5/14/08
Versus - "Iron Man" vs. The Iron Man Comics
Even though the official beginning of Summer is on June 21, it seems like it the "Summer Movies" season begins sooner and sooner every year. The movie studios, instead of spreading the movie love evenly throughout the year, jam the majority of their blockbuster films down our collective throat from the beginning of May to around Labor Day.
Why do I bring this up? Well, the movie that was chosen to inaugurate this year's Summer movie season was none other than the eagerly-anticipated "Iron Man", which is also the first comic-book based movie (of many) to be released in 2008. And for the Pulp Fiction website, it means the "Versus" columns are about to get a lot of new material to bitch about…I mean review ;).
It should also be noted that this is the very first film to be wholly financed by Marvel Studios. You've all heard me gripe about how movie studios that are not directly affiliated with the comic book properties they translate to the big screen tend to make changes to the concept and/or story that don't jibe with (or downright go against) the original material. It was my most fervent hope that Marvel paying the final bill on the movie would prevent that very thing from happening. Was that the case?
What the movie got right
I'm happy to report that, at least in my opinion, this is one of the most faithful comic-to-movie adaptations (other than "Sin City" of course) ever released, and definitely the best movie to come out of Marvel in a very long time. If they took the same kind of care with the upcoming Hulk & Punisher movies that they took with "Iron Man", I think we'll see a renewed interest in those characters that was all but killed when their inaugural movies came out a few years back.
Getting back to "Iron Man", let's take a look at what the movie did well.
Casting
To start with, the casting of the entire movie (for the most part) was dead on. They could not have gotten a better actor to portray Tony Stark/Iron Man than Robert Downey Jr. He is as accomplished an actor as anyone working today, and is professional (and perhaps reverent) enough to play a Tony Stark that is consistent with how he is portrayed in the comics, a hero that is flawed, but ultimately sympathetic (post-Civil War antics aside).
The rest of the principal characters were well-cast as well. Gwyneth Paltrow brings a quiet authority to Stark's assistant Pepper Potts, and the writers were wise enough to tease a romance between Pepper and her boss without actually going through with it (if slow romantic tension is good enough for David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel on the TV show "Bones", it's good enough for this movie). Terence Howard was a great pick to play James Rhodes, and really got to shine in his interactions with Stark prior to him putting on the Iron Man armor for the first time. And you will love to hate Jeff Bridges as the main villain of the movie, Obadiah Stane. For the sake of getting this character into the first movie, he is introduced as Stark's charismatic-but-gruff business partner rather than the business rival that nearly drove Stark to ruin in the comics, a move which sets up his villainous turn later in the film rather nicely.
Story
The origin story of Iron Man has, out of necessity, been revamped for modern times. The Northeast Asian guerrillas that captured Stark have been replaced by Middle-Eastern terrorists. This is not a big surprise, as Warren Ellis and Adi Granov revamped the Iron Man origin in a similar manner in the book Iron Man: Extremis. All the movie really does is expand on the groundwork laid out in Extremis, and it does an exceedingly good job. From the humorous dialogue between Stark and the soldiers with him in the transport to his capture and all the way to his creation of the first armor and escape from captivity, director Jon Favreau and the screenwriters do an excellent job of telling the origin story of Iron Man.
More humor is introduced after Stark regains his freedom when he goes through the trial-and-error process of perfecting his Iron Man armor. His interactions with the automations in his lab as if they were human employees is priceless, as are the impromptu super-pratfalls he takes while perfecting the flight process in his lab. I almost felt sorry for Stark as one of his many sports cars gets wrecked as he returns from his first full test flight (but then I remembered that he's loaded so that emotion quickly faded).
Stark's realization that his weapons are being used by terrorists and other unsavory characters provides the character with a purpose: to single them out and destroy them. When he takes his upgraded armor to confront the terrorists, he teaches them a vital lesson: Don't get into a missile fight with Iron Man - you'll lose! This obsession with disarming villains using his weapons echoes the Armor Wars storyline from the 1980's, where Tony Stark finds out that his armor designs have been stolen and sold to a multitude of high-tech villains such as the Beetle, the Crimson Dynamo and others and goes on a crusade to destroy their armors lest they do more harm with his designs. The movie uses this aspect of Stark to set a precedent, and perhaps sets up things to come. I have to say, an Armor Wars-based movie would not suck, but then I've always been rather partial to that particular Iron Man storyline.
A logical (well, for a sci-fi movie anyway) tech-based explanation for the functions of the Iron Man armor is provided as Stark is refining the armor. The power source in the chestplate acts as both battery for the armor and a magnet to keep the shrapnel he took in the Middle East from penetrating his heart. The repulsor rays in his gauntlet were initially intended merely to provide stability for his flight boots and got repurposed into an offensive weapon. It's those little touches of practicality and rationality that make this movie attractive to the mainstream moviegoer as well as the die-hard comic book fanatic.
Design
The look of the Iron Man armors in the film is strikingly similar to their modern-day comic book counterpart. That is because artist Adi Granov, the artist that helped Warren Ellis launch the current Iron Man series, was largely responsible for providing the art design for the movie armors. Granov must have been like a kid in a candy shop, re-designing multiple Iron Man armors and giving them real-world basis and functionality, and the love shows through in the final products. The Mark I armor looked just about as good as it did when Granov drew it in Extremis, and it really looked great for armor cobbled together in a cave. The Mark III armor that Tony ends up with also looks like it leaped right out of the pages of Extremis. (If you don't take that as a biiiiig hint to pick up Extremis, you should either have your head examined or start taking some Red Bull through an I.V. drip)
The Iron Monger armor that Stane dons for the climactic battle of the movie looks a heck of a lot like the Bob Layton-designed suit from the comic, with just a touch of the Firepower armor design from Armor Wars thrown in for good measure. Granov's design just made it look that much more menacing.
Where it went wrong
This movie didn't really give me a lot of material to work with as far as nit-picking goes. My only real complaint is that the James Rhodes character became an afterthought once the Iron Man suit comes onto the scene. Terence Howard did such a wonderful job with the character up until that point of the movie, then he just became kind of one-dimensional. He was literally just there to keep the plot moving by saving his friend's ass again and again. Sure, that is exactly what he did in the comics, but let Howard chew up some scenery in the doing of it. All of the other principal actors got their moment to shine throughout the movie; it's just a shame that Howard didn't get his. That being said, it was a nice touch to have him look at an Iron Man prototype that looks suspiciously like the War Machine armor and mutter to himself "Next time, baby!"
After the dust has settled
Iron Man epitomizes what a movie based on a mainstream comic book character should look and act like. It should definitely be seen in the movie theater, as it is well worth the…(shudder)…$11.00 price of admission. The movie even plans ahead for the future. Besides the tongue-in-cheek allusion to Rhodes' future as War Machine and introduces S.H.I.E.L.D., it also sets the stage for potential character crossovers, just like Stan Lee & Jack Kirby used to do with great frequency back in the day.
For those of you that don't want the surprise of what I am referring to spoiled, just stay after the closing credits have rolled. You definitely won't be sorry! If you don't give what Spider Jerusalem would refer to as "…two tugs of a dead dog's cock" about spoilers, read on…
*Spoiler Alert!*
Once the credits end, Tony Stark walks into his penthouse to find Nick Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson and looking like he just walked out of the pages of The Ultimates), who wants to talk to him about a little something called the "Avengers Initiative". Add to these reports of both Robert Downey, Jr. and Jackson making an appearance in the new Hulk movie next month and things are going to get a lot more interesting at the box office in a year of two.
<TOP>