Iron Man

Iron Man (***1/2)

I'm sort of late to the party on Iron Man, which came out in early May and immediately made tons of money and got tons of hype. Having finally seen it last weekend, I can confirm that the hype was very much justified, and that the movie proves that it is still possible to make a superhero movie that doesn't feel like a cookie-cutter re-branding of another movie, despite how many superhero movies are out there now. It's a very intelligently written movie, and it manages to maintain a certain degree of unpredictability, despite having the core "Guy becomes hero, hero discovers villain, hero beats up villain" plotline that most of these Marvel/DC movies are based around.

The movie begins by introducing us to Tony Stark, who is very much true to his character's portrayal in Marvel comics. He's a genius when it comes to engineering, but he's also a drinker, a womanizer, and in just about every other way someone who lives live with reckless abandon. This is how he's first presented to us as he's riding in a Humvee with U.S. soldiers on his way back from a weapons demonstration for his company, Stark Industries, somewhere in Afghanistan. Things hit a snag for him, to put it mildly, when the convoy of Humvees is the target of an attack and Tony finds himself in the hands of a terrorist organization (a fictional one, whose members are made up of many different nationalities, no doubt to stave off controversy). He has shrapnel lodged in his chest that would've pierced his heart and killed him, were it not for another scientist captured with him who keeps him alive with an electromagnet hooked up to a car battery (I strongly question the validity of the medicine behind all this but whatever, it's a comic book movie). In a cruel twist of fate, Stark realizes that he's being kept alive so he can build the very missile he just demonstrated for the U.S. military for his captors.

Stark, of course, has other ideas, and creates an early prototype of the Iron Man suit and uses it to escape. He also makes a breakthrough in "arc reactor" technology (no idea if this has a real world equivalent, be it actually functional or theoretical), which he uses to power the electromagnet in his chest without him having to be dragging a car battery along. Upon his return to the U.S. he has a sort of epiphany and decides that Stark Industries, despite being primary a weapons manufacturer, since the weapons keep ending up in the hands of the wrong people. This doesn't go over well with Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), who briefly headed the company after Tony's father died but before Tony was old enough to become CEO himself.

Much of the next section of the film tracks Tony's progress as he designs a new and improved Iron Man suit--without letting Obadiah or the rest of the company know--in the lab in his mansion. He does it with the help of Jarvis, the personality of the super-sophisticated AI that controls his entire house. In a movie in which everything that's not owned by Tony Stark basically resembles our, normal present day world, the fact that Jarvis seems to rival the computer from Star Trek: The Next Generation in intelligence is a little cartoonish, but I can forgive that because a. it's a comic book movie and b. it leads to some extremely funny exchanges between Tony and the various robotic appendages that Jarvis controls. Tony's near obsessive level of devotion to his new project concerns his devoted, if perhaps somewhat overwhelmed at times, assistant, Pepper Potts (Gweneth Paltrow). She doesn't have a huge role, but there are some very good scenes in which we see her doing the best she can to be a companion to the loner that is Tony Stark while not encouraging his more self-destructive habits. Their relationship has some vague sexual tension, but doesn't turn into a hokey love story which at times seem to be a prerequisite for any big Hollywood movie. This, along with the fact that the movie is more about Tony building the suit and taking on the identity of Iron Man than him endlessly fighting random guys as Iron Man makes the movie stand out amongst the cluster**** of big budget superhero movies, and hopefully will influence the myriad superhero movies that are still on the way.

The movie ends with the requisite hero vs. villain confutation, and has the much expected "greed is bad, selfless is good" morality tale woven in, but the movie is well-written enough and the performances by Downey Jr., Bridges, and Paltrow are good enough such that the movie feels like it has something unique to contribute to the genre and isn't just a cookie-cutter duplicate of other movies with a different guy in a different costume. It also sets itself up for sequel in a way that actually makes you believe that a sequel would actually branch out from what the original was, instead of just swapping villains and rehashing mostly the same plot. This is a superhero movie done right.