This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:
Comment: I never said you were a superblogger.
Dusty: Didn’t?
Comment: Mmm-mmm.
Dusty: Well, good, because that would be outlandish and, uh, fantastic. I’m just not the superblogger type.
Rating: PG-13
Director: Jon Favreau
Writers: Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum
Stars: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges
Release Date: May 2, 2008
Run time: 2 hours, 6 minutes
THE PLOT:
via wiki
Tony Stark, who has inherited the defense contractor Stark Industries from his late father Howard Stark, is in war-torn Afghanistan with his friend and military liaison, Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes, to demonstrate the new “Jericho” missile. After the demonstration, his convoy is ambushed and Stark is critically wounded by a missile used by the attackers—one of his company’s own. He is captured and imprisoned in a cave by a terrorist group called the Ten Rings. Yinsen, a fellow captive and doctor, implants an electromagnet into Stark’s chest to keep the shrapnel shards that wounded him from reaching his heart and killing him. Ten Rings leader Raza offers Stark freedom in exchange for building a Jericho missile for the group, but he and Yinsen believe that Raza will not keep his word.
Stark and Yinsen secretly build a small, powerful electric generator called an arc reactor to power Stark’s electromagnet and a prototype suit of powered armor to aid in their escape. Although they keep the suit hidden almost to completion, the Ten Rings discover their hostages’ intentions and attack the workshop. Yinsen sacrifices himself to divert them while the suit powers up. The armored Stark battles his way out of the cave to find the dying Yinsen, then burns the Ten Rings’ weapons and flies away, crashing in the desert and destroying the suit. After being rescued by Rhodes, Stark returns home and announces that his company will cease manufacturing weapons. Obadiah Stane, his father’s old partner and the company’s manager, advises Stark that this may bankrupt Stark Industries and ruin his father’s legacy. In his home workshop, Stark builds a sleeker, more powerful version of his improvised armor suit as well as a more powerful arc reactor for it and his chest. Personal assistant Pepper Potts places the original reactor inside a small glass showcase. Though Stane requests details, a suspicious Stark decides to keep his work to himself.
At a charity event held by Stark Industries, reporter Christine Everhart informs Stark that his company’s weapons were recently delivered to the Ten Rings and are being used to attack Yinsen’s home village, Gulmira. Stark dons his new armor and flies to Afghanistan, where he saves the villagers. While flying home, Stark is intercepted by F-22 Raptors. He reveals his secret identity to Rhodes over the phone in an attempt to end the attack. Meanwhile, the Ten Rings gather the pieces of Stark’s prototype suit and meet with Stane, who has been trafficking arms to the Ten Rings and has staged a coup to replace Stark as Stark Industries’ CEO by hiring the Ten Rings to kill him. He subdues Raza and has him and the rest of the group killed. Stane has a massive new suit reverse-engineered from the wreckage. Seeking to track his company’s illegal shipments, Stark sends Potts to hack into its database. She discovers that Stane hired the Ten Rings to kill Stark, but the group reneged when they realized they had a direct route to Stark’s weapons. Potts meets with Agent Phil Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D., an intelligence agency, to inform him of Stane’s activities.
Stane’s scientists cannot duplicate Stark’s miniaturized arc reactor, so Stane ambushes Stark at his home and steals the one from his chest. Stark manages to replace it with his original reactor. Potts and several S.H.I.E.L.D. agents attempt to arrest Stane, but he dons his suit and attacks them. Stark fights Stane but is outmatched without his new reactor to run his suit at full capacity. The fight carries Stark and Stane to the top of the Stark Industries building, where Stark instructs Potts to overload the large arc reactor powering the building. This unleashes a massive electrical surge that causes Stane and his armor to fall into the exploding reactor, killing him. The next day, at a press conference, Stark publicly admits to being the superhero the press has dubbed “Iron Man”.
In a post-credits scene, S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury visits Stark at home, telling him that Iron Man is not “the only superhero in the world”, and that he wants to discuss the “Avenger Initiative“.
My Review:
Iron Man is a movie wherein a good story meets excellent special effects, and both are made much better by maybe the most perfect casting choice in the history of super hero movies. If the wrong person had been cast as Tony Stark, this movie wouldn’t have worked despite its other positives. I don’t think it’s an overreach to make the case that Robert Downey Jr. was the most important hire made by Marvel Studios and that without him, a decade’s worth of pop culturally dominant films might not have followed. Indeed, once he left the role of Tony Stark, the popularity of the MCU began to recede almost immediately. There are a lot of other great acting performances in this film (Gwyneth Patrow is fantastic as Pepper Potts), this franchise, and in the Marvel Universe, but RDJ as Tony Stark is the only one I cannot imagine anyone else tackling successfully.
As big as the MCU became in the 2010s, there was a beginning… and Iron Man did that back in 2008. One of the things that really struck me after my first rewatch since seeing it in theaters is how smart the first five minutes of the film really are. With only a small space in time to have introductory dialogue – meaningless smalltalk between Stark and a guard – we establish Tony Stark as a fast-talking, funny, highly charismatic, somewhat womanizing, and intellectually brilliant person. In only a few minutes, we feel as though we know and really like the main character. Then the film abruptly sets the stakes for the rest of the film and the character’s life. It’s an incredibly brilliant storytelling hook. By the time the ensuing flashback gets the audience once again in the present, they’re fully invested in the character’s outcome.
I mentioned above, but I remain very impressed with the special effects of the film a decade and a half later. The look of the suit, the presentation of the tech, and the flying all look fantastic. The movie takes place in a technological universe that feels real, looks real, and comes across as existing in a tangible near-future world. I mean, if you found out that Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg were working on their own Iron Man suit, would you be that surprised?
The movie is definitely not perfect. A lot of the tech development feels comedically rushed. Despite it being a cool scene, it remains unclear to me how billionaire Tony Stark knew how to blacksmith himself a suit while he was held captive. It’s also unclear when and how Obadiah trained to use his own Iron Man prototype – it would have been pretty conspicuous while he flew it around, I think. The story also makes the mistake of building up its hero so much that his fight at the end with Obadiah felt anti-climactic. (This is always difficult when doing an introductory superhero film.)
Overall though, minor gripes aside, the movie was excellent and it reminded me strongly of why Marvel movies became so culturally relevant for more than a decade. Robert Downey Jr. provided some indefinable magic to the proceedings that made the story captivating. I highly recommend it.