Iron Man

I have a twelve year-old son, so you know I have to go see almost every superhero movie that comes out. We saw this together at a matinee the Saturday after it came out. He wanted to see it on its opening night. I braved many a crowd when I was younger to see movies on their opening nights. There is no way, now that I'm middle-aged, that I'm going to do that again. You know what? It's the same movie a day after, or a few days after. It doesn't make it better because you fought a crowd of sweaty, angry people to see it first. Even then, there are thousands of people worldwide who saw it even before you.

End of rant.

My son, Curtis, and I got the theater about a half hour before the show started. The place had less than a half-dozen people there. I thought that was going to be the extent of it: it was a 10:00 a.m. showing, after all, on a Saturday. I was wrong. Before the proverbial curtain went up, the place was packed with kids and their parents (a Good Thing^™—it is rated PG-13, after all).

I have to preface this by saying, I am probably one of the few Iron Man fans who actually knows Iron Man's origins. I had two excellent books as a kid, The Origins of Marvel Comics and Son of Origins (I saved up a lot of allowance in order to purchase both books. Seventeen bucks doesn't seem like much now, but it was a whole lot of green back then). Son of Origins had the story on the birth of Iron Man. I knew how Tony Stark was struck by shrapnel, how it was working its way towards his heart, and how he and another captive scientist formulated the plan for his suit of iron, to keep him alive after the shrapnel reached his heart.

I'm pleased to say the screenwriters did an excellent job of being faithful to the original story. They updated a great deal, as they should have (the setting was changed from Vietnam to a more current war zone, and it was set in the modern era instead of the '60s/'70s of the comic book version of the superhero), but they didn't ditch so much as to make the origin unrecognizable.

Apart from that, I liked the plot a great deal. Some of the action sequences require a great deal of willing suspension of disbelief, but what superhero movie doesn't? But it doesn't take too many liberties. For example, they provide an explanation of how Iron Man can fly, they don't just say, "Oh, yeah, he can fly. 'Cause he's a superhero." Once again, this is pretty much inline with how he is portrayed in the comic books.

I don't want to give anything away, but suffice it to say, this is a solid movie. It's perfectly paced, doesn't throw so much at you so it's hard to keep up (can you say "Pirates of the Caribbean III"?) and features some great acting. The actors don't overact or swallow their lines. This is probably the best superhero movie to come out from Marvel and is, from what I hear, their first self-produced title. It's better than Spider-Man I & II (though both of those are still great films) and neck and neck with X-Men I & II. If you're a superhero fan or just like a great action flick, take in this film. You won't be disappointed.

Make sure you stay past the end credits. They're long (like all movie credits these days), but there's a bonus scene you won't want to miss.

External links

• Iron Man at IMDb
• Iron Man at Rotten Tomatoes
• Iron Man at Kids in Mind
• Iron Man at Wikipedia
• Iron Man = win, blog entry/review from Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer