility and using his tremendous power for good.
The message is therefore ultimately Satanic: God is bad, and you're better off dead. When good people (and robots?) refuse to take their power, bad people take it by default. After all, a key component of evil is the lust for power over others. When evil has convinced everyone that the only acceptable method of resistance is pacifism, disempowerment, surrender, and suicide, then evil has truly won.
Have we really fallen so far that we no longer know how to fight the good fight? Do we really think that all violence is "bad"? Have thousands of years of culture, morality, and civilization really been swept away by a few decades of propaganda? The fact that this artful piece of toxic amorality has gotten so much acceptance suggests that much has been lost.
The film is worth seeing as a pretty film, but I'd recommend sitting down afterward and discussing the values and lessons here with your family, in a critical way. I sure as hell wouldn't plunk my kid down in front of this with no discussion, because it's a powerful piece of propaganda that needs deconstruction. Or just destruction.