Iron Man was part of the huge first wave of superheroes co-created by Stan Lee in the early 1960s, in collaboration with a variety of artists, mainly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, but also Bill Everett, Larry Lieber, and Don Heck.
While never a headliner in the Marvel Universe, ol’ ShellHead was always a major player at the very least. He was a founding member of the Avengers, a presence in a lot of stories as the inventor (or at least the owner of the company that invented) much of the Marvel Universe’s fancy tech, the financial backing of the Avengers, and the centerpiece of several major events in the comics, from the Kree-Skrull War to the Armor Wars to Operation: Galactic Storm to Civil War.
Since the movie rights to most of Marvel’s biggest names—Spider-Man, the X-Men, Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four—were already gobbled up by other studios, Marvel decided to focus their nascent Marvel Studios endeavor on the Avengers characters, starting with Iron Man.
Originally imagined as a latter-day Howard Hughes, Tony Stark is a brilliant engineer, a good-looking man who is something of a womanizer, and a rich, successful industrialist. I want to say he’s the type of person you don’t see in real life, but there’s Hughes. Still, not a lot of people combine all three of those things.
Like most of Marvel’s early heroes, Iron Man’s origin was very much a product of its time, as Stark’s primary method of making a living was to build weapons for the United States military. While in southeast Asia checking out his weapons, he’s taken hostage by an Asian warlord and told to construct a weapon for him. Instead, he secretly builds a suit of armor, which also serves as a glorified pacemaker, as shrapnel from an explosion is nearing his heart.
Unlike several other contemporary heroes, Iron Man’s origin has generally been easy to update, mainly because there’s always been somewhere where we’ve got troops. In 2008, it was Afghanistan, and Stark’s odyssey of armor-creation was easy enough to relocate there without changing much except the nationality of his captors. (His comics origin was officially retconned to the Gulf War at one point, and more recently to the War on Terror, like the movie.)
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An Iron Man movie was in development throughout the latter portion of the 20th century, just like every other Marvel character after Stan Lee moved out to California to drum up movie deals. Lee himself co-wrote a treatment for an IM film with Jeff Vintar. Among the names attached to direct over the years: Stuart Gordon, Quentin Tarantino (really!), Joss Whedon, and Nick Cassavetes. Both Nicolas Cage and Tom Cruise had expressed interest in playing the title role, and other scripts were done by Jeffrey Caine, Tim McCanlies, and Alfred Gough & Miles Millar, among others.
Finally, in 2005, Marvel decided to start from scratch and release Iron Man through their own studio arm. They saw how successful Dark Horse had been producing their own films, and also realized how much more money they’d have made off of the Spider–Man and X-Men movies if they’d produced them themselves instead of selling the rights to other studios.
Jon Favreau, who’d wanted to work with Marvel again after Daredevil, was hired to direct, and he also co-starred as Happy Hogan. Favreau combined two scripts, and provided a movie that combined the character’s origin in Tales of Suspense #39 by Lee, Lieber, and Heck with Denny O’Neil’s ongoing 1980s arc in Iron Man that chronicled Obadiah Stane’s slow takeover of Stark International and their eventual confrontation in Iron Man #200, Stane now in armor as the Iron Monger.
The success of the Spider- and X-movies without any A-list stars helped Favreau convince Marvel not to go for a huge name to star. In fact, his original thought was to go with an unknown, but he went with Robert Downey Jr. in part because Downey Jr.’s own life’s ups and downs, including all his personal travails being in the public eye, mirror Stark’s in the movie.
At this point, the notion of an interconnected universe was in its formative stages, but producer Kevin Feige did, at least, intend for the characters that Marvel Studios had controlling interest of to all exist in the same continuum. To that end, Downey Jr. made a cameo in The Incredible Hulk between this movie and its 2010 sequel.
The cast includes several folks who would recur throughout what would eventually be the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Besides Downey Jr. as Stark (who has, as of this writing, appeared in nine films, and is at least mentioned in three others) and Favreau as Hogan (four films), there’s Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts (six films), Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D. (four films, several shorts, and the star of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. for five seasons), Terence Howard as Jim Rhodes (the character appears in five subsequent films played by Don Cheadle), Paul Bettany as the voice of J.A.R.V.I.S. (five films, plus three more as the Vision, for which the J.A.R.V.I.S. AI was a template), and, of course, Samuel L. Jackson’s cameo in the post-credits scene as Nick Fury, the director of S.H.I.E.L.D., the first of ten appearances (so far) by Jackson in either a film or a TV episode in the MCU. All the above characters are scheduled for more appearances, too….
“You’re a man who has everything and nothing”
Iron Man
Written by Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway
Directed by Jon Favreau
Produced by Avi Arad and Kevin Feige
Original release date: May 2, 2008
In Afghanistan, Tony Stark is being ferried in a Humvee by three airmen. They’re nervous around him at first, but he himself breaks the ice and they’re asking him questions about his sex life and asking for selfies to be taken with him.
Suddenly, they’re under attack. All three escorts are killed, and Stark is caught in an explosion. He wakes up to find himself being filmed with people around him talking in a foreign tongue.
We then zip back 36 hours to Las Vegas, where Stark is receiving an award. A video presentation provides exposition on his history: his father, Howard Stark, worked on the Manhattan Project; Tony was a child prodigy, graduating with honors from MIT; a car accident claimed Howard and his wife Maria when Tony was a teen; Obadiah Stane, Howard’s business partner, ran the business until Tony was of age; now Stark and Stane run the company together.
Stark is busy gambling and therefore misses getting the award, presented by his childhood friend Colonel James Rhodes and accepted by Stane. Stark is ambushed by Christine Everhart of Vanity Fair about his work as a weapons manufacturer. Stark defends his choices, and winds up convincing Everhart to fly back to Malibu with him and spend the night.
The next morning, Stark’s assistant Pepper Potts gives Everhart her (freshly dry-cleaned) clothes and Stark’s good wishes, as well as a healthy dose of snark. Stark himself is downstairs working on one of his many vintage cars. He shows up three hours late for his flight to Afghanistan with Rhodes, where he is to demonstrate Stark Industries’ new Jericho missile system.
The demo is a huge success—and then, on the way back to the airfield, they’re ambushed. Before he falls into a coma, Stark notices that they’ve been attacked by Stark weapons.
Stark wakes up to find another scientist who is prisoner of the terrorists who attacked the convoy: Yinsen, who was able to keep the teeny-tiny bits of shrapnel from occluding Stark’s heart by use of an electromagnet hooked up to a car battery. The terrorists, who call themselves “the Ten Rings,” force Stark to build one of his Jericho missiles for them. Stark reluctantly agrees—and then proceeds to do his own thing. With Yinsen’s help, he builds a miniature ARC reactor, which more efficiently keeps his heart safe. Then, under the cover of building a missile, he instead constructs a suit of armor that will be powered by the reactor in his chest.
Yinsen told Stark at one point that he will see his family when he leaves this place. Only when he sacrifices his life to buy Stark time to power up the armor does Stark realize that his family is dead—he always intended to die to escape imprisonment. Stark thanks him for saving his life and Yinsen’s dying words are to urge him not to waste that life.
The armored Stark makes short work of the Ten Rings terrorists, and tries to fly away after destroying their weapons depot. However, the jet boots don’t quite work as he’d hoped, and he crash-lands. However, the conflagration got the attention of the U.S. military, and he’s rescued by a team led by Rhodes.
Stark returns to the U.S. battered, bruised, and furious that his weapons have wound up in terrorist hands. Instead of going to a hospital, he goes to Burger King, as he’s jonesing for a cheeseburger, and then calls a press conference and announces that Stark is getting out of the weapons business—a revelation that shocks both Stane and Rhodes.
Stane does damage control, first with the press, then with the Board of Directors, and also suggests that Stark lay low to recover and give him a chance to do that damage control. Stark spends his time in the basement of his house working on a better suit of armor, starting with a better miniature ARC reactor. (He tells Potts to throw the one he made in Afghanistan away, but she instead puts it in lucite with a plaque that reads, “PROOF THAT TONY STARK HAS A HEART.”)
In Afghanistan, Raza, the leader of the Ten Rings group that kidnapped Stark, manages to reconstruct the armor Stark built. Meanwhile, Stane reluctantly informs Stark that the Board of Directors has voted to sanction him.
After several weeks of testing the new armor, Stark goes off to attend a party, saying hi to Hugh Hefner (who looks just like Stan Lee), and seeing Potts in a beautiful dress that he apparently bought for her. (Meaning she bought it for herself with his money.) He dances with her, which she finds awkward, because he’s her boss. He offers to fire her, and she points out rightly that he wouldn’t last five minutes without her. They go to the roof to get some air and they almost kiss before they remember that it would be inappropriate. Stark offers to get her a drink, and while he’s waiting for it, Everhart confronts him with pictures of terrorist cells in the Middle East that have Stark weapons. Stark is livid, and confronts Stane, who admits that he was the one who sanctioned him.
Stark puts on the armor and flies to Afghanistan to destroy the cache of Stark weapons. He then gets into it with two Air Force planes (and initially lies to Rhodes about where he is when Rhodes suspects him). One of the planes is damaged, the pilot bailing out, but his chute won’t deploy. Stark risks his life to save the pilot’s life, then flies off.
After returning home, Stark sends Potts to copy files off of the Stark server, and one of the things she finds is the video that was recorded right after Stark was kidnapped. The Ten Rings attacked the convoy with orders to kill everyone, not knowing that Stark was one of the targets. They kidnapped him and used him rather than kill him as Stane instructed. But Stane is the one who ordered the hit.
For his part, Stane—who has already gone to Afghanistan and killed Raza and his people to tie up loose ends (pointing out to Raza that if he’d killed Stark like he was supposed to, this would never have happened)—visits Potts, hoping to grill her for information about Stark. Only after she leaves does he realize that she pulled files off the server.
Agent Phil Coulson of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division has been trying to debrief Stark since he got back from Afghanistan. With Stane now after her, Potts confides in Coulson, who summons more agents to protect her.
