It’s spring 2020 and we’re all trapped inside. Everywhere you look there are lists of what to watch and read while social distancing, but I’ve actually had this idea in mind since watching Avengers: Endgame. It’s hardly an original thought, but because Endgame was such a tribute to the early days of the MCU, I wanted to go back and rewatch the MCU from the beginning.
In theory, I’m going to watch and write about every movie. In reality, judging by my track record, I will probably fail out of this series in a few weeks, so I make no promises and certainly don’t plan to have a schedule. As for what I’ll most likely be writing about, well… I’m an author, not a cinematographer. You can expect some thoughts on character, plot, and especially story structure, and very little on the actual filmic aspects. (Luckily, if film stuff is what you’re looking for, there are roughly a gajillion Youtubers who have plenty to say on that.)
So, let’s get into it. Iron Man, from 2008, was the starting point for this whole cinematic universe.
I didn’t know much about the character before the movie came out, but was primed to like him. I wasn’t a huge comics person, but a few of my closest friends were, and on a road trip together in 2007 they’d spent awhile brainstorming which characters I would like best, if I were ever going to dive into comics — and Tony Stark was the winner for Marvel. (In fact, my friends spent a couple of hours detailing the entire plot of Civil War.) So I was psyched to go see this movie back in the day, and really, really enjoyed it.
So how does it hold up, 12 years later?
Really well, actually, and yet I feel like if I saw it for the first time in 2020, I would not be that into it. But that’s nothing about the movie — that’s about me. I’ve always been pretty much a hippie at heart; I think war is bad and helping people is good. But over the few years I’ve also taken a strong, sharp turn into full on eat-the-rich territory. I think billionaires are universally, fundamentally bad and should not exist. I think that hoarding wealth is as bad as hoarding any other resource (and often goes hand-in-hand), and that money and power are intrinsically tied together and at the heart of most of the violence and war in the world. All of which makes it a hell of a lot harder to enjoy Tony Stark, a billionaire weapons manufacturer.
To be clear, like most of his crappy behavior, the weapons manufacturing is problematized by the movie. He has a very clear arch, where he starts as a smug, rich, irresponsible douchebag with no particular morals or interest in the world as a whole, has a horrifying experience, grows as a person, and ends as a smug, rich, semi-responsible douchebag with a clearer set of morals and an enormous interest in the world as a whole. For all the movie paints him as cool from the get-go, it is not saying that Tony at the beginning is an aspirational figure. It rubs his face in the horrible things he and his company have done and sets him up to reform his terrible ways. Great!
But it never, ever problematizes his status as a billionaire, or that his growth is going from mass weapons manufacturing to turning himself into a weapon. Where this really stands out to me is his first mission. He’s discovered that the villains who held him captive are still terrorizing the region, and particularly Yinsen’s home town, so he takes his suit out for the first time, shoots them all, blows up a weapons stash, nearly gets blown up himself, and heads home triumphant. Great!
Except do you know what he never does? Send aid or relief to the refugees who inspired him to go on the mission. The news report he watches while prepping dwells on it again and again — these are people with nowhere to go, who’ve lost their homes to violence, who have nothing and it seems like no one in the international community cares enough to help them. Tony helps by taking out the people who took their homes, and that’s it. That’s enough. He’s a hero. But these people still have no homes or food or other resources, and again, Tony is a billionaire. It is well within his power to both blow up badguys and send aid, but he — and the movie — only care about the former.
So yeah, Tony is a great, engaging character, and the movie recognizes that the way he behaves at the beginning is bad. But the solution it asks you to cheer for pays a lot more attention to the spectacle of violence than to the humans who are affected by it. And hey, it’s a superhero movie. No one is watching it hoping for a drama about the ins and outs of refugee aid and resettlement assistance. But the fact that there isn’t even a throwaway line about sending aid is pretty telling about just how little the movie actually cares about the people Tony is supposedly helping.
My other issue with the movie has been with me since 2008 — its treatment of Christine Everhart. She’s the report who asks Tony about whether or not arms dealing is bad, actually, near the beginning; he blows off the questions, they sleep together, and then Pepper slut shames her on her way out. I haaaate this part. It’s designed to show Tony being gross, which it does, but by having Pepper join in with her “taking out the trash” line it undercuts that. Pepper’s shaming of Christine turns it from being about Tony’s attitude towards women to being about how Christine should be ashamed of herself, because Pepper is the reasonable, good character here, and it plays into the sexist trope of women basically cat-fighting over a man. That was crappy in 2008 and it continues to be crappy now.
All of that said, this movie is still incredibly good. My above objections aside, it really nails a very tough line with Tony: he’s obnoxious, but still really fun to watch. He always gets the last word, and you want him to. Watching him outsmart and outtalk the people around him is a delight.
Another thing worth noting with 12 years of hindsight: while full of special effects, this movie feels a lot more grounded than more recent movies. The fight scenes are smaller scale and the impact of each hit feels like real impact. It feels like there could be an actual human in the suit, and when Tony gets smashed around by Stane in the big fight… it’s not that you think he might lose, because duh, he’s the hero, but it genuinely feels like he’s an underdog.
Finally, one bit I’ve loved about this since 2008 is that the movie actually lets Pepper have a point of view. I have always adored that, though the audience follows Tony’s point of view from their dance to learning about the violence in Golmira to going into battle, Pepper is allowed point out that from her POV they had an intimate dance and then he vanished and ditched her and never mentioned it again. Like yeah, he did the right thing! (From the movie’s perspective, at least.) But that doesn’t mean everything else vanished into the background.
Some stray thoughts:
- In Tony’s press conference when he first gets home after escaping, one of the things he yells is, “I came to realize I’ve become part of a system that has zero accountability!” Ha. Just wait a few years, Tony, that’s gonna be an even bigger problem for you.
- “Either way I’m dead in a week.”
“Then this is a very important week for you.”
That is my favorite dialogue in the whole movie. I love Yinsen as a character and wish that he was referenced more in later movies so it felt more like not just becoming Iron Man, but Yinsen himself had an impact on Tony. - Tony and his bots! They are so fun and endearing, I wish they showed up more in later movies too.
- The scene where Pepper is copying files and Stane walks in and begins chatting with her is actually the most tense, suspenseful scene in the movie. A+.
- Plus, Pepper grabbing Coulson for help is smart and great and Coulson then opening the way toward the larger MCU is a great set up. It was a way to allow for the whole MCU project to build into something cohesive, without demanding it; if there had never been another Iron Man movie or any of the other franchises launched, it wouldn’t have taken away from this movie or felt like anything was left unresolved.
- “Tony Stark was able to build this, in a cave! With a box of scraps!”
“Well I’m sorry, I’m not Tony Stark.”
The scientist in that scene sounds so genuinely hurt. Stane’s yelling is fully over the top and the exchange is hilarious.
So that’s that. It’s a really fun, really well put together movie that launched the entirety of the MCU. It sets a lot of the tone — it’s funny, it’s grounded in character, it’s uninterested in secret identities, and it hints at a much bigger project to come.
