Monday, May 5th, 2008...12:02 pm
iron man - review
Iron Man is an awesome movie. Go see it.
That’s pretty much what the tone of this review will be so if you’re in a rush you can go now.
All ill attempts at humour aside, this movie is really good. The pacing is fantastic. There wasn’t a single moment where i felt the movie was dragging or getting bogged down. I was constantly engrossed in what was happening on screen.
Origin stories can sometimes be hard but this movie has used the Batman Begins formula to great effect. It isn’t enough nowadays to simply have some guy strap on a suit and start saving damsels. You need to know the why of it all.
Tony Stark’s motivation comes when he discovers how his arms manufacturing is being used in the world beyond his playboy circle. Mercenaries using his high tech weaponry attack the Marine convoy transporting Stark through Afghanistan. Their goal is to have Stark make them more advanced weapons that they can use to take their war beyond the borders of Afghanistan.
Instead, Stark decides to make the Mark I, the first incarnation of the Iron Man armour. Credit must be given here the visual effects team because every aspect of this suit looks viscerally realistic. It has a tangible weight. You can imagine something like this actually getting made.
This is the first example of how realistic the effects in this movie are. In fact there was only one identifiable moment where the CG noticeably bled into the film and i’m willing to forgive that. Props must be given to director Jon Favreau for not overindulging on the special effects because this could quite easily have been a film that was ruled by CG.
Apart from looking utterly fantastic, Iron Man was further blessed by a brilliant script and outstanding actors. I hope this trend of intelligent film making continues for Marvel because i for one do not want my fanboy dreams shattered by another X-Men 3.
Robert Downey Jr is perfect. I truly cannot imagine this film with anyone else in the role. He doesn’t just act, he seems to inhabit Tony Stark and Iron Man. Jeff Bridges also brings a slow-burning menace to his role of Obadiah Stane. I have to give special mention to both Gwyneth Paltrow and Terence Howard. They both do a fantastic job with the limited screen time that their characters have. Gwyneth, as Pepper Potts, exhibits a marvelous wit in her dealings with Tony (and in one instance, Tony’s one night stand from Vanity Fair magazine). Terence Howard plays Tony’s close friend James Rhodes (who will play War Machine in a future film) and the relationship that they share is wonderful. You can feel the affection that these two friends have for each other but also the tension that exists between two drastically different personalities. I’m looking forward to the evolution of these characters in future Iron Man movies.
The film also has something to say for current US involvement in the Middle East. Iraq doesn’t get mentioned but Afghanistan is front and centre. It is fairly critical, pretty much stating that while the intentions might be good the actions are far from helpful.
The movie also takes steps to ensure that it doesn’t demonise any particular ethnicity, not an easy thing to do if so much of your action takes place in a terrorist hot spot. The “bad guys” that capture Tony aren’t identified as locals. They’re part of a mercenary group calling themselves the Ten Rings (a tip of the hat for fanboys, and perhaps a hint at future movie villains). and numerous references are made to the various ethnicities of these mercenaries.
This movie is awesome. I am utterly and unashamedly enamoured with it. It brings together all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster and combines it with an in depth story and solid characters that are well acted.
Industry executives, please take notice. This is how a superhero film should be made.
12 Comments
May 5th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
[...] After much deliberation and many rewrites i have completed my Iron Man movie review. [...]
May 5th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Make sure you stay until the very very end of the credits. There’s a cameo that’ll make a fanboy’s day.
May 5th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Thanks Adrian for such a good review. I always think the directors do a good job of bringing my creations to life. Except for Ghost Rider, what was Mark Johnson thinking?
Anyway, if you liked this, I say stay tuned for the new Hulk. It will be a smash!
May 5th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
“viscerally realistic”? Oh dear, you just fangasmed - clean it up!
May 5th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
I LOVED Iron Man too!! In fact, it doesn’t make me as ashamed that Emma has done Tony Stark…actually, it’s COOL now.
Anyways, the movie was awesome. I wanna see it again next week! Great review too…I’ve been meaning to write my own review, but I’ll do that later.
LOL @ Stan Lee comment.
May 7th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Adrian, I’ve just seen Ironman and 99.5% agree with your review…
** CAUTION** this blog contains spoilers so if you haven’t yet removed your posterior from the computer chair to your local preferred cinema then DO SO NOW and stop reading this entry!
My 0.5% disagreement comes with your comment “All ill attempts of humour aside” - The Gwyneth line about ‘Even taking out the trash’ coupled with ‘Testing booster boots at 10% should be safe enough’ - *THWACK - SLAM - CRASH* were definite chuckle if not deep belly laughter moments!
Total agreement about Robert Downey Jr as Stark - who better to act the part of a reformed alcoholic playboy? He did a superb job. As Adrian has already wonderfully outlined, the screen performances from the supporting actors in Ironman were solid, tangible and BELIEVABLE. I truly felt the moments of rapport, emotional awkwardness as emotional boundaries drifted closer and sizzled with proximity (Stark and Potts). My girlfriend’s fingernails left crescent moons in my triceps when arch villain Obadiah Stane sprung her in the act of hacking the work mainframe. There was excellent dramatic tension and buildup. The close and trusted friend backstabbing the hero may be a classic; but when it is worn and carried off well is nothing to sneer at. “Everything has been done before; great artists merely express the same material in unique ways”
is a quote from whom I can’t recall - but I agree whole-heartedly!!