Stane, however, already got to Stark, having used a neural paralyzer to immobilize him and then remove the reactor from his chest, condemning him to death. Stane has been building his own armor since killing Raza, but the other scientists in his employ have been unable to miniaturize the reactor. (Stane’s furious complaint that Stark built one in a cave with scraps is met with a very meek reminder that they are none of them Tony Stark.) So Stane steals Stark’s glorified pacemaker.
While Stark is able to stumble downstairs to the basement to put in the old reactor that Potts had made into an award, Potts and Coulson don’t arrive at Stark Industries in time—Stane has put on his own armor (which is way bigger than Stark’s), and he pounds the crap out of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. Before he can kill Potts, Stark shows up in his armor. While he’s no match for Stane directly, especially with the lesser reactor powering his armor, he is able to occupy him long enough for Potts to overload the large-scale reactor that powers Stark Industries with Stane on top of it.
Stane and Stark’s fight was public, and the media refers to the red-and-gold-armored person who attacked the depot and fought the bigger armored person as “Iron Man.” S.H.I.E.L.D. creates a cover story for both Stark and Stane, and also say that Iron Man is Stark’s bodyguard. However instead of confirming the cover story, Stark admits that he’s Iron Man at the press conference.
After the credits, Stark arrives home to find Nick Fury, the director of S.H.I.E.L.D., already there, telling him that he’s part of a much larger universe now (ahem), and also mentions something called the Avengers Initiative.
“I’m just not the hero type”
Back in 2008, I saw Iron Man at the late, lamented Ziegfeld Theatre, and the usher had to tell everyone who came in, “Stay all the way through all the credits. Trust me.” On the one hand, that seems quaint ten years on—on the other, there are still people who leave Marvel movies before the credits are done, so there you go. However, I just love that Marvel Studios started doing the whole post-credits thing, as it’s a joy. They haven’t always landed (I’m looking at you, Guardians of the Galaxy), but they’re often a lovely Easter egg to the hardcore fans.
More to the point, though, they get people to sit through the credits. Which you should do anyhow, these people worked hard on this movie, and they deserve it. I despise the current trend in television to shrink closing credits to nothing while ads run, because the whole point of credits is to be read. These are people who did a good job and helped make the movie happen, dagnabbit!
Anyhow, ten years later, nobody has to remind anyone to sit through to the end of a Marvel movie, but it was a big deal here. Up until Stark walked in to find Fury in his house, this was Yet Another Standalone Superhero Movie, just like most of the others I’ve done in this rewatch to date. And then Fury shows up and says he’s part of a bigger universe (Marvel has always referred to their milieu of superheroes as “the Marvel universe”) and he drops the word “Avengers” and every fanboy heart goes squee because right there we’ve been promised the one thing that only one feature-length adaptation (the first two Incredible Hulk TV movies of the late 1980s) had done.
Pretty much every superhero comic book line has been interconnected, from World War II (when you had superheroes teaming up to fight the Axis powers) forward. Mostly this interconnectedness was seen in team books—the Justice Society of America in the 1940s, the Justice League of America and the Avengers in the 1960s, and so on—plus in team-up books (Marvel Team-Up, The Brave and the Bold).
But the screen adaptations never followed suit, mostly because the rights to the characters always wound up with different studios. With Marvel Studios controlling this set of characters themselves, Kevin Feige was able to finally re-create that one aspect of superhero comics that had long been missing from their screen adaptations.
All that from one post-credits scene, but that’s the least of why Iron Man is an excellent film. It’s all well and good to want to create a coherent universe, but that’s less relevant than actually making a good movie (something that others who have tried to re-create the MCU’s success have sometimes forgotten; I’m looking at you, Tom Cruise’s The Mummy).
Luckily, Iron Man is a very good movie, which is one of the main reasons why the MCU has been a success for a decade now. It starts off brilliantly, establishing Stark’s character quickly and efficiently as he sits in a Humvee holding his drink steady as it bounces through the desert and chatting with his escorts. It’s to the credit of Favreau and the screenwriters that this scene is so brilliantly effective, as we only have a few minutes to get to know these characters before they’re shot at. They don’t just redshirt the three airmen, they’re three people you actually care about, so it matters (to us and to Stark) when we see them die.
Looking back ten years on, you can see the “Marvel formula” for an origin movie: flawed person has an eye-opening experience that leads to that person being put in a position to become a hero. Sometimes the heroic instinct is already there, but they’re prevented from fulfilling it, and sometimes they need to go on the journey to become a hero. Iron Man is assuredly the latter, as the Stark we meet at the top of the film is a charming asshole. It takes the trauma of being kidnapped, and of seeing his weapons being used by terrorists, to wake him up and make him turn himself into a superhero.
What’s especially fascinating about the movie is that it departs from the comics in several distinctive ways, the biggest being Robert Downey Jr.’s performance. His wiseass portrayal of Stark has become the cornerstone of the MCU, so it’s easy to forget that it bears only a passing resemblance to the personality that Stark has had in the comics since 1963. But then, Stark has always been very much a product of the 1960s, the suave, cool, debonair jet-setter that was a particularly strong archetype in that decade. Downey Jr.’s portrayal is more appropriate for the 2000s, and he absolutely makes it work.
Plus, like any good adaptation, the essence of Stark remains the same: he’s a genius industrialist with several character flaws who has to ante up and be a hero. It was less of a journey in Tales of Suspense #39, but that was also the first of an ongoing monthly series of stories. Iron Man needed to tell a story in and of itself, and a big part of what makes the movie compelling is Stark’s journey from uncaring asshole who gives his major award away to an actor in a Caesar costume, who plays dice instead of accepting that award, who sleeps with a reporter trying to do a piece on him, who brings a drinks cabinet along with his crates of weapons to a demo—into a hero, into someone who will break a no-fly zone to save kids from being killed by terrorists wielding weapons he designed.
He’s also surrounded by a superb cast. Gwyneth Paltrow is radiant as Pepper Potts, Stark’s personal assistant and something vaguely resembling a love interest. It’s actually played really well, as it ends, not with the kiss and declaration of love that movies have trained us to expect, but instead with Potts tartly reminding Stark that he left her on a rooftop waiting for a drink that never came because he got sidetracked by Everhart showing him pictures of terrorists using his weapons. The chemistry between Downey Jr. and Paltrow is superb—and will remain so through several movies—but the relationship is also fraught, as the journey Stark goes on here is not one he’s even remotely finished going on.
One of the knocks on the MCU has been the comparative weakness of the villains. Usually the exceptions cited are Loki and, more recently, the Vulture and Killmonger, but nobody ever mentions Jeff Bridges as Stane, and I can’t for the life of me understand why, as he’s absolutely fantastic. The revelation that he’s the bad guy is less effective if you know the comics—Stane was an unrepentant bad guy in the comics, a rival to Stark from the moment he first appeared in Iron Man #163, and arguably the villain who hurt Stark the most, as he assisted his descent into alcoholism and took his company away from him. Here, Stane is a trusted ally who turns out to be a snake in the grass (a theme the MCU will come back to more than once), and Bridges is magnificent in the role. He brings his relaxed charm to the role, looking dapper in his brightly colored suits and his pinky ring and his always putting an arm around Stark, and it all hides a ruthless streak that we really don’t see until he kills Raza. Even then, the avuncular mien that lulls you into a false sense of security stays up almost the entire time—the only time it doesn’t is when he rips the scientist a new one for not being able to miniaturize the ARC reactor.
And then we have Clark Gregg. Originally a one-off walk-on role to establish S.H.I.E.L.D.’s existence, Gregg’s professional deadpan makes Coulson into a hugely compelling character. His effortless competence in this film would lead to him becoming the glue that holds the first set of MCU films together, and later starring in his own TV show.
One shouldn’t forget Shaun Toub. Yinsen is an understated but important role in the creation of Iron Man. His arc in this movie is the same as the character’s in the comics, and Toub plays it beautifully. He knows his fate, and he knows his only chance at redemption is to help Stark. He helps create a hero, and that’s his legacy, even if it’s one that only Stark knows about. And Paul Bettany is a delight as J.A.R.V.I.S., the AI that runs Stark’s house and later the Iron Man armor. (The TV series Agent Carter will later establish Edwin Jarvis as Howard Stark’s butler, and one suspects the naming of the AI after him is due to fond memories of Jarvis that Tony has from when he was a kid.)
The other performances are a bit more hit-and-miss. Terence Howard creates very little impression as Rhodes—the re-casting with Don Cheadle will prove to be trading up, and besides, it freed Howard to star in Empire, which is a much better role for him—Faran Tahir is disappointing as Raza, and Favreau is surprisingly nondescript as Happy Hogan (though future films will do better with him).
Even if this wasn’t the vanguard of the most successful series of movies in the history of the universe, this would be a very good superhero movie. Stark’s heroic journey—which will have many many many bumps in the road—will continue to be a theme throughout the entire MCU (two more of his own movies, as well as all the Avengers movies and one each of the Captain America and Spider-Man films), and the start of it is a classic, with a great villain, a strong plot, and a climax that nicely allows Stark and Potts to collaborate.
Next week, we look at what was, in essence, a mulligan on Ang Lee, as well as the first crossover since (appropriately) The Trial of the Incredible Hulk, as we look at Edward Norton’s one-movie tenure as The Incredible Hulk.
Keith R.A. DeCandido has never actually written Iron Man, though he’s written Spider-Man, the Hulk, the original X-Men, the Silver Surfer, Thor, Sif, and the Warriors Three. However, he did edit a series of Marvel novels in the 1990s that included two Iron Man novels by Greg Cox, a Spider-Man/Iron Man team-up novel by Danny Fingeroth, Eric Fein, & Pierce Askegren, an Avengers novel by Askegren (which included ol’ ShellHead), and an Avengers/X-Men trilogy by Cox (ditto).
Yeay, we start with the MCU reviews!
I actually rewatched the Iron Man trilogy recently, and found the first film the weakest of them. It’s entertaining, but pretty generic, all explosions and action scenes.
