Iron Man (2008) – on HD. I tend to pick Blu-rays by the bundle these days, then slowly consume them over several weeks on top of the DVD rentals that continue to arrive at our door step. The most recent big bunch of pickups were the first Transformers film, District 9 which I’ve blogged about before here, Contact and finally the first Iron Man film from 2008.
While Marvel has got a lot of luck with film adaptations of its film adaptations of its super hero characters – e.g. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie trilogy – it’s easy to forget that they’ve had misfires too: like Daredevil, Elektra and Ghost Rider. If you’re saying “say who?” about now, it only goes to show how badly those films turned out and into quick dumps into DVD bargain bins.
The first Iron Man film though fared well. Not only is the superhero one of comic book writer Stan Lee’s most loved creation from his large roster of characters he cooked up, it’s also a production with self-confessed fanboy Jon Favreau at the helm. In a bit of inspired casting, the role of Tony Stark/Iron Man went to Robert Downey Jr. and he delivers the flippancy and flamboyance of the billionaire in a naturalistic way that Christian Bale couldn’t in The Dark Knight.
Interestingly while the character has been seen in animation since the 1960s, the 2008 film was the first ‘live’ action adaptation. I’m guessing it’s because computer generated graphics today is making it possible to render realistically onscreen today a moving human clad in advanced titanium armor and firing sophisticated weapons – the type of visuals that would had looked cartoonish if not outright impossible in the 1980s.
Unlike other superheroes who have to deal with hiding their alter egos, the Iron Man character has a major twist: everyone knows who he is when Stark announces his identity at the end of the first film. One of the major themes in comic book heroes which gets ruthlessly mined for story arcs is how superheroes routinely keep their real world personas secret in order to protect their loved ones from getting targeted and held ransom by their enemies. I was looking forward to how Tony Stark would deal with everyone knowing who he is in his off-hours, but funnily this theme never quite surfaced in the second film.
As super hero origin stories go, Iron Man is pretty formulaic. The film starts with character establishment, then how he gets his ‘powers’ (in Tony Stark’s case the incentive to build his armor), learning how to use his powers, and finally the requisite big battle with the first villain.
There are a couple of elements though that made the first film different from your typical superhero films. One is the liberal sprinkling of humorous touches throughout. There’s already funny guy Downey Jr. for instance, and his banter with Rhodey (Terence Howard) while trying to outfly F-22s over Afghanistan is rib tickling. That aerial battle is pretty spectacular too, the more so that aside from Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns from two years before and the Human Torch from the pair of Fantastic Four movies, there aren’t a lot of films of superheroes who fly.
That said, I think the somewhat light-hearted tone of the film also undermines how seriously it’s taken. Terence Howard for instance seems to be playing the role of Stark’s best bud for laughs (he’s obviously chuckling in every scene). And the bunch of terrorists who capture and imprison Stark in the first 30 minutes are caricatures. They are so laughably inept you never quite see them as serious threats. I’m not suggesting that the first Iron Man film should have taken the tone of what The Dark Knight did, but Iron Man throughout its film length at times feels more like a Saturday picnic outing than a true superhero epic.
Still, Marvel is on a gold run with its relatively successful series of films based on the Avenger team of characters, with easter egg scenes to be had after each film’s end credits about the next superhero they are introducing in film. I’m assuming that the next one would be Thor, the Norse mythological God. Now, that would be really interesting.:)
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