Best movie of this year hands down!

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

The Stoneman Institute of Mathematics under the military is developing a Supercomputer. The military is launching a secret satellite. Timmie Merinoe is an average ten year old. His father tries to improve his intelligence by bring him to the Supercomputer. Timmie improves to such an extent that he is able to reassemble Robbie the Robot which arrived from over 300 years in the future. Robbi helps turn him invisible. Meanwhile, the Supercomputer intends to take over the world using the military satellite.There is a lot of nonchalant going on in this movie. None of the adults seem affected by a time-traveling robot especially the father. He treats the invisibility like an inconvenient prank. At times, it's laughable. This was probably strictly directed at kids. Reasoning is rudimentary and so is the acting. This is nowhere near the classic Forbidden Planet. There is a limited connection to the iconic movie which is more than simply reusing Robbie the Robot. It's cool to see this for a fan of Forbidden Planet but it's a weak movie on its own.

They say - "Children should be seen, but not heard." Well - In The Invisible Boy it seems to be the other way around - "Children are heard, but not seen." From my perspective - When it comes to the likes of children (in this case movie-children), I sure wish to hell that it could be both ways, meaning - Children should "not" be seen, and "not" heard, both, at the same time. Yeah. Now, wouldn't that be just ideal?Set in California (in and around the Stoneman Institute of Mathematics), The Invisible Boy's sucky, little, Sci-Fi story (from 1957) deals with the attempted "World Take Over" by a massive, supremely arrogant, "thinking" Computer that's obviously gotten way-way too big for its britches.In this flick's story the institute's top mathematician's son, 10 year-old Timmy, is, in a sense, kidnapped by this "brainy" computer. For this computer to pull off its hare-brain scheme to rule the world it immediately renders Timmy invisible by re-adjusting his index-of-refraction. (Yes. It's really that simple to do when you're a big, frickin', hot-shot computer) The computer, of course, can speak and it refuses to re-animate the boy until its "high'n'mighty" demands for human co-operation (in its quest to rule the world) are met to its pompous satisfaction.Personally, I hate "smart" computer movies such as The Invisible Boy. I mean, this particular movie was clearly intended for people (children, I guess) who just don't bother to think things through, or to think sensibly about things, at all.Robby the Robot (the hero from Forbidden Planet) was given a pivotal role in this flick.Unfortunately, this time Robby the Robot was bad. I thought that doing this to Robby really sucked. Robby the Robot was a cool robot-dude and he surely deserved to be on the hero's side of things in this flick, too.

While watching the opening credits, all the actors in the film were unknown to me, all except for the last name shown, Robby the Robot. Upon seeing Robby's name, I knew I was going to have an enjoyable evening of home video watching. I am a big fan of Robby, he has to be one of the few film props with his own IMDb page and numerous credits to his name. Robby's co-star, Richard Eyer, plays the part of Timmie Merrinoe, a ten year old boy, the only child of Dr. Tom and Mary Merrinoe, played by Phillip Abbott and Dianne Brewster respectively. This film is set in the paranoia of the cold war as Dr. Tom Merrinoe's work involves using a super computer to monitor the nuclear activity of the Soviet Union. While hanging out in his father's computer lab, the Super Computer manages to make Timmie super smart, and then has Timmie put Robby together from a pile of robot parts. The Super Computer is actually evil and has plans of world domination, which is why he took control of Timmie as the Super Computer needs Robby the Robot do his evil bidding. Little Timmie eventually develops the ability to become invisible with aid of Robby and the Super Computer. As one might expect Timmie has fun with his invisibility by playing tricks until his Parent's discover the truth about their son's new ability, sending him to his room. The main purpose of Timmie becoming invisible was to show off invisible gags and have a cool name for the film, it really wasn't germane to the central theme of an evil computer taking over the world. The Super Computer eventually has Robby hold Timmie hostage in order to get Timmie's Father and the government to do his bidding. When the Super Computer tells Robby to destroy Timmie, he can not and turns on the Super Computer. All ends well at the end as Robby joins the nuclear family of Timmie and his Parent's with Timmie once again among the visible. As silly as the premise of the film is and probably was, it is still good clean fun, and it is a film the entire family can watch. The props and special effects incorporated in this film were typical of a Sci-Fi B movie of this time period, with Robby of course was the coolest of them. The corny simplicity of this film is what I liked best beside Robby. This film is fun, just don't take it too seriously.

This IS a kids' movie, so Timmie is there to fix the viewers' point of view and point of sympathy. Invisible Boy also fits into 1950s paranoid sf genre. So there is a secret installation, and there are army officers, and so on down the list of clichés. Unlike so many movies of this genre, the Russians aren't the enemy. The superdupercomputer is it. Its motive is independent survival. This machine is an early draft of HAL 9000.I love Robbie too, but remember, Robbie is actually a costume. There is not much point in conflating Robbie's role in this movie with its debut role in Forbidden Planet. We are supposed to like Robbie. Robbie is a hero. Unlike most movie automatons, Robbie has built-in morals. The superdupercomputer can't break that. Robbie won't torture Timmie.I love the climactic confrontation of the computer's maker (Timmie's dad) with his creation. The machine proceeds to hypnotize the man with its sequencing status display lights. But Robbie "knows" in its circuits what the right thing is and proceeds to destroy the learned-experience storage units.After that, the machine can only work like an ordinary computer (external intelligence). That is quite a sophisticated storyline. Sorry about the kid stuff.