I’m glad they didn’t went with an unknown. Honestly, they were lucky that Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t in demand and was probably affordable in comparison to today’s standards. I remembered that Jeff Bridges mentioned that the script was being written as they were filming, so even if the film isn’t great, Downey Jr. is interesting to watch and a good actor and saves it. Going with unknowns is cheap, but some are interchangeable and don’t make an impact. I thought that of Chris Hemsworth in the first Thor, but I think he is improving and was great in Infinity War.
I didn’t know Stark’s personality in the comics is different than the movies, I agree that Downey Jr.’s performance seems better to these times.
About the stablishment of the cinematic universe, I read somewhere that Marvel makes movies like the make comics. I don’t know if it’s accurate, but it’s a nice idea to explore.
Going with unknowns is hardly cheap at all. You underestimate the talent people can build up when they’re not getting pampered (or harrased) by Hollywood
Wouldn’t the Legends of the Superheroes DC specials from the ’70s be the first onscreen superhero crossovers, lame as they were? Or were you referring specifically to Marvel team-ups? Or do they not count because they were sketch-comedy specials rather than proper stories? (There was also the Green Hornet guest appearance on Batman, but that wasn’t a crossover between comics characters from the same company, since GH was primarily a radio and movie-serial character.)
As for Iron Man, I found it immensely enjoyable while I was watching it, but after the fact I felt unsatisfied. The thing is, the dialogue and character interplay in the film are largely improvised, and that’s all brilliantly done by Favreau, Downey, Paltrow, Bridges, et al., but it’s all built on a very flimsy story framework. Strip away the terrific improv and comedy and character interplay and you’re left with a very ordinary, uninspired, by-the-numbers superhero origin story. So while its significance as the launching point of the most far-reaching and successful shared cinematic universe in history cannot be overstated, it feels rather lacking in significance as a story in itself. It feels great to watch it, but it leaves you with little to think about after it’s done.
And a number of the things it leaves me to think about are plot holes. Like, why did Stark leave the arc reactor and the shrapnel in after his rescue? It was necessary to keep hm alive in the cave, and in the 1960s it was plausible that surgery to remove the shrapnel would’ve been too dangerous — but in the modern age, with microsurgery and robotic surgery and all that, and especially given that the arc reactor was actually implanted in Tony’s chest rather than just worn as part of a life-support breastplate, it’s hard to believe that getting surgery to remove the shrapnel would’ve been riskier than leaving that big honking power source stuck inside his body and creating who knew what infection and radiation hazards.
Also, how does a rigid suit of armor keep him alive when he crashes in the desert at high speed? Unless it had some kind of inertial damper fields or something, the impact should’ve ended up with an intact suit of armor filled with mostly liquefied meat and pulverized bone. (And I type that while I’m having lunch. Thanks a lot, me.)
I also find it rather inconsistent that Tony has an epiphany that causes him to swear off building weapons… and then turns around and builds an armor suit loaded with lethal weapons. Aside from the inbuilt contradiction there, I dislike how this film started the MCU’s general practice of ignoring the comics characters’ usual reluctance or refusal to kill, instead going for the standard approach of American movies where killing the bad guys is expected and routine, as in the scene here where Iron Man blows up a bunch of terrorists. In recent years, we’ve had some nonlethal MCU heroes — the Agents of SHIELD generally prefer nonlethal “icer” guns, the Netflix heroes generally eschew killing albeit with some exceptions, and Ant-Man and Spider-Man show a preference for nonlethal methods and even actively saving their adversaries when possible. But the first wave of MCU movies tended to go in a deadlier direction than the comics, and there generally seems to be an assumption that the Avengers tend to be killers (as when Hank Pym was amazed that Scott Lang battled an Avenger and wasn’t killed). I’m not crazy about that, and Iron Man set the precedent.
There was something pretty timely about a movie which argues that you had to stop doing things the way your parents were doing it in order to try and make a better world.
I recently read somewhere* that Downey ad-libbed the “I am Iron Man” declaration. Just…wow.
*Just googled it, and yeah it’s all over the web as part of the 10th anniversary reporting.
OP:
It may not be exactly the same from the engineering perspective, but both Elon Musk and Richard Branson fall into this basic archetype as well. They are both brilliant at the business thing they do.
One of the behind-the-scenes details I remember about this movie was how Favreau had to adapt to RDJ’s improvisational acting style, by just basically turning on the camera and letting him go.
It’s also worth noting what a chance they took by casting Robert Downey Jr in the first place, and how much effort he himself has put into getting his life back in order; he and Tony really are on very similar arcs.
The funny thing about the Burger King scene was that RDJ attributed Burger King with saving his life. In the midst of his drug-fueled days, he stopped at a BK and never tasted anything so disgusting. It made him rethink his life.
The big compliant I have, and it’s something brother and I have discussed for years in various films, is the bad guy instantly picking up the good guy’s powers and knowing how to use them. In this case, it was Stane instantly knowing how to use his suit. Whereas it took Stark a big chunk of the movie to figure out. Stuff like that bugs me. It really bugs me in movies where the hero spent most of their life mastering a discipline (like martial arts) and somebody, good guy or bad, picks it up and is as good as the hero is a short amount of time (Looking at your Arrow, with your sidekicks who became instant martial masters and you spent 5 years “in hell” to get your pedigree).
@2 Comic book heroes making a big deal about not killing strikes me as implausible. If you spend your time beating people unconsciousness, I’m pretty sure you’re going to kill someone sooner or later. Human bodies are incredibly resilient to damage until they aren’t. Unless Stark develops a magic stunner (which he could, since he’s Tony Stark) it seems like he’d kill someone by accident sooner or later.
ETA: Which doesn’t mean they should be murder happy but you still don’t want your hero being blasé about accidentally killing someone. I think I would prefer them to recognize what they are doing is dangerous and respect the possible risks rather than being loudly self-righteous about not killing.
Christopher: I honestly totally forgot about the Legends of the Superheroes, and of course technically Justice League of America counts, though that was never aired — but the latter case was specifically doing that team, and the former is probably best left forgotten about.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Great review as usual, but I have to offer up a small correction. If memory serves, the Justice Society of America actually debuted in the 1940s as the first big “cross-comics” superteam. By the 1950’s, I’m pretty sure their book has transitioned from “All-Star Comics” to “All-Star Western.” Also, the Invaders was a 1970s retcon by Roy Thomas, essentially backdating the “All-Winners Squad” from the late 1940s into wartime adventures.
Other than that, this is a spot-on review of a spot-on film. Count me, however, as one who definitely preferred Terence Howard as Rhodey and wished that Marvel’s stinginess hadn’t resulted in him having to leave the role. From what I understand he was the highest-paid actor in Iron Man and they demanded he take a cut to return in the sequel.
The cast was the biggest strength of this movie, and the end product stood head and shoulders over any previous superhero movie. It surprised me when I heard how messy the production effort was, with the script mutating as they shot, because the film ended up so well paced and coherent. And there was a lot of audacity displayed by the film makers, as they clearly intended this to be a cornerstone of a movie universe right from the start, something many others have tried to do, but failed.
While this isn’t the best of the Marvel Movies, I don’t think anyone can deny that this is one of the most influential movies to come out in the last twenty years. Fifty years from now this is the one that’ll be shown in film school.
Twels: Good catch. I’ve edited the post appropriately, thank you.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I quite enjoyed this movie, mostly because of RDJ. I’ve always loved his work, since Air America. In fact, I always sort of saw him as a Mel Gibson-light. He has the same charm and the charisma, without the magnetic, slightly psychotic, edginess. Although, its that edginess that made most of Mel’s best performances. I can’t imagine anyone playing Tony Stark as well as RDJ. Or even half as well.
This is close to a perfectly constructed film. And that does make it slightly generic, but the performances keep it fresh. Its pretty much perfect for what it is–a big summer blockbuster tentpole that people will watch for decades.
@5 – Richard Branson is decidedly not an engineer or inventor. He is a rich guy. Elon Musk and Sergey Brin are usually the two Tony Stark analogs.
Always thought it was a shame that he didn’t build two Iron Man suits. Then Yinsen could have escaped as well.
Maybe he didn’t have enough parts? Then maybe he could have built one big suit. Stark could be the front legs and Yinsen the back legs.
Iron Pantomime Horse!
“Yinsen, dammit, you have to keep in step!”
“Sorry, Mr Stark.”
15: further back, if you want rich socialite and genius polymath engineer, there’s Charles Babbage! (No idea if he was a womaniser or not.)
@15:
Which is as I stated in the comment, so, I agree?
It’s always seemed to me that the version of Tony Stark that RDJ is portraying is closer to the version from the Ultimate Marvel comics line than the 616 (standard Marvel) version. There’s actually not a lot of characterization to go on for Ultimate Tony, but the self-centered, self-destructive streak is definitely there. I probably first thought that because the Ultimate version of Nick Fury IS Sam Jackson, as stated several times in the comics, so seeing Jackson appear here automatically makes me think of the Ultimates.
Which is an even bigger testimony to RDJ’s performance, because I can’t stand the characterizations of most of the Ultimate characters, aside from Spider-Man. They’re pretty much all unrepentant, selfish jerks, but as we discussed the last couple of weeks, that’s the kind of characters that Mark Millar creates. For Downey to make me root for a character I was predisposed to dislike — that’s an impressive feat of acting.
@CLB –
“I also find it rather inconsistent that Tony has an epiphany that causes him to swear off building weapons… and then turns around and builds an armor suit loaded with lethal weapons. Aside from the inbuilt contradiction there…” – I agree with you about the general trend towards lethal heroes, but in a way, I wonder if this is just starting on the character development we see in Stark throughout the MCU as a flawed and sometimes inconsistent man.
