The American premiere is less than 90 minutes away at Grauman's Chinese in Hollywood and we already have a Hollywood Reporter review:

Bottom Line: Derivative bits aside, the pint-sized Japanese icon takes flight in vibrant CG animation -- no 3D glasses required.

Since making his debut in a 1951 Osamu Tezuka manga, the beloved Astro Boy has been retooled as a fondly remembered 1960s black-and-white animated series and, subsequently, full-color renditions in 1980 and again in 2003.

Finally going the big-screen, computer-generated route, the iconic Japanese hero manages to keep his innate lovability intact in a visually dynamic if overly eager-to-please family feature cobbled together with parts reclaimed from various animated classics.

Although the social-political allegorical elements could have benefited from a slyer, less obvious touch, an energetic voice cast headed by Freddie Highmore and Nicolas Cage ultimately saves the day.

Designed to cater to older kids and their nostalgic parents, the heavily marketed Summit Entertainment release could be well-positioned to attract a sizable demographic.

For the uninitiated, Astro Boy began life as Toby (Highmore), the wunderkind son of brilliant scientist Dr. Tenma (Cage), who is tragically killed in a robotic experiment gone terribly wrong.

Anguished, Tenma creates Astro Boy in Toby's image, but despite succeeding in programming him with all of his son's memories and characteristics, he ultimately rejects him as a convincing substitute.

Filled with rejection and chased by the military, Astro Boy flees from Metro City, the affluent metropolis perched in the sky, and crashes down to Earth, where vagabond kids scavenge for rusty, discarded robots and bring them back to their ***in-like father figure, Hamegg (Nathan Lane).

There's obliviously a strong Pinocchio undercurrent running through the "Astro Boy" mythology, but in trying to make the movie version as accessible as possible, director David Bowers ("Flushed Away"), who shares screenplay credit with Timothy Hyde Harris ("Space Jam"), also has borrowed liberally from "WALL-E," "The Iron Giant" and "Robots," to name a few of its more notable influences.

A little more subtlety could also have been applied to a political subtext involving Blue Cores and Red Cores, power sources made with positive "blue" energy and negative, unstable "red" energy, with both being co-opted by the war-mongering President Stone (Donald Sutherland).

Then there's a whole other overt Marxist element that also might not go over so well in red states.

But that spirited voice cast, also including Bill Nighy, Eugene Levy and Kristen Bell, is among the year's best, and those gleaming, stylized backgrounds (taking their cue in part to the work of Katsushika Hokusai, a 19th century Japanese woodblock artist), effectively merge Eastern and Western sensibilites, even though the East in question was outsourced to Hong Kong.

Opens: Friday, Oct. 23 (Summit Entertainment)
Production: Summit Entertainment, Imagi Studios
Cast: Freddie Highmore, Nicolas Cage, Kristen Bell, Donald Sutherland, Bill Nighy, Eugene Levy, Nathan Lane, Samuel L. Jackson
Director: David Bowers
Screenwriters: Timothy Hyde Harris, David Bowers
Executive producers: Cecil Kramer, Ken Tsumura, Paul Wang, Francis Kao
Producer: Maryann Garger
Director of photography: Pepe Valencia
Production designer: Samuel Michlap
Music: John Ottman
Editor: Robert Anich Cole
Rated PG, 94 minutes

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And Variety agrees it's good:

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Appropriately for a film about robots, efficiency is the primary virtue of "Astro Boy," a well-oiled CG-animated superhero pic that makes up in competence and vitality what it lacks in originality. Adapted from the classic Japanese toon, this thoroughly Westernized film will likely have little appeal to devotees of the source material, instead targeting tots and borrowing from a variety of recent animated pics. Slated for an Oct. 23 release Stateside, two weeks after opening in Asia, the film easily should draw sizable family crowds and hold their attention well; whether it sticks in their memory is another question.

The anxiety of influence is a palpable force in "Astro Boy," although it owes just as much to "Wall-E," "The Iron Giant" and "Pinocchio" as it does to its source -- Tezuka Osamu's 1952 manga that spawned multiple cartoon series and bequeathed contemporary anime with a hefty chunk of its DNA. While "Astro Boy" is hardly the equal of any of those, it's nonetheless a cut above this year's thematically and aesthetically similar "Monsters vs. Aliens," displaying flashes of intelligence and a relaxed pace that should please parents who stumbled out of the latter nursing stroboscopically induced migraines.

Action centers around Toby (voiced by Freddie Highmore), a spiky-haired child prodigy who lives in futuristic Metro City, a robot-controlled utopia orbiting high above the Earth, which has become overrun with garbage. Following his scientist father, Dr. Tenma (Nicolas Cage, whose characteristically breathy, marble-mouthed diction proves an odd fit for the character), to an experimental weapons test, Toby is accidentally killed, and the grieving Tenma creates an identical-looking android replacement, complete with Toby's memories and consciousness (as well as the ability to fly and a cache of fearsome weaponry, for reasons left unexplained).

