Iron Man, Revisited
Hi there! I’m Kevin Kam and I think too much about pop culture.
We’re not too far away now from Avengers: Infinity War — in fact, there’s just enough time to watch one Marvel Cinematic Universe film a week until May 4th. Which, it turns out, is exactly what I’m going to do! I’ll be putting up these reviews every week, so feel free to watch along with me so we can discuss.
So here we go with the movie that started it all, back in the misty days before Disney bought Marvel. Or Disney. Or Fox.
Release Date: May 2, 2008
Directed by: Jon Favreau
Budget: $140 million
Domestic box office: $318 million
What Holds Up
The effects actually still look good in this day and age. It’s probably helped by the fact that there aren’t random creatures or crazy environments to deal with. They could pretty much focus all their energy on making the suit look right. And it does! It’s old hat by now, but the internal view of Tony in the helmet is a crucial part of selling the idea that there’s actually a person inside this pile of CGI. They don’t use it quite as much in this movie as in later ones, but it’s pretty important to Robert Downey Jr’s performance.
On the whole, that performance is still kind of the glue that holds the movie together. Despite some issues that I talk about in the next section, his rapid-fire quips and unbalancing charm work well and are very much in the style of director Jon Favreau. Without RDJ, there is no MCU. This movie had to do well enough to justify the continuation, and it doesn’t get there without the charismatic showing from Robert Downey Jr.
I also have to say that the ending of the film is just about perfect. The secret identity trope is so overused that having Tony Stark just blithely declare “I am Iron Man” was a genuine surprise at the time, and gives a satisfying kick into the credits and hope for the sequels being something new and different.
What Doesn’t Hold Up
Lots of casual sexism is used as a punchline. Yes, we get it, he’s a womanizer and kind of a piece of shit at the beginning of the movie, but I’d argue even his later advances on Pepper are borderline sexual harassment. I don’t want to get too sidetracked, but the power differential between the billionaire and his secretary is just way too huge for comfort. The leads have pretty great chemistry, but that doesn’t completely cover up a weird dynamic. This will not be the last of my criticisms of the treatment of the female lead in these movies.
The central plot is generally pretty thin. They have a lot of legwork to do to set things up, but the middle third just feels like Tony Stark randomly tinkering to generic metal riffs with no momentum or urgency to anything. Even when Tony leaps into action to help the villagers that his weapons are being used against, it doesn’t really feel like part of a larger whole. It works as well a character beat, but not as a plot element.
For example, the second act gives us the sequence with Tony evading the F-22s, which really accomplishes nothing other than cluing Rhodes in on the whole Iron Man business. But Rhodes also serves no useful function in the plot either before or after he finds out, and that means it’s basically not even a blip when Terrence Howard is replaced with Don Cheadle for the subsequent films. The whole middle of the movie kind of feels like it was made for the trailers.
How Bad is the Villain?
Well, not great. Jeff Bridges has to speak around a mouth full of chewed scenery throughout the movie, and his switch from “cutthroat CEO” to “fist-fighting in a giant metal suit” is not especially believable. However, he also gives us this glorious line reading, and for that we should be eternally grateful.
Ironmonger (which they force him to try to say naturally at one point) is also the start of a not-so-proud tradition of Marvel villains having the exact same power set as the protagonist. It’s tricky because it’s not the villain’s story, and you don’t want to spend an extended amount of time explaining a totally unrelated villain and set of abilities, but you also want something more distinct to contrast with the hero. It’s a fine line to walk, and I think the title of this section probably gives an indication of how well they do in general.
After-Credits Sequence
We get our very first look at Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury! He breaks into Tony’s house and declares that he has “become part of a bigger universe. You just don’t know it yet.” Rather on the nose, but I remember how big of a deal it seemed at the time. Of course, name-dropping the Avengers this early forced them to later scramble to undo it, but it’s still an iconic moment.
It’s funny that nine years ago a shared movie universe seemed like a crazy gamble, and now it’s what everyone is stumbling over each other to establish — to the death of all sanity in some cases. I’m looking at you, Universal.
Wrap-Up
All right, that does it! Let me know if you’ve gone back to watch Iron Man again and what you thought of it. I’m also considering different subheadings, but these are the ones that made the most immediate sense to me. I don’t think I’m going to grade the movies in the course of this series, but I will probably rank them at the end because ranking things is fun and the internet has taught me to do it aggressively to spark controversy.
Catch you next week for a look at The Incredible Hulk, the awkward kind-of-but-not-really-MCU movie!