My final comment is total agreement with my friend Adrian; Film rollers and makers take note the benchmark had been made and the bar has been set high.
PS - You mentioned Batman Begins - when, oh when is the release date set for Australia? And THIS time don’t sneak away early on your own - we’ll organise the guys and girls together and have a good night out at the movies together.
Bryn
May 9th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Mostly agree with review. Except the ending sucked.
Brilliant movie, bad ending.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
What was sucky about the ending?
Are you talking about the whole “I am Ironman” thing? That was a bit cheesy but i think it fit in with the Stark character quite well.
He spent the whole movie working off of instinct and at that moment it felt right to reveal himself as Ironman.
And, truth be told, the whole “he’s my bodyguard but is never in the same room as me” thing was always lame in the comics. I’m glad they didn’t do it that way.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Not just the “I am Iron man thing.” but the whole final battle.
Sure, it looked impressive but it was too superhero cliche and didn’t quite fit into the set up of the movie.
By cliched I mean everyone knows that the hero has to fight a menace that has very chance of killing the hero. Fighting against the odds is what makes them the hero.
But the menace that Iron Man fights should not have existed due to the set up of the film.
Tony Stark is a genius, despite being a drunken wasteral . Jeff Bridges is a business man, not an engineer. When Stark snr dies, Bridges takes over the company and continues to sell conventional weapons til Stark takes over with his new smart tech designs.
Stark builds the mark 1 out of scrap. He does not test it before it’s use and therefore it has problems - flight weapons, bulky and unwieldly etc. Mark 1 is trashed in desert.
Designs and builds mark II with high tech equipment. Tests each system to iron out flaws (pun intended) while having the only existing power source for the suit to carry out the tests. By the final battle the mark II is fully tested and qualified.
Bridges gets the pieces of the mark I off the terrorists and has his engineers build the iron soldier. Not a direct copy but an improved copy bigger and meaner. His own engineers tell him that they can’t get it to work because they can’t build the power supply (”I’m not Tony Stark”). They can’t test the soldier. At all. They can’t refine any of its systems.
Now admittedly none of this concerned me at first. I believed the mark 1 reactor powering the mark II would put Stark and Bridges on a level playing field. Let the enjoyment of two cyborgs a’la Robocop II pounding the crap out of each other begin.
It was when they started to fly. (”How did you solve the icing problem?”) Icing should of been the least of Bridges concern. How the hell did they get the soldier to fly? Flight didn’t work on the Mark I. Stark had a hell of time getting it to work on the mark II (”Ten percent power should be enough”). That’s when I thought about all this.
That’s why the ending sucked.
Oh and as for “My body guard” Iron man is a person in a metal suit. He could build a light weight suit that his air force friend or someone to wear and lurk behind the door at press conferences or whatever so people could sneak a mere glimpse and people would buy it.
To quote Pratchett, “How’d you recognise the ghost Mister Policeman?” “Well….he’s got a mask on…” “Really? Now say it again and listen to what you are saying. You can recognise him because he’s got a mask on. You can recognise him because you don’t know who he is? Life isn’t neat! Whoever said there’s only one ghost?”
May 12th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Oh and am I the only one who found it a little difficult to believe that the top weapons supplier to the US military could provide terrorists with top grade weapons that the US military had yet to buy without attracting the attention of the CIA, home land security, SHIELD, FBI, BATF etc. Especially when the CEO, or former CEO, deputy CEO whatever you want to call him can travel to a war zone to met the terrorist leader without anyone raising an eyebrow?
Or that he could receive a video email from the terrorist who openly discuss their plan to kill Stark in exchange for said weapons that IS STORED ON HIS OWN COMPUTER WITHOUT ANY REAL SECURITY without someone raising the alarm?
May 12th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Well Obadiah did have other tech guys working on it. Surely they could have engineered the things that he wanted (big guns for instance).
The flight capabilities can be argued away in the same way. If Obadiah wanted the suit to fly then surely the boffins could have worked that out.
I do agree that having it work so well right out of the gate was pretty ambitious but i’m willing to let that slide as a cinematic indulgence.
Yes, it was convenient that no one knew that Obadiah went to Afghanistan with a full security detail and didn’t attract any kind of Federal attention.
Yes, the idea that the mercenaries would send a video to Obadiah with their renewed demands is pretty suss. Also suss is the idea that he’d keep it on the Stark Enterprises network (though Pepper was only able to obtain it using some sort of Super USB that Tony had engineered himself).
Perhaps this should be my argument. Yes, there were some plot holes but the overall caliber of the movie was so good though that i’m willing to accept them. Not the best reason because it is fairly biased but i’m a fairly biased individual when it comes to Marvel.
Unless you’re Brett Ratner in which case you are the embodiment of incompetence and must be stopped.
May 12th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Again it was a brilliant movie. It was only the flight of the soldier that did it for me (I can put up with a large number of plot holes etc for the sake of cinematic indulgence but sometimes there just something that I find a little too hard to look past) and since it happened at the end of the movie I’ll live with the fact that only the ending sucked.
And I’ll agree with you on Brett Ratner.
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