When I saw this movie when it came out, I really liked it – even with no comic experience, it just seemed like a step above the other somewhat forgettable comic movies I’d seen around that time (Daredevil, Fantastic Four, etc) – I mean, I loved the X-Men/Spider-Man (and even the other maligned Batman movies) but that was about the extent of it. I agree that the characterization, chemistry, snark, dialogue just really worked. And the ‘I am Iron Man’ thing was honestly pretty hilarious to me since at that point, the ‘secret identity’ thing was such an ingrained part of the superhero genre. I don’t recall that the Stinger resonated with me (aside from being excited about Samuel L. Jackson) but in retrospect…what a moment :)
To be fair I don’t think this is the first movie with post credits scenes – I know, for example, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets had a silly one, and so did X-Men Last Stand for that matter – but it’s definitely the one that started making it a crucial thing that contributed to the plot in a serious way, and was a part of the hook for the next movie. I imagine other movies have done it before that I’m not aware of, but this seems to be what kicked it off in the mainstream.
Anyway – my point is that at the time it was a fun movie and kicked off something pretty great, but I’m also impressed with the way Stark’s character has been developed. I think the fact that he wants to swear off weapons, but still have a suit ‘for himself’ is in some ways in line with his character in which he often strikes me as a bit condescending/controlling/and thinks he knows best in a well meaning way, but on the other hand he also was a big proponent for oversight in the later Avengers movie. In part, perhaps, becuase he doesn’t seem to think most people can be trusted. I’m dashing this off quickly before running to lunch but maybe somebody else can expand on that idea more.
Because of the popularity of the “Ultimates” line of Marvel comics at the time of the first MCU movies, the movies definitely drew as much from the Ultimates versions of the characters as the classic versions, with Nick Fury being the most obvious example. That ended up being kind of circular, since the Ultimates artist was inspired by Samuel L. Jackson when he came up with the new version of Nick Fury in the first place.
Lisamarie@20:
The original Pirates of the Caribbean had a post-credits stinger as well, where the monkey removes one of the coins from the chest. All of them have a post-credits scene, now that I think of it.
The Theatrical release of Masters of the Universe in 1987 also had a post-credits stinger, where we find out that Skeletor survived.
I remember being mystified when Downey Jr. was cast as Iron Man, he just didn’t seem to fit. But then I realized that he basically is Tony Stark, and did not disappoint. This movie blew me away beyond all expectations, and they really haven’t stopped. A few stumbles but never a crash as far as I’m concerned.
Great article krad, thanks. I’m excited you’ve started the MCU movies, as I am a big MCU fan (movies and TV both #coulsonlives).
Despite my current fandom, I did not see Iron Man in the theater. I couldn’t even be bothered to rent it. I think the video store ended up doing a buy 2 get one free deal on used DVDs and I bought it alongside something like the Sixth Day and some other forgettable movie.
When I watched it, I enjoyed it. But I’d gone in with low expectations (one review I read said it was good until the climax, and then it looked like Transformers). It’s a great movie, so I ended up really liking it more than I expected to.
I’ve watched it at least 10 times. For a while after the Avengers, every new MCU movie that was coming out sent me scrambling to do a rewatch through all of the prior MCU movies, starting right here with Iron Man. (Except the Incredible Hulk, which I’ve seen once, do not own (the only MCU movie I don’t) and have no interest in watching again). I no longer do this (I wouldn’t be able to keep up) but it was fun for a while.
The interesting thing is, while I really enjoy the movie, I always come out of it feeling like it is…less than my mind has built it up to be. Or something? I don’t know. I start out watching it with excitement but by the end I’m like “Oh yeah, now I remember, that movie is only ‘ok'” or something. Probably I’m just remembering it overly fondly as the one that started them all. I dunno.
But a great movie that gave us the greatest MCU character. The singular most iconic face of the MCU, and the glue that holds it all together.
Agent Phil Coulson.
@8/noblehunter: I am not interested in getting into another debate about whether it’s “implausible” for heroes to want to avoid killing. “Implausible” is a silly standard to use when talking about a genre populated by superpowered mutants and literal gods and sorcerors. What we’re talking about is how the comics interpreted to the screen, and in the comics, most of these characters are portrayed as reluctant to kill, but that reluctance is not accurately translated to the screen.
Not to mention that it’s theoretically the policy of most police forces and even most militaries to avoid lethal force except as a last resort (though American police fall horrifically short of this ideal where black Americans are concerned, and I’ve seen even military personnel express shock and disgust at American police departments’ failure to employ the same de-escalation policies and firearms discipline required of US soldiers). So it’s straight-up counterfactual to say it’s “unrealistic” for heroes to at least try to avoid killing. And that’s what I’m talking about here — not whether it can be avoided 100% of the time, but whether it’s okay for a so-called “hero” to make deadly force a first resort like so many action-movie protagonists do. That is what’s unrealistic, because any vigilante who went around casually killing people would bring down the full force of the law upon them pretty quickly.
Besides, you missed the part where I said it was a contradiction within the story itself, which is always the biggest no-no. If Tony Stark is driven by his guilt at the loss of life from the lethal weapons he manufactured, why does he equip his own personal suit of armor with lethal weapons that he personally kills people with? That just doesn’t line up. Why would he feel less guilty about killing people directly than he does about killing them indirectly?
@17/ajay: If you want to see a version of Charles Babbage fighting crime (for certain values of “crime”), I recommend the superb (but sadly dormant) webcomic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Pixar animator Sydney Padua.
@20/Lisamarie: You’re right, post-credits scenes have been around since long before 2008. Marvel may have popularized them and standardized them, but they hardly originated them. Heck, they were pretty common as final punchlines in comedy movies back in the ’70s and ’80s, like the first couple of Muppet movies. Heck, Marvel didn’t even pioneer the idea of a stinger as a teaser for a subsequent film — see the post-credits scene (or rather the during-and-also-after-the-credits scene) in Young Sherlock Holmes for an example.
Of course, for the first few decades of feature films, up until the ’50s or even the ’60s, it was standard for all of a film’s credits to be shown at the opening, with the ending being just “THE END” and sometimes a reprise of the cast list. So you could argue that most early movies consist entirely of post-credits scenes. :D
@25 – LOL :) Actually, wasn’t Star Wars one of the big movies that did away with that, and George Lucas got slapped with some fine because putting the credits at the top of the movie was some screenwriter guild requirement? But he was really comitted to the whole opening crawl/space opera feel so he didn’t want to do it. Or maybe that’s just one of those film urban legends.
That said (I was going to say this and then forgot but now you’ve reminded me), Star Wars is actually a huge reason I got into the habit of staying to watch the credits of any movie, because I love movie scores and soundtracks and of course it is interesting then to see what really goes into making a movie. I would never watch a Star Wars movie without also watching the entire end credits – to me those movies aren’t over until the last note has played ;)
@25 Because Tony was interested in making sure only the right people were killed. He couldn’t trust his own company to only sell weapons to “good guys” so he needed to get it out of the weapons business. He could trust himself not to kill the wrong people and only kill the right people.
I’m glad you didn’t go with the narrative that Marvel Studios went with a “C-list character that nobody ever heard of” or some such thing. Because while it’s true that the X-Men were bigger in the 80’s and 90’s, the Avengers characters – especially Cap, Thor, Iron Man, and the Hulk – were never C-list characters. In the 60’s and 70’s, and again in the late 90’s and 2000’s, they were really quite popular. They sold millions of comics, they had animated series throughout the decades going back to the 60’s, and they made TV shows and movies with the Hulk, Thor, and Doctor Strange.
They made a 13-episode Iron Man cartoon series in 1966. You know who didn’t get their own series in 1966? The X-Men. They didn’t get their own series until 1992. The 1989 one-off “Pryde of the X-Men” that was supposed to be a backdoor pilot for a series didn’t even work. Iron Man, meanwhile, made appearances on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, and then went on to have his own animated series again in 1994 (in addition to guest-starring in, I think, every other Marvel animated series of that decade).
Iron Man was a playable character in 4 video games in the 90’s. He appeared in a bunch of others in various capacities.
Prior to the MCU, five Iron Man novels were published, starting in 1979. The last (before the MCU) was in 1997.
Iron Man was the subject of a discussion in an episode of Seinfeld in the 90’s.
And of course, in the comics, Iron Man was frequently the leader of the Avengers, he served with both East and West Coast versions, and as noted in the article here, he was nearly always involved in the biggest Avengers storylines.
I’m not arguing that Iron Man was more popular (or even as popular) as the X-Men at certain points in time. All of this to long-windedly say that again, I’m glad you didn’t push the narrative that Marvel Studios had to make a movie with a C-list character because “all the good ones” were at other studios. It’s great PR for Marvel Studios to say that. Makes them sound like the scrappy underdog that made do with what they had and created an empire. But it’s not exactly true. Plenty of people – especially the comic book readers who influenced the ticket sales of Iron Man in 2008 – knew who he was.
I’m glad to see from some of the comments here that I’m not the only person in the world who thinks this movie is seriously overrated and just kind of meh. It’s great if you like watching a guy work in a machine shop, but if you’re more interested in a superhero movie actually getting around to showing us the superhero in action, it’s an exercise in seriously delayed gratification. Which probably has something to do with the script being almost identical to that of Batman Begins in terms of story details and beats: I once started to compile a mental list of similarities between the two films, and I had to stop when I was somewhere in the double-digits, because I had clearly made the point to myself.
Oh, and this is yet another of those Hollywood movies that depict female reporters as thoroughly willing to sleep with the men they are assigned to interview — and maybe even motivated by that urge more than by the cause of journalism, or even by their own career considerations. Screw that noise.
There are things I like about the movie, however. Most of them revolve around the way the character of Stark is written and how he’s performed by Downey. While there are certainly moral ambiguities there, I like how he’s shown transitioning from a form of egomaniacal monomania that doesn’t do the world much good to one that does. As will be explored more fully in further MCU films, he’s actually the most idealistic character in that universe — even more so than Steve Rogers. He just hides it beneath an armor (notice the metaphor?) of sarcasm and supposed cynicism.
I particularly like the scene in which Iron Man tells the villagers that the terrorist is all theirs to handle. That’s a superhero as I like to see them: simply here to right the balance of an extreme situation so ordinary people can retake control of their lives, not to hold sway over us lesser beings because they are uniquely able and entitled to. (Lookin’ at you, Dark Knight Strikes Again.)
