Every week, a group of friends and I are rewatching a Marvel movie in preparation for the next Avengers film. Might as well talk about them on the way, right?
Review: Iron Man
2008’s Iron Man holds a special spot in pop culture history: It’s the first member of the MCU- Marvel’s shared series of films. It was the first time anyone even tried this sort of thing. Previous film series- James Bond, along with every adaptation of Batman come to mind- often reboot or don’t rely on shared continuity for the stories to work. Even Bulldog Drummond, which has a surprising 24 films in its series, changes actors every few entries.
So does it hold up, ten years later?
Absolutely. I would say that it’s even better now than it was in 2008.
To start, Tony Stark is the most toxic of men. More than any other Marvel hero that has been put to screen thus far. I was 17 in 2008, and I saw this as “Wow, what a confident ladies’ man!” and yeah, that’s the thinking of an idiot teenager who grew up in deep Pennsyltuckey. I may not have been alone in that reading of Robert Downey, Jr.’s performance, but the characters in the movie were not amused.
The entire film is punctuated with Pepper, Rhodes, Obediah, and almost everyone in the cast constantly chastising Tony for his behavior. He’s an asshole, and they’re sick to death of him. The news clips and paparazzi glorify every move he makes, and he even sleeps with a journalist in the beginning, but the people who know him best know that he’s completely, utterly full of shit.
And now we talk politics.
In May of 2008, George Bush was still president, and American media was still saturated with post-9/11 imagery and propaganda. It has already been revealed that the reason for going into Iraq was a lie, most of what we were told about the middle east and terrorism was a bag of lies, and that shines clearly in Iron Man. The “terrorists” were bought and paid for by Stark Industries to fuel conflict. The idea that American exceptionalism was the only influence keeping the world politically stable was shattered. It was, in fact, American interference worldwide that was causing many of the issues in the first place. In the narrative, this was framed specifically as Tony’s doing, but you can tell what Marvel was going for.
And while it is very forward-thinking, Iron Man also kicks off the decade-long issue of its movies completely lacking in representation- I didn’t notice a single woman in any of the Air Force scenes that had dozens of extras**.
Robert Downey, Jr. is so fucking charming. Gwyneth Paltrow is really great, even if she is a snake oil salesman. Terrence Howard is a wife beater and that’s what we should remember about him. Jeff Bridges’s portrayal of Obadiah Stane is, in my opinion, seriously underrated. His role in the third act is… wonky… to say the least, but the way he pulls the strings for the duration of the film is nothing short of brilliance.
The sci-fi of Iron Man is weak. People criticize Ant-Man and the Wasp for the fact that it inserts the word “quantum” into every third sentence and that makes the machines go. The only difference here is that instead of “quantum”, they use several different science-sounding words. For example, the arc reactor Tony builds in the cave? Tony says it creates some number of gigajoules per second. An engineer would refer to this as “gigawatts”. But you can’t say “gigawatts” in a movie without making a Back to the Future joke, so that’s excusable. What’s not excusable is that Yinsen says “That could run your heart for 50 lifetimes”, which is horseshit- that’s like saying a car that can drive at 100 miles an hour could drive around the Earth 50 times. That doesn’t make sense. Watts are a rate of power, not a unit of measuring power*. There are some other bits too- the Iron Man suit being made mostly of gold and titanium wouldn’t be able to repel bullets as described, Tony sustained like, 4 or 5 fatal injuries in the movie, does the arc reactor power a magnet or power his heart? It’s like they keep changing it every couple scenes…
Iron Man is also imperfect structurally: Parts felt a little rushed, and good portions of the movie were ad-libbed by the cast. Great performances, but the narrative suffers for it. Some things were too convenient, and the introduction of Agent Coulson and S.H.I.E.L.D. was a little forced.
And all those negatives barely matter. The characters and story work even if the sci-fi fails. Iron Man delivers an entertaining story that is still politically and culturally relevant a decade later, and is the absolute perfect way to begin the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Let’s see if Marvel can keep up its steam in the second entry into the franchise: The Incredible Hulk (2008).
I couldn’t type that with a straight face. This is gonna hurt.
*This rant about gigajoules per second supplied to you by my roommate, who is an engineer.
**This comment brought to you by Jilly, but I totally would have said it if she hadn’t
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