As detailed in a dapper, retro-styled prologue, Metro City's sentient cyborgs are considered little more than disposable slaves, and Tenma goes to lengths to hide Toby's internal circuitry from him. When he catches Toby fraternizing with the house's mechanical help, however, Tenma becomes disenchanted with his creation and cruelly sets the boy loose.

Dropping down to Earth after an awkwardly timed battle with decidedly unscary supervillain President Stone (Donald Sutherland), Toby eventually falls in with a gang of orphaned scavengers who roam the ravaged surface, seeking out scrap metal for their ***in-like guardian (Nathan Lane). Now calling himself Astro, the boy passes himself off as a fellow traveler and tries to go about fitting in, soon discovering an ability to revive dead robots from the junkyard.

Dark as all this sounds, the PG-rated pic's apocalyptic elements are more than balanced by its moments of levity and strong (though surprisingly subtle for a kidpic) moral undercurrents. The battle and chase scenes are kinetic and exciting without becoming too frightening or manic, and there's little here to upset any but the smallest children. (That this film should merit a PG rating while last year's far more sinister "Tale of Despereaux" skated by with a G defies all reason.)

Script by director David Bowers and Timothy Hyde Harris is mercilessly streamlined in its storytelling, and save for one very unexpected shout-out to Kant, it refrains from aiming too many jokes above its target audience's heads. Supporting characters are well drawn, particularly a band of robot revolutionaries plotting to overthrow their human overlords but hopelessly hampered by Asimov's first law of robotics.

Animation is topnotch yet stylistically inconsistent, veering from bubbly and Wii-like to photorealistic from scene to scene. Other tech contributions are solid all around, with some excellent visual effects and sound design giving the action scenes extra punch.

A grade B review from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY...

By Owen Gleiberman

In an origin story that's like Pinocchio meets Frankenstein, Dr. Tenma (voiced by Nicolas Cage), a robotics professor, loses his son, Toby, in a freak energy accident and builds a new kid from scratch: a robot boy with rocket flames that shoot out of his feet and hair molded into a Dennis the Menace cowlick. Astro, as he comes to be known, doesn't just look like Toby; he has the exact same personality (they're both voiced by Freddie Highmore). You could chalk this up to the miracle 
 of robotics — or, perhaps, to the thinness of characterization that marks this jet-propelled update of the Japanese cartoon series, which in 1963 was an early milestone of anime.

If you're pining for the richness of a Pixar film, or even for the crackerjack comedy of, say, Kung Fu Panda, look elsewhere. Yet the new Astro Boy is a marvelously designed piece of cartoon kinetics, with the pleasing soft colors and rounded-metal tactility of an atomic- age daydream. Astro gets kicked off Metro City, a spaceship that hovers above Earth, and he lands in a scrap heap of robots and meets some wild-child friends. There's a little too much lost-boys-and-girls mopiness, but when Astro becomes a robot gladiator, the movie turns happy demolition derby, and the virtuoso collisions just keep on coming. B

A *** out of **** review from Roger Ebert...

"Astro Boy" is yet another animated comedy in which the hero, who is about the same age as his target audience, is smarter, braver and stronger than the adults in his world. Toby is also a quick learner; after he dies in an accident, he's reborn inside a robot that looks just like him and retains all of his memories. His father, in fact, treats him just like the original Toby. But Toby is dead! my inner logician insisted. Here's a good question: Does Astro Boy with Toby's memory wonder why he is a robot and can fly?

No time to ask questions. Metro City is in upheaval. Astro Boy (the voice of Freddie Highmore) is powered by a Blue Energy source discovered by his dad (Nicolas Cage); it's safe and clean, but its opposite is Red Energy, which is dirty and dangerous and desired by the warmonger President Stone (Donald Sutherland), who wants to use it to seize complete control. That seems like a shame, because Metro City is in peaceful orbit around the Earth, its citizens waited on hand and foot by robots.

Below on Earth, there is devastation as garbage piles high. The precocious Astro Boy does battle with the president and then vamooses to Earth, where he meets some scavenger human kids, led by the ***inesque Hamegg (Nathan Lane), who builds fighting robots out of scrap parts. Apparently BattleBots still thrive. All builds up to Astro Boy, back up in Metro City, leading the Blues against the evil, polluting Reds, in an apocalypse where any thoughts of Blue and Red states would of course be completely inappropriate.

The movie contains less of its interesting story and more action and battle scenes than I would have preferred. Has market research discovered our children are all laboring with attention deficits and can only absorb so many story elements before brightly colored objects distract them with deafening combat? Still, "Astro Boy" is better than most of its recent competitors, such as "Monsters vs. Aliens" and "Kung Fu Panda."

It may have a building audience because of loyalty to the Astro Boy character, first introduced in a Japanese manga and then adapted into two generations of TV cartoons. Daffy Duck, he ain't; in fact, he's a boy robot of few words and simple ideas, but he has pluck, and cannons built into his chest and butt. You don't see that every day.

Now try this test. "Astro Boy" was filmed in glorious 2-D. Take the kids if they insist on going, and afterward ask them if there was anything missing. I'll bet not a single kid says, "I wish it had been in 3-D." So the kids are happy; plus, you've saved $3 a ticket and didn't have to wear those damned glasses.