I don’t think Tony felt guilty about his weapons killing. He felt guilty about who his weapons were killing, i.e. civilians and US soldiers (notice in the opening scene it’s Stark brand weapons that kill his soldier friends and cause his chest wound). When he built his weaponized suit of armor, he removed the middleman and was able to control who was being killed, namely the terrorists and Stane, and later all manner of space aliens, killer robots, etc., etc. until Disney runs out of money or the Sun burns out.
As we’ll see in later movies, Tony has some major control issues. The suit is symbolic of those issues.
@26/Lisamarie: No, by the time of Star Wars, it was already quite common to put most of the credits at the end. By that time, credits had been split into two sequences, the “above the line” credits (i.e. those that came with residual payments) shown prominently at the top of the film and the “below the line” credits shown in a scroll of smaller text at the end, much like how TV credits are generally done. What Star Wars did, and what later movies have frequently emulated, was putting all the credits at the end, completing the transition from the early days when all the credits were at the beginning.
These days, movies that put all their credits at the end still have a separation between the above-the-line and below-the-line credits. Generally in Marvel movies, the former get an elaborate animated title sequence (much like the kind that would’ve been shown at the start of a movie in the past) and the latter just scroll up the screen, usually with the mid-credits scene in the middle.
@27/noblehunter: “making sure only the right people were killed.”
If you’d said “making sure that nobody was killed except as a last resort,” then you might have something. But phrasing it that way — “the right people killed,” as if some people intrinsically had no right to live and as if anyone had the right to decide that unilaterally — is horrifying. Superhero fiction is not supposed to be that callous and amoral, not as a rule. It’s certainly not the attitude most Marvel Comics heroes have taken in the original stories, except for antiheroes like the Punisher (who’s frequently portrayed more as a villain) or Wolverine.
@28/danielmclark: The X-Men made an appearance or two on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends as well, and I think at least one other Spider-Man cartoon. Several of the cast members from Pryde of the X-Men were reprising their roles from prior cartoon appearances.
@31/ChristopherLBennett: Yep, true. And I almost included a couple of lines about that but ultimately decided I’d been ranting long enough. It wasn’t my intention to compare every appearance of Iron Man to every appearance of the X-Men, but just to show that Iron Man was making appearances and that he wasn’t the unknown quantity in 2008 that most writers like to say he was.
I actually didn’t know that some of the voice actors from Pryde were reprising roles from previous cartoons. That’s really cool. I think Pryde was really underrated, especially with regard to the animation, which I consider light years better than what we got with the 1992 series.
@26, 31:
We watched Burton’s Batman last month with the kids, and they were like “What in the heck is this?” as the title sequence rolled by with names of actors and directors. They had similar thoughts about the opening of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
No patience for it, whatsoever, lol. They can take a backdoor open on TV, but not the credits right upfront. At least I’ve got them paying attention to episode titles and writers and directors now, but they like to get that more from the internet and the show card than watching it on screen.
Stane is a double foil for Tony. At first, he’s portrayed as the person Tony should be, then he is shown to be the person Tony shouldn’t be. An interesting switch.
>31
Which goes again to Tony Stark’s control issues.
“Buckaroo Banzai” did a credits/stinger/coming attraction (a “sequel” that never materialized, for obvious reasons) and that was in 1984.
When I first saw this movie, I was distracted by the fact that Stane wears a rather large ring, at least superficially resembling one of the Mandarin’s. Raza seems to wear one as well. I was pretty sure that those and the “Ten Rings” reference were setup for the Mandarin to appear in a later movie…the proper Mandarin, not Ben Kingsley. I’m still waiting.
@37/Brian MacDonald: I never want to see the “proper” Mandarin, because that character is an outmoded racist stereotype. The way Iron Man 3 handled it, deconstructing the way white people use Orientalist stereotypes of villainy to frighten other white people, was far, far better than an uncritical perpetuation of an offensive racial caricature.
36. Jeffersonian
Was the obvious reason that we wouldn’t have been able to handle the pure brilliance of a sequel to the world’s perfect movie? That’s the only reason I can think of.
Also, Iron Man is great. I never really followed comics and had almost no idea who the character was. This introduction and the MCU as a whole has been a pretty educational experience that I am grateful for.
I agree that the 1960s Mandarin is a horrible racist caricature. I was hoping for something more like the 90s version of the Mandarin, an industrial genius based in Hong Kong, competing with Stark on that level, but with some radical ideas about who should be running the Chinese government. Keep the rings around for the inevitable fight scene, of course. The “Mandarin” name could just be something that his corporate enemies call him, insultingly. It’s not like Iron Man’s villains ever get called by their villain names in the movies.
I’ll talk more about this when we reach Iron Man 3 in 2019 (it’s currently scheduled for early January), but I agree with Christopher w/r/t the Mandarin. I loved the inversion of the stereotype with Ben Kingsley.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
You’re right, krad; sorry. The Mandarin stuff is off-topic.
@40:
“I was hoping for something more like the 90s version of the Mandarin, an industrial genius based in Hong Kong, competing with Stark on that level, but with some radical ideas about who should be running the Chinese government. “
Dunno. I can’t see MARVEL/Disney risking offending the PRC……And the Mandarin’s main schtick is his opposition to the Chinese government…..
Of course, MARVEL/Disney could reboot the character, make him Russian and call him the Tsar….That would eliminate any potential problems….
@krad: about these IM/Avengers novels mentioned in your bio. Do you remember one where Stark had a serious thing for Scarlet Witch? His “attentions” bordered on lascivious and creepy.
I remember feeling somewhat vindicated for being an IM fan when this movie came out. Despite the excellent arguments made above about IM’s central role in many Marvel comics events, the perception among fans and non-fans was of Stark as a second tier character. (Decade prior was all Spider-man, all X-Men, all the time.) I superficially identified with him (16-year engineering career and wore similar beard), but a woman I was interested in at the time saw my Iron Man statue and told me I’d wasted my money. (Was the 90s one with the kneepads that made him look like he played in the NFL.)
Also remember reading that T Howard really messed up his negotiations for the sequel. He seemed to think that he was the star of the first one and couldn’t bear to be paid less than RDJ for the second, who obviously deserved a raise. Not sure he was asked for a pay cut, just that he wouldn’t be top billed. Kinda odd that he was paid more than Jeff Bridges in the first place.
Sunspear: Stark never had a thing for the Witch in any of the novels I worked on, but while the program I edited from 1994-2000 was the biggest single series of Marvel novels, it was far from the only one, and far from the first — there were a couple in the late 1960s and another set in the 1970s. You may be thinking of one of them.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
One thing I really liked about this movie is the way the Iron Man armour looks. The classic Layton/Michelinie Iron Man style is my favourite in the comics, but the gold mesh would never have translated to the screen in my opinion (thought the nanobot version in Infinity War is pretty impressive). It’s amazing that they could bring the armour to life on screen so well. I’m not sure if that’s because the props and costume staff were geniuses or if the Iron Man comics artist at the time (Adi Granov I believe?) did a great job designing a costume that could be built in real life.
I do wish the durability of the suit was more consistent in the movies though. Here in Iron Man it seems close to indestructible, and by Iron Man 3 even being hit by a car can destroy a suit.
His portrayal by Bridges is great, but can anyone tell me what was his plan after realising that Potts and Stark know he had been the one behind black-market weapon deals and the ambush on Stark? Up until then – taking control of Stark industries is a goal which we can understand. The moment he gets his own armor it changes into “flying around the city and wrecking havoc” even when he knows the goverment knows… I would understand him trying to get away to his secret lair on some volcano island, but he gets into a sort of King-Kong mode instead.
@Spriggana: Yeah, his motivations fall apart towards the end. He’s a FUN villain the whole time, but not a particularly well-considered one. Sure, fine, he’s got his big dumb mecha, but now what? His crimes are known, and he has to know that they’ll be publicized. So what’s the game plan? Shoot his way out of the immediate problem, and… live the rest of his life as an internationally-known criminal, with SHIELD after him? Seems like he’s trading down from the life he had before, to be honest. It’s especially jarring because up ’till the climax, the film portrays him as a calculating villain, a guy who works behind the scenes. He’s intelligent and methodical, right up until he’s not.
Though I never have read any of the superhero comics, not Marvel nor DC’s, the Iron Man character himself wasn’t totally a stranger to me as I had watched the “Iron Man” cartoon as a kid (along with “Spider-Man”, “Jonny Quest”, “Fantastic Four”, and “Biker Mice from Mars”) and quite liked the character. Still, I was quite a blank canvas regarding the character, so to say, when the movie came out, and I had no expectations.
Oh boy ….
Suffice to say, I have seen it at least a dozen times and have now an undying love for Marvel MCU, for Tony Stark, and for Robert Downey Jr.
39, Jason:
True. Excellent point. Hanoi Xan is still lurking out there…
“I despise the current trend in television to shrink closing credits to nothing while ads run, because the whole point of credits is to be read. These are people who did a good job and helped make the movie happen, dagnabbit!”
Amen, amen, amen, amen, AMEN! It’s also especially annoying when you want to hear a song or music theme the movie will have through the credits and you can’t because instead you’re forced to see and hear the same freaking ads they run over and over through commercial breaks. Can’t anyone just declare that illegal or something? Creators have to be legally credited over their contributions, but are they really credited at all if their credits are effectively impossible to read?
Also, completely agree on Jeff Bridges’ as Stane. I’m not fully sold on Killmonger or Zemo, but out of all the MCU villains I’d say I liked Stane, the Vulture, Thanos, Loki and, despite being a secondary bad guy, Arnim Zola.The rest, though… ehhhhh. Here’s hoping Mysterio is made justice, as he’s a personal favorite of mine.
Don Heck, the man who drew most of Iron Man’s first appearance and replaced the basic grey armour Kirby designed (as seen in the opening of the film) with the iconic red and gold armour, gets a throwaway “and also” mention? Okay…
I’d consider Iron Man a B-list Marvel character, but then I think I’ve probably got an inflated view of the Hulk, who everyone else seems to consider a second-tier character but who I think is probably second only to Spider-Man as a Marvel hero you can guarantee the man on the street has heard of. (The popularity of the Avengers may have addressed that, although thanks to the films it’s also made the Hulk one of the characters people most think of when the Avengers is mentioned.)
