As I said in my brief, the film was superior. All of the actors seemed well chosen, the main characters were fairly interesting with executive assistant Pepper Potts standing out as a independent person willing to stand up to Tony Stark. As our hero, Stark himself, Robert Downey Jr. was simply perfect as an adult who didn’t come of age but did find more to life than just hedonism. I like having adult heroes as at this point I’ve come of age so I’m more interested in questions of what to do with ones life afterwards.
Stark makes an interesting contrast to Bruce Wayne (aka Batman), Wayne pretends to be the person Stark is, but Wayne’s skills are much more rounded and Stark is a better engineer. The movie did play up both Stark’s flaws and strengths quite well and I particularly enjoyed a moment in the final fight where Stark used a trick he only knew about because he irresponsibly pushes the limits of everything he does.
Part of the fun of the movie was also the conspicuous consumption. As Ann Horraday said, Iron Man has just as much of it as the Sex and the City movie does, it just happens to take a different form. I actually don’t care that much about the fancy cars but I loved the house and the lab. The movie also focused a lot on Stark’s development and invention process, which was great. Also the robots were really cute, plausibly engineered if overly intelligent, and quite funny.
I’m going to save the full political analysis for something else, namely a way to make export controls sexy. My main complaint is that the film seemed topical but wasn’t really. The U.S. is part of a coalition occupying Afghanistan, we’re not going to let a province get taken over because they have hostages. We might not immediately respond, particularly when it’s not in our territory, but this isn’t the kind of situation where the world would just turn its eyes away. For a more plausible scenario, put it in a neighboring -stan or perhaps the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Similarly, the big bad has a poor business plan when you remember that the U.S. has the bulk, if not quite and absolute majority, of the world’s defense spending. Although in fairness to the movie, this is a common comic conceit.
Movie Promotion Image, I figure it’s okay
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