The Invisible Boy refers to Timmie (Richard Eyer, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad), the 10-year-old son of a cold, emotionless workaholic. (But really, aren’t we all?) The kid hangs out at his dad’s top-secret intelligence office, which houses a talking supercomputer containing the sum of all human knowledge.
Left to his own devices while his father works, the kid reassembles Robby the Robot (from Forbidden Planet), who becomes his new friend. At first, they do things together like flying kites, but after the supercomputer downloads a big batch o’ evil into Robby’s electrobosom, the robot is getting the kid to drink a potion that turns him invisible.
It’s every kid’s dream to have a robot and be undetectable to the human eye (or maybe just to have a robot; the invisibility part is ideal for teenage boys who wake up with sticky sheets), which is what makes The Invisible Boy an enjoyable, old-school science-fantasy film, particularly when the kid starts pulling pranks on his parents.
But in the final half-hour, this squeaky-clean exercise ceases to be fun when it no longer focuses on the boy, but his dad and his co-workers. Thus, what was playful and mischievous turns into something political and menacing — in other words, just like real life. —Rod Lott
We can’t get our Rockets to Work, but we can build a time machine to bring Robby the Robot from the Future. That how this movie starts. If you can turn off your brain, than you may enjoy this.