Otherwise, I pretty much agree with the review. I think Tony Stark basically remains a likable asshole but turns into a heroic likable asshole, and also one who has to consider the consequences of his actions. (That said, I’m not entirely comfortable with him turning a defeated terrorist over to a mob who are likely going to beat him to death, even if it is a satisfying moment on one level.) I wasn’t familiar with Stane from the comics, so while him being the villain wasn’t a complete surprise (he was obviously in the movie for some reason) I wasn’t entirely familiar with where it was going. And I needed to look up who Iron Monger was. And it was great that they eschewed the whole “every superhero must have a secret identity even when it causes more problems than telling the truth” thing and simply had him say “I’m Iron Man” at the end.
Post-credit sequences…huh. I do look back at programmes from the 80s, or even the mid 00s, where they actually kept the credits on screen long enough for people to read them, rather than the super-fast scroll that’s only readable with freeze frame these days, and think some things have changed for the worst. But I have never ever managed to sit through the 10 minutes+ credits you get at the end of a film and I don’t think it’s worse it for an extra 10 seconds that could have been put before the credits. If I ever watched a Marvel movie in a cinema, I’d probably go home after the first two minutes and see if someone had put the post-credits on Youtube.
@52
That is exactly what I do, or on vimeo, dailymotion, or a dozen other vid hosting sites. It is just easier. I think this is where the move to have more “mid credits” scenes is coming from too, to keep us in the auditorium longer. And also the recent pivot back to credits which are not just rolling black, but more stylised or with some sort of funny theme to them. So walking out and using “pirate” alternatives has really improved Hollywood (again) to the benefit of the viewing audience in the longer term.
I’m also hoping the mass piracy of Ant-man and Wasp in the UK this summer brings an end to delaying release dates in other markets too. They’d have got more money if they hadn’t decided to delay it for bloody football.
I, uh, don’t think you need the “Jr.” there when you’re just using his surname.
Im still horrified at the ease at which Stark is willing to kill in this movie. I assume Man Of Steel will get the same benefit of the doubt for the neck-snap? But of course it wont.
@15: Another modern-day Stark analogue is Steve Jobs. I’m pretty sure that Jobs is at least half the reason that Stark’s facial hair transitioned from the classic Howard Hughes moustache to a goatee.
Add my voice to support this. My mother (silver-haired) insisted that we sit through the credits at the cinema when I was little for precisely this reason, and I have successfully persuaded a good few friends to do the same. But sadly, Pirates and MCU films are still the only ones audiences seem to sit through for, at least in my UK experience. I am frequently alone in the cinema by the time the last credit rolls.
@55/Blackzoid: Stark and Superman are held to different standards, as it should be. You folks that are still sore about the complaints regarding the Man of Steel neck snap five years later will just have to get over that. The entire point of Superman is that he is the ideal. He’s what we’re supposed to aspire to. He fights when he has to, and only as much as he needs to. He doesn’t inflict unnecessary harm or damage, and he doesn’t kill because he always finds an alternative. There has been a small number of writers over the past 80 or so years that have forgotten – or ignored – that, but that’s the core of the character because he’s supposed to be aspirational.
Iron Man isn’t supposed to be aspirational. At all. That was never the point of the character. He was an arms dealer. I mean, come on.
I almost always sit through the credits, because the music isn’t done yet. The music is part of the movie too, so the movie isn’t actually over until the music stops. The only exception is when the end-credits music is too unpleasant for me to handle. When I saw The Matrix Reloaded, the end-title music was so intolerably loud and driving (I’m very sensitive to such things) that I had to leave the theater, then come back in at the end to watch the preview of Revolutions.
And I agree with Lisamarie about Star Wars. The end title music there is part of the tradition. I can’t imagine walking out before the closing fanfare and timpani beats. That’s just leaving the experience unfinished.
@58/danielmclark: “Iron Man isn’t supposed to be aspirational. At all. That was never the point of the character. He was an arms dealer. I mean, come on.”
I don’t want to get into the whole Man of Steel debate until we get to that film, but I disagree with the logic in this paragraph. The idea behind Iron Man was that he was a reformed arms dealer. He was someone who regretted the wrongs in his past and was trying to atone for them — much like Spider-Man, although he had only a single huge wrong to atone for. Many heroes are on journeys of redemption, trying to make amends for their past mistakes or crimes. I think that’s very aspirational, because it says that our mistakes don’t have to damn us, that we can transcend them and become better.
On the other hand, I found it disquieting when I read a collection of early Incredible Hulk comics and saw how many nuclear doomsday weapons Bruce Banner had designed, and apparently continued to design even after becoming the Hulk (though when he got the opportunity to do so within the nonstop serialized narrative was very unclear), with no sense of guilt or remorse about making weapons that could kill millions, because he was doing it for Uncle Sam. It made him a hard character to empathize with.
I sit through the credits because I’m OCD. ;-) Also the music.
@46: I suppose it’s probably more of a topic for when this gets to Iron Man 3 but I always assumed that the Mark 42 armor was deliberately so much less indestructible because 1) he hadn’t actually finished making it, it’s still just a prototype but it’s all he’s left to work with after the mansion is destroyed and 2) as part of the whole thing where the suits are kind of a metaphor for Tony, he’s a wreck for most of the movie so the Mark 42 is similarly vulnerable. Plus he’s made what, around 30 suits in the few months between Avengers & Iron Man 3, while also not sleeping at all? It’s not surprising it would be a much lower quality of work than the suit he spent weeks working on, even with advances in his tech in the meantime. I do agree though, a lot of the other suits seem to have inconsistent power levels across the movies but Iron Man 3 seemed like it was maybe a deliberate thing.
@60 Aspire to the reformation, but not the man.
Quoth cap-mjb: “Don Heck, the man who drew most of Iron Man’s first appearance and replaced the basic grey armour Kirby designed (as seen in the opening of the film) with the iconic red and gold armour, gets a throwaway ‘and also’ mention? Okay…”
Yes because that list refers to all the people who worked with Stan on all the Marvel heroes of the 1960s, not just Iron Man. That’s why that list also includes Bill Everett and Steve Ditko, who had precisely zero to do with ShellHead.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
But isn’t Stark on a journey to be a better person? Iron Man seems like the first step in that direction, and I don’t think it’s going to fully happen in one movie. Because: A) it would be unrealistic for someone that egocentric and damaged to become a thoughtful Clark Kent type person that quickly, and B) the MCU is a glorified TV series and they want to stretch these arcs out as far as possible.
@64
“Quoth cap-mjb: “Don Heck, the man who drew most of Iron Man’s first appearance and replaced the basic grey armour Kirby designed (as seen in the opening of the film) with the iconic red and gold armour, gets a throwaway ‘and also’ mention? Okay…””
“Yes because that list refers to all the people who worked with Stan on all the Marvel heroes of the 1960s, not just Iron Man. That’s why that list also includes Bill Everett and Steve Ditko, who had precisely zero to do with ShellHead.”
Steve Ditko seems to have been the guy who designed Iron Man’s red and gold armor:
.” The character’s original costume was a bulky gray armored suit, replaced by a golden version in the second story (issue #40, April 1963). It was redesigned as sleeker, red-and-golden armor in issue #48 (Dec. 1963) by that issue’s interior artist,Steve Ditko, although Kirby drew it on the cover. As Heck recalled in 1985, “[T]he second costume, the red and yellow one, was designed by Steve Ditko. I found it easier than drawing that bulky old thing. The earlier design, the robot-looking one, was more Kirbyish.””
(Via the WIKIPEDIA article on IM)
krad: Ah. Fair enough.
I did not get that.
@52, Cap-MJB:”Don Heck, the man who drew most of Iron Man’s first appearance and replaced the basic grey armour Kirby designed (as seen in the opening of the film) with the iconic red and gold armour, gets a throwaway “and also” mention? Okay…”
As I mentioned upthread, Ditko designed the red and gold armor, and he also drew the first issue where it appeared:
.” The character’s original costume was a bulky gray armored suit, replaced by a golden version in the second story (issue #40, April 1963). It was redesigned as sleeker, red-and-golden armor in issue #48 (Dec. 1963) by that issue’s interior artist,Steve Ditko, although Kirby drew it on the cover. As Heck recalled in 1985, “[T]he second costume, the red and yellow one, was designed by Steve Ditko. I found it easier than drawing that bulky old thing. The earlier design, the robot-looking one, was more Kirbyish.””
(Via the WIKIPEDIA article on IM)
Heck does deserve credit for creating Tony Stark’s look, however.He also created the designs for Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan.
Even without going on how traditionally DC heroes have generally been more idealistic than Marvel’s more often than not, which probably is material for a while Tor.com discussion of its own, Superman is the paragon, to a much higher degree than even Captain America is. Captain America is a soldier born from bloody battlefields, Thor is a Norse god of war, and Iron Man is a living arsenal of war, while Superman is the ultimate Boy Scout inspirational figure, Wonder Woman is an ambassador of peace and love, and even Batman, while dark and brooding, is deep inside a child marked by death who doesn’t want to see more death, period.
I’m not saying the Marvel heroes have to be killers, especially Spider-Man, who sorts of falls under the same general clause as Batman (I’m not counting Punisher as a hero, and Wolverine is more of an anti-hero who regardless should be on a tighter leash while with the X-Men, alleged establishers of peace between human and mutant). But overall I think the Avengers are built on somewhat laxer grounds than the Justice League on this regard, and out of all the Justice League members, Superman ranks way above all others as a supposed example for the planet.
I’m, mind, more forgiving on the last option kill in MOS than most. It’s still WAY less terrible than Superman casually disposing of the depowered Phantom Zoners in Superman II, in a way that is implied to be lethal as long as you get the standard barebones version of the story. My real problem with the MOS kill is not the scene itself, but that it’s placed in a context where Superman keeps on being this weirdly detached and aloof colder person instead of the warmest and ironically most human of all heroes he’s generally supposed to be. And then it’s just pretty much waved off for that movie’s end, and the next movie’s followup on it is just a mess.
