"From risk comes progress," states an old man, the main character's grandfather, in Steamboy's opening scene. These words, though often true, are ones that he eventually will eat because what is also true -- what is the subject of many science fiction tales -- is the other side of the trade-off: from progress comes sacrifice, and this sacrifice is not always worth the price. That is what this film is about, and it is told in a wonderfully creative steampunk fashion. The decision to tell such a story in this style was simple genius. As such, it provides itself with the opportunity to dream up truly original technologies, something that most films of the science fiction genre struggle to do, and it is this visual originality that saves the film from its missteps.

What you might be wondering right now, whether or not you have seen Steamboy, is how I can consider it science fiction. The first half of the name, you might be thinking, says it all: steam. Though steam-powered technologies are obviously a thing of the past, this film treats them as if they are the current technology (even though the film takes place in the past), and, in upholding one of the primary elements of science fiction, surpasses its technological status quo by imagining steam technologies far past their time, technologies that we might dream of had the steam age continued evolving to present day. This is science fiction -- it's just science fiction set in the steam age.

Ray Steam, a young English boy who is the descendant of masters of steam technology, receives a package one day from his grandpa. Inside is a Steam Ball, a sphere containing a very specific, very special form of steam, capable of virtually infinite measures of force and longevity. This sphere is the necessary final component in the creation of his father -- a Steam Tower, a veritable floating fortress, powered and propelled entirely by (what else?) steam. Suddenly two men show up to take it from him, and though Ray initially succeeds in making a getaway, he is finally caught. It turns out these henchmen work for his supposedly dead father and want the sphere back so as to complete the creation, which his grandfather is trying to keep from coming to fruition.

His father, Edward, is a pure idealist who believes unquestioningly in the virtue of science and is devoted to the completion of the Steam Tower at any cost because, he says, "Science is power," and the "Steam Tower is science in its ultimate form." It's easy to see that his intentions are being corrupted by the prospect of money and power, which a successful demonstration of the Tower is sure to bring him. So, Ray and his grandfather set out to save Edward as well as London, which the Steam Tower, as it hovers over, is inadvertently destroying in a way that I will not take the time here to explain. Ray's grandfather, who was partially and regretfully responsible for the creation of the Steam Tower, sums up the situation perfectly and in the true science fiction tradition: "[W]e weren't strong enough to keep what we planned from becoming a monster." But it is not only Edward's creation that is destructive. The movie is filled from the beginning with big machines that wreak havoc due to misuse and imperfection. It is seen in the opening scene involving Edward's accident, another early scene where the factory at which Ray works nearly blows to kingdom come, and even during the first chase scene. This destructive nature of technology is one of the film's insights, and it is vividly portrayed.

During the scene in which Ray is caught by his father's henchmen, we get to see just how imaginative the writers and animators are. When Ray is supposedly safe in a train car, suddenly a blimp arrives, hanging from which is a gigantic pair of steel claws which grab the car, effortlessly splintering its sides, and rip off the roof so that a crew can repel down and capture Ray and his Steam Ball. The technology is of course crude, but in this crudeness is such audaciously blunt methodology (just rip off the roof with a giant pair of claws!) that it is refreshing and unexpected. There is hardly any finesse to the technologies in Steamboy. They are all of a purely mechanical, steam-powered nature, designed not to be efficient but purely to have the sheer power to do whatever it is they need to do. If they need to make a city float, no need to devise UFO-inspired anti-gravitational mechanisms; just blow the thing off the ground with massive amounts of steam! Though the technologies are huge and clumsy when compared to things like lasers and tractor beams, there is an entirely different kind of art required to actually visualize the mechanics of something that typical science fiction films would explain away with alien terminologies like "quantum stabilizers." I particularly love Edward's mechanical equivalent of a launch key for the Steam Tower -- pure genius. Watching Steamboy makes me wish there were more steampunk movies; I feel like it is an art form that has just as many imaginative possibilities as science fiction, per se, but that still remains largely untapped.

The actual story also has its merits, taking one of the classic themes of science fiction: the danger of unabashed scientific pursuit. Edward is a man who is so devoted to an ideal that even the fact that it has deformed him has no deterring effect on his endeavors and neither does the fact that his grand creation is best suited for the purposes of war. When lauding the benefits of technology, instead of considering the burns that cover much of his face, he falls back on questionable axioms (often contained within long, repetitive tirades, of which there are perhaps too many) like "[Science is] not secrets for the use of the well-born deep in their palaces and churches. Science exists as a power to be used in reality." His mistake, one that is common among the devoutly idealistic, is in his turning to the theoretical truths of his ideals rather than their actual results. The film is therefore a warning not only about blind faith in science but blind faith in anything.

There are some aspects of Steamboy that, whether by accident or intention, seem taken right out of Star Wars. Ray's dad is the chief of these. Not only is he permanently scarred because of his pursuits, but he also covers those wounds (partially) with a mask a la Darth Vader. This is not much on its own, but also consider the fact that Ray was told, by his grandfather, that his father had died in the accident that deformed him, and when Ray confronts his grandfather about this, he is told, "He who has crossed to evil is as good as dead," (Return of the Jedi spoilers ahead) echoing those lines from Obi-Wan to Luke : "... [T]he good man who was your father was destroyed. So what I have told you was true ... from a certain point of view." To top it off, the Steam Tower is almost the steampunk equivalent of the Death Star, a giant, floating, self-contained city with great destructive power.

All of that said, Steamboy is far from perfect. Its construction is its biggest flaw. It begins strongly enough, quickly throwing us into a mystery of what this metal ball with a valve on it is that Ray's grandfather has sent him as well as why these men are suddenly chasing him down for it. However, as it settles into Ray's attempts to save London, the film becomes too comfortable with its position, spending far more time than necessary on the climax and the events immediately leading to the climax. This leads to an overlong scene in which characters inside the Steam Tower are doing nothing but running around trying to find certain controls, turn certain cranks, and open certain valves while the bad guys try to stop them from doing so. The outcome, too, is all too predictable.

Another fairly large flaw is the Steam Ball. The story could have easily been told without it and, in doing so, would have avoided an esoteric and somewhat fantastical element that seems to undermine the technological basis of the rest of the film. Let me provide an analogy, going back to Star Wars again: In George Lucas' first draft of Star Wars, there was a scene in which Luke Skywalker (as a very different character than what he turned out to be) had to take something called the "Kiber Crystal" to a man named "The Starkiller" to help them fight the Empire.¹ The inclusion of such a mystical object greatly weakened the film's portrayals of both the power of the young man with big dreams and the importance of the spiritual aspect of the universe and thus was smartly dropped in subsequent drafts. Now, the Steam Ball is, granted, a bit different in that it is said to be the product of real science, not alchemy or wizardry; however, its characteristics are dangerously reminiscent of magic, especially when compared to the other technologies in the film. Many viewers are likely to overlook this, but had it been dropped from the script, I think it, too, would be a plot device that those learning about it later would have wondered, What would have been the point of that?

Despite its faults, Steamboy is an enjoyably imaginative film, presenting a unique view of a classic science fiction motif via some really cool visuals. However, I get the feeling that with a little revision, the script could have been tightened quite a bit. What we have in Steamboy is a good film that could have been great, had it gone through a few more drafts.