@69/OverMaster: Your points about the Avengers may be so, but still, in the comics, they’ve generally been portrayed as preferring nonlethal measures. There was even a time when it was retconned that Captain America had never even killed anyone during World War II, though that was abandoned later on in favor of the premise that he had killed during the war but didn’t kill as a rule as a present-day superhero. And Iron Man has generally tended to rely on fanciful, nonlethal weapons like his repulsor rays rather than mini-missiles and such.
Even the Hulk, with all his furious rampages, was generally portrayed as never killing anyone, no matter how implausible it was that he would always avoid doing it even by accident. I think there was even a comic once that tried to rationalize the unlikely nonlethality of the Hulk’s rampages by claiming that Banner’s brain was subconsciously performing lightning-fast calculations to ensure that the Hulk only broke things or threw things in just the right way to avoid killing anyone. (The Bill Bixby series had a simpler version, that the Hulk was really just Banner with his intellect removed and thus had the same emotions and drives, including a profound regard for human life. There was even an episode where a ruthless villain trying to kill the Hulk for sport accidentally killed himself, and the Hulk was anguished by his death, even though there was probably no other character in the entire series whom Banner would’ve been more justified in hating.) Although more recent comics did establish that the Hulk’s rampages tended to have a death toll, leading to storylines like Planet Hulk where he was kicked off of Earth because he was too great a threat.
And I’m still trying to stay disciplined and save my Man of Steel discussion for when we get to that movie.
I’ve been thinking for quite a while that I should do a Marvel rewatch, but these days there are just so darned many of them. Happily, this series should give me the kick in the pants I need, and keep me at a sustainable pace.
Just wrapping up Iron Man and it really is great, both on its own and in terms of how it lays groundwork for future films.
My one minor niggle is the timeline — based on Tony’s apparent age in the movie (from the magazine covers &c.), he must’ve been born sometime around 1970. If his father worked on the Manhattan Project, then he must’ve been pushing 60 when Tony was born, which certainly isn’t impossible, but does seem a bit odd. It almost would’ve fit better if Howard was his grandfather, not his father. Or am I getting the dates wrong?
(And in light of the upcoming Captain Marvel movie, Nick Fury’s line in the post-credits scene about Stark not being the only superhero takes on a whole new significance …)
One of the best superhero origin movies of all time second only to Batman Begins in my book.
“Thor is a Norse god of war”
God of thunder. The god of war is Tyr.
71: on the timeline- maybe not that implausible. A lot of the Manhattan Project team were very young. Feynman, for example, was born in 1918. If he and Howard Stark were the same age, and if Tony Stark is the same age as Robert Downey Jr, he would have been born in 1965 when his father was 47; later than usual but by no means implausibly late.
@26/Lisamarie: I coincidentally just came across an article that clarifies what really happened with the Star Wars credit controversy.
https://www.cbr.com/empire-strikes-back-george-lucas-opening-credits/
It wasn’t SW, it was The Empire Strikes Back, and it wasn’t about the credits as a whole:
The first film only had a credit for Lucasfilm Limited before the opening, which was fine since Lucas directed it himself. But TESB was directed by Irvin Kershner, so doing the opening the same way meant denying Kershner the opening credit he was entitled to. And for some reason, defending that hill was so important to Lucas that he quit the Director’s Guild and hired a non-DGA director for ROTJ. Which seems incredibly petty to me.
Makes perfect sense to me. Lucas didn’t want any credits at the beginning. Calling the Lucasfilm logo a credit seems petty to me.
@76/roxana: That’s contradictory. If he didn’t want any credits at the beginning, why insist on putting his own company’s credit there (and it wasn’t a logo, just the words “A LUCASFILM LIMITED Production”)? Why not just waive that along with the rest? If you read the whole article I linked to, there’s an example where Brett Ratner, in the same situation, chose to leave the name of his company “Ratpac Entertainment” off of the opening logo. So Brett Ratner — a man who’s been repeatedly accused of sexual assault, harassment, and other abuses of his coworkers and employees, so he can hardly be considered humble and selfless — was willing to set aside his ego and defer putting his name at the front of a film… but George Lucas so adamantly refused to make the same tiny concession that he quit the whole Director’s Guild over it?
@69/OverMaster: That may be the popular perception of Superman but that’s because the popular perception is Christopher Reeve or, more accurately, the first Christopher Reeve film. Superman wasn’t created as the ultimate Boy Scout. He was created as a crusader for social justice who dished out extreme punishments to greedy landlords, fake doctors and money-grabbing industrialists, and who would calmly stand there and let mobsters shoot him in full knowledge that the bullets were going to ricochet back off his body and kill them. The character of Superman created by Siegal and Schuster was far more of a “pay evil unto evil” type than any of Stan Lee’s creations.
@78/cap-mjb: It’s become fashionable in recent years for some people to claim that Superman and Batman were “always” as violent as they were in their first couple of years and that their nonviolence was a retcon introduced in the ’50s or ’70s or whatever. But that is an absolute falsehood, as actually reading the early comics would make clear (and I’ve been doing so steadily with DC’s ongoing releases of their Golden Age trade paperback collections of the early Superman and Batman comics).
Yes, in their first couple of years’ worth of comics, both Superman’s and Batman’s adventures frequently ended with the deaths of their opponents, because that was part of the pulp adventure tradition they were derived from. But as the characters and the medium of superhero comics matured and developed their own identity distinct from their inspirations, the editors decided that since the books were written for children, the violence should be toned down. So once the early-installment weirdness was past, both Superman and Batman were firmly and emphatically nonlethal in their methods, and the fact that they’d ever killed at all was retconned out of existence. That was the way they were defined from the mid-1940s onward. It wasn’t a latter-day reinterpretation; rather, the original, deadlier versions were just rough prototypes who hadn’t yet evolved into the full-fledged versions of the characters.
Christopher Reeve’s Superman was anything but a reinvention. The whole reason he was played that way was because it was an homage to the wholesome, earnestly corny way Superman had been portrayed in the comics since at least the 1950s, and the way Kirk Alyn and George Reeves had portrayed him onscreen. And while ’40s Superman did have a tougher side, he was also very much a Boy Scout, a role model for children and a paragon of morality.
Honestly I wasn’t bothered by Iron Man zapping people, and I’m usually someone who winces at a superhero killing. Maybe if it had been done in a more graphic, bloody manner, I would have taken offense (looking at you, DC), but the violence in this film is largely bloodless and fairly cartoonish. The moment a baddie accidentally shot himself from a richochet to Iron Man’s suit I realized we’re in ACME territory and could go along with it.
@79 I read an article a couple of years ago that said Batman’s willingness to kill lasted only 18 months before the institution of the no-kill rule, and that even then there were only a couple of actual deaths in that period. I just wish I could find it again, I don’t suppose you know what it was or if it sounds about right or not?
@81/random22: It was more like 13 months; the backlash against gunplay came after a Hugo Strange story in Batman #1, just a year and a month after Batman’s debut, when Batman gunned down a truck containing several mutant monsters and implicitly killed the driver too (and even there, he said he was reluctant to take life but found it regrettably necessary). Although there did continue to be a few villain deaths at Batman’s hands over the next year or so, though usually the “accidental” kind where he kicks someone off of him and they happen to fall off a cliff or into a pit — although it usually happened to the Joker and Hugo Strange, so they generally turned out to be alive an issue or two later.
This probably isn’t the article you were thinking of, but it discusses the topic in the context of a larger discussion of Batman’s gun use or lack thereof over the decades:
https://www.newsarama.com/26211-the-history-of-gun-toting-batman.html
Here’s a more focused discussion of the early gun use in Batman comics, pointing out that it was often just in splash art and usually directed against inanimate objects or monsters:
http://sacomics.blogspot.com/2005/08/batman-and-guns.html
That said, most of Batman’s kills in the very early comics were not done with guns but usually with sheer muscle power, so it’s not quite the same subject. And of course early Superman killed without using guns. (I remember one case where he smashed through a kidnapper’s plane to rescue their hostage and then allowed the plane to crash with the kidnapper inside.) But this was only for the first 2-3 years while the characters were outgrowing their pulp origins and feeling their way toward becoming the kid-friendly, wholesome role models they would be from the ’40s onward.
@82. Thank you :)
I’ve read some Golden Age Superman stories, not many, I admit. I guess it’s fair to say that Superman’s initial casual attitude to human life didn’t last that long, but the early installments do have a fairly messed up morality that doesn’t fit his Boy Scout image. (Not as screwed up as the early Wonder Woman stories, which are so dystopian you pretty much have to accept the writer must have been insane and run with it.) I’m not saying Christopher Reeve’s Superman was a reinvention but it’s not the only interpretation of Superman, any more than Adam West’s Batman is the only interpretation of that character. Even the sequels had to quickly make Superman less noble and more flawed and I’m not sure quite such a pure version of the character could be done again, for all that everyone holds it up as an example of what Superman should be like…but that’s a discussion for another film.
The DC heroes may have their origins in pulp fiction but the Marvel heroes were very much products of the Comic Code era. They were portrayed as a lot more flawed and human than their square-jawed DC counterparts, but it’s hard to imagine 60s Iron Man abandoning an enemy to a probable lynch mob. I guess the argument is that the Marvel heroes have moved towards a more pragmatic viewpoint in recent years, although the DC Universe isn’t exactly squeaky clean. Perhaps the truth is that, while audiences have older versions of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman to compare modern versions to, for all his appearances in animations over the decades, the mainstream audience basically think of Robert Downey Jr when they think of Iron Man, so they’re not going to say that he’s got Iron Man “wrong”.
@84/cap-mjb: “I’m not saying Christopher Reeve’s Superman was a reinvention but it’s not the only interpretation of Superman, any more than Adam West’s Batman is the only interpretation of that character.”
But neither of those interpretations was a radical departure. They were both fairly faithful depictions of the way the characters had been portrayed in the comics since the mid-1940s, once they’d both become wholesome role models for children. If you read a Batman story from, say, 1946, you’d find it almost indistinguishable from the kind of stories the Adam West show was doing 20 years later, except that the Batman and Robin of the comics would’ve had more of a sense of humor about their work than the ultraserious stiffs that West and Ward portrayed. And the comics only got sillier in the ’50s once the Comics Code was instituted and depictions of crime and violence were cracked down on to an extreme degree. The Adam West show was very much like the comics of two decades before, and downright sedate next to the comics of one decade before.
As for the Reeve Superman movies, Richard Donner tried to bring a new verisimilitude and naturalism to the character, but a lot about the first two movies is straight out of the goofiest Silver Age comics. And Superman III and Supergirl (1984), as I probably discussed in the rewatch posts for those, were even purer recreations of the style and tone of Silver Age DC comics.
Here’s the thing — the modern appreciation for flawed, complex heroes hasn’t always been the case, at least not in comics or TV aimed at young audiences. It used to be that heroes were expected to be pure ideals, paragons of virtue that parents could let their children read about or watch without any worry that they’d get the wrong messages. These characters weren’t expected to have moral ambiguity or to undergo any growth or change over time, just to be pure, stalwart heroes in story after story. The reason West’s Batman and Reeve’s Superman were played the way they were is because they were both homages to that simple heroic ideal that had been the norm for the previous couple of generations. You keep talking about them as if they were unique or revisionist, and that is absolutely wrong. It’s only since the ’70s and ’80s that Superman and Batman have been given more nuance and ambiguity, and that was in response to Marvel’s approach to character writing, and largely carried out by writers and editors who moved from Marvel to DC, like Dennis O’Neil, John Byrne, and Frank Miller.
Batman pretty much settled into a no-kill policy after Robin’s debut, which came around a year after Batman’s own. That being said, Batman was still pretty callous towards criminal deaths in Robin’s first story (where IIRC Robin tackled a thug to his death off a building), but after that, other than the already mentioned Hugo Strange and the Monster Men tale (which was published after its originally intended date; Robin’s first appearance replaced it in Detective Comics, and Strange’s story was sandwiched between the debuts of Joker and Catwoman in Batman # 1) he pretty much adopted his strict no-kill policy for decades.
@85/CLB: Again, not saying “unique or revisionist”. Just saying other versions shouldn’t be criticised for not being like them.
@87/cap-mjb: Nobody’s said that other versions should be criticized. This is a question of objective fact, not opinion. You incorrectly implied in comment #78 that the popular perception of a nonviolent Superman is based specifically on Christopher Reeve and that the “normal” Superman before Reeve was the violent version who actually only existed from about 1938-42. Your comment was misleading and I corrected the facts. That is all.
@88/CLB: Sorry if I implied Superman was violent and lethal in the comics for longer than he was, but I maintain that the popular perception of Superman is based on Christopher Reeve, because more people have seen his films than have read a Superman comic. I’m sorry if you feel the need to correct that. Repeatedly.
@89: I just don’t agree that there’s a significant difference between Reeve’s portrayal and the comics’ portrayal, as you have repeatedly implied there was. Reeve’s portrayal was based on 30 years of prior comics and TV/film precedent, including George Reeves as well.
Reeve’s Superman matches up pretty well with the Fliescher/Famous cartoons from the forties, in terms of character. His Clark Kent is a bit dorkier, but the portrayal of Superman is in line with that. And with the Live Action black and white serials version of Superman too.
If nothing else, Reeves was doing pretty much what the movies and tv Superman had always done.
Then there are those of us who’s perception of superman is based on Lois & Clark. I think that was fairly consonant with the main body of Superman comics, too.
@92/noblehunter: Lois & Clark was inspired specifically by the John Byrne reboot of Superman in 1986 and after, including the various changes it made to the mythos — Clark as the “real” person and Superman as the facade (rather than the reverse), Ma and Pa Kent still alive in the present and serving as confidantes to Clark, Lex Luthor as a seemingly legitimate business titan with romantic designs on Lois, etc. Although Byrne’s portrayal was influenced by Christopher Reeve’s in some respects, notably his appearance.
I suppose you could make a case that the Reeve movies pretty much introduced the idea that there was a “real” Clark Kent underneath and distinct from the facade of Superman (though distinct from the bumbling nebbish persona as well), whereas the comics had generally portrayed him as fundamentally being Superman/Kal-El at heart with Clark as just a disguise. They also appear to have originated the idea of Jimmy Olsen being a photographer instead of a cub reporter. So they certainly had their influence. But in many other respects — including the portrayal of Superman as a wholesome, upbeat, and non-murderous hero (since Zod et al. were taken away alive in a deleted scene) — they were true to what had come before.
Completely different topic: J.A.R.V.I.S.
At this point, this may count as headcanon, but I’m really not sure that the origin of J.A.R.V.I.S. in the MCU was supposed to be as innocent as “Tony Stark has fond memories of his dad’s butler”. Edwin Jarvis has a chilling throwaway line in Season 2 of Agent Carter where he expresses his horror at the idea of being turned into a ghost in the machine. I can’t escape the feeling that it was meant to be foreshadowing for a scary storyline in the unproduced Season 3. It’s awfully on the nose. (Can’t reference exact line or episode from memory.)
mutantalbinocrocodile: Yes, but based on the evidence we actually have — that Jarvis is both the name of Stark’s AI who takes care of his house and armor and also the name of his Dad’s butler who took care of him — I’m fine with the innocent interpretation until proven otherwise. Especially since I personally viewed that throwaway line in Agent Carter as a joke reference to the AI version, not as foreshadowing of anything.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Also can we redirect the discussion of Superman for a rewatch post that is actually about a Superman movie? We’ve already got two of them, one for the Reeve films, one for Superman Returns.
https://www.tor.com/2017/08/15/live-as-one-of-them-kal-el-the-christopher-reeve-superman-movies/
https://www.tor.com/2018/03/16/how-many-fs-in-catastrophic-superman-returns/
Thanks!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
We’ll probably discuss this a bit more in Iron Man 3, but I don’t have a problem with the Mandarin as I read him in the comics or watched him in the 90s cartoons. And I’m 50% East Asian.
I was really impressed in this first movie that they established “The Ten Rings” and the villain was Obadiah Stane. I looked forward to seeing the Mandarin in a future movie, but alas, that didn’t happen. Still, I liked the worldbuilding in establishing a link to Iron Man’s archvillain in the first movie. This, along with the after credits scene of Nick Fury, would establish my love for Marvel Cinematic Universe: continuity! Foreshadowing and arcs! TV and comics techniques applied with a movie budget! What’s not to love? The problem is introducing someone to this universe. I was successful with my wife (started in 2012), but not with my stepdaughter, who thinks this task is too daunting (10 years of movies is a lot).
Also, regarding the after credits scene: I didn’t know it existed the first time I watched. I just sat in the theater because I liked “Iron Man” music by Black Sabbath and was enjoying it. What a happy surprise in the end!
This was the first movie I had seen in theaters in a long time, and I have seen almost all of the Marvel films in theaters since then. I remember being at, I can’t remember, Ant Man or something and all of the previews were for nerdy comic book, sci fi movies, not a romantic comedy or drama in the mix, I teared up.
I have watched this move maybe 10 times by this point, it’s a lot of fun, but overall I find 2 to be more fun.
@98/DougL: Movie trailers tend to be attached to movies with similar target audiences, because those are the people most likely to want to see the movies being advertised. If you go to a comic-book or sci-fi action movie, then of course you’re mostly going to get trailers for other comic-book or sci-fi action movies. If you want to see trailers for romantic comedies or dramas, you need to go to a romantic comedy or drama.
@70 The weirdest part of that whole “did the math” explanation of how Hulk supposedly never killed anyone was that IIRC it came during World War Hulk, wherein he returned from the exile of Planet Hulk, the one the other Avengers sent him on because of how dangerous he supposedly was.
@100/Erunion: That’s odd, I thought I’d originally heard about it much sooner than that, like when my comics-fan high school friend was telling me about Marvel characters back in the late ’80s or early ’90s. I could be wrong, though.
I am coming late to this party, but per the post-credits scenes, the first I can remember doesn’t seem to have been mentioned above – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where Matthew Broderick comes out in the bathrobe and says “You’re still here? It’s over. Go home.” I’m sure there were others before and, of course, many others after. But when I was reading the discussion above about when they first started, that was the first movie that popped into my head. And unsophisticated, snarky, teenage me thought it was hysterical.
@102/Bonneykate: The Muppet Movie did the “Go home” gag 7 years before Ferris did. I think it was my earliest post-credits stinger, and I remember it completely breaking me up.
Just throw me anything starring RDJ (and Sam Rockwell in the next IM movie) and I’ll more likely applaude. In comparison to other main superhero franchise Iron Man is on the paper a meh thing to work with, as the characters are all boring, they’re history boring, their relationships boring, BUT the actors here made even Hogan and Pots memorable and likable. This is a rare example where a movie adaptation is actually way better then the origin. Hmm I wonder how many movies there are who can claim the same. Someone should make a list.
So count me and my family as a group that sits through all the credits. As mentioned by Keith, it’s just the respectful thing to do for all the people who worked hard on it. My Dad was the one who instilled that in me as a child, and I’m glad he did. Plus, I like listening to the music. I know that the MCU has gotten flack for its generic scores, but I personally enjoy listening to them. They’re not all great or particularly memorable, but they can usually be counted on to at least give the hero a good leitmotif.
Anyways, my experience with this movie is a little weird. I don’t recall the exact order I saw the Phase 1 MCU films in, but I know that I first saw this after seeing Iron Man 2 and Avengers. So for me at least, RDJ’s performance wasn’t new and exciting because I had already seen him in the role. That’s not to diminish his accomplishment, as this is still one of his best performances in the series, but it does help explain why I’m not quite as enthusiastic about this film as others are. I like it, but I don’t love it.
That said, I think when it comes to the armor itself it never really looks cooler than it does here. The Mark 3 remains my favorite take on the Iron Man suit to this day. It’s the perfect balance between sleek and bulky, and the color scheme is balanced just right. I know this is entirely superficial, but it’s something I’ll just have to cop to. This movie showed how Iron Man can be really dang cool.