Iron Man or "The Saga Begins"

Sorry to take so long with this. It turned out trickier than I thought to write this. Some of it was perfectionism, a trait I have long struggled with, where I get so bogged down by trying to work out every possible contingency/flaw that I end up paralyzed and unable to get going, period.

However, some of it is due to, well, unlike many, I wasn’t completely off the clock during the massive quarantine. I work part time at a library, so we just worked on inventory while we were closed to the public. But working requires a different mindset than my everyday one and combined with the anxiety of a major pandemic while being governed by the worst (as in both awful and stupidest) people, my creativity dried up.

So here we are at the beginning with the first movie.

The MCU has pretty much settled into a nice, consistent groove, where the filmgoer generally knows what they're in for. Hollywood also takes comfort in knowing that said movie will safely recoup the money spent to make it and then some. But this steady success almost makes everyone forget just what a stunning accomplishment the whole MCU project was to begin with.

Basically, nothing like this had every been attempted. We had had superhero franchise films--Superman, Batman,X-Men, Spider-Man--but each franchise existed in its own little world. In each franchise, the title characters were the only ones who existed, so while in the comics, crossovers are as common as table salt, with heroes constantly dropping in to help each other out, this wasn't the case with the movies.

And you can kind of see why this wouldn't happen. There’s the obvious storytelling problem that come with being in a world with multiple superheroes. To be fair, this is something of a problem in comic books as well, where you often find yourself wondering why Superman or some other hero doesn’t pop in on another’s domain, just to see how things are going or be like, “You need some help? Looks like Headless Hookhands Pete has you on the ropes.” No, usually unless the character has a specific reason to be in City X, they generally leave each other alone. Like in the DCAU’s take on Batman fighting Superman, which is much much better than Zack Snyder’s version, the reason the titular heroes cross paths is because Bruce Wayne has some kind of business deal to work out in Metropolis. Then again, maybe superheroes are fiercely territorial like dogs, and it’s just not worth getting mixed up in these fights if you don’t have to. Though this territorialism is kind of needed, otherwise Superman would just fly into every place in the DC-verse and just solve everything, leaving the other costumed heroes with nothing to do.

There's just too much coordination involved, having to explain who Character X is and why they battle evil, so the audience knows what the heck is going on. Because while comic book movies are popular, the truth is that comic books themselves, remain something of a niche entertainment, read, collected, and discussed by a devoted cadre of hardcore fans. The trouble is superhero films demand a considerable amount money to produce, so the bar is raised much higher when it comes to getting bodies in seats. The cadre of hardcore fans is nowhere near large enough for this, so the movie-makers have to find a way to draw in the casual reader (aka someone who maybe read a few series a while back, but fell out of the habit for whatever reason) along with those who generally haven't followed the heroes for whatever reasons.

So the people involved need to introduce the hero, so the audience know who they are and why they're doing the stuff they do, but have to in a way that doesn't require the viewer to have encyclopedic knowledge of several decades-worth of canon. By the time people started making superhero movies, most of the characters had been around for decades, giving the writers involved a vast sea of stories and plots to choose from. The problem is that this sea is almost too vast. Unlike movies, comic books don't have to worry about runtime or special effects budget. Comic books can swing for the fences and do whatever they want, without having to consider "Okay, so how are we going to demonstrate this massive brawl," because even with CGI, special effects still cost a whole lot to make happen. Comic books don't have to consider real-world realities of physics and other limitations, which is probably for the best. Real-world science hasn't managed to get us the futuristic tech of Back to the Future II, never mind intergalactic space travel.

With movies, the producers know that an audience is only willing to sit through so long a movie. If you're going to make them sit through something three hours+ in length, then they better have served up something to justify all that time. The Lord of the Rings films manage this by being massive, sprawling fantasy epics with dense mythos and worlds that need to be explored. People read and watch fantasy films, because they want to escape the real world and explore another. As such, LOTR does what it can to immerse us in the lavish, wondrous beauty of Middle Earth, while also having some of the best battle scenes put to film and truly great characters. I acknowledge the flaws of the movies (still salty about how they handled Lord Denethor), but on the whole, the films managed to find a nice balance between honoring the book while dealing with the limitations of film.

There's also the problem in that for the most part, superheroes have been regarded as silly, trifling material that most adults are far too mature to consume. And really, all superheroes, no matter how hard anyone tries to "ground them," are really kind of silly. There's nothing realistic about a nigh-invulnerable humanoid alien who has just about every superpower under the sun who battles evil, while wearing a costume his adopted mother made him.

It's this attitude that explains why so many superhero films of the past were so dire in terms of quality. It took Hollywood a long time to accept that while these characters are silly, there's a reason people love them so much. It took Hollywood an embarrassingly long time to acknowledge this love and realize that superhero films succeed more, when the film play the hero fairly straight: not turning the hero into a buffoonish caricature or stripping away so many comic book elements in the name of realism, as the render to character unrecognizable. While the fan freak-outs over costume designs or the casting of superhero movies, is a bit tiresome, at the same time, it's a little understandable. The history of superhero films is often a dark and scary one. Fans had to endure a lot before finally arriving in the era of today, the golden age of superhero movies. Bah, kids these days...they'll never have to know the agony of Superman III, Superman IV, Steel, or Batman and Robin, etc.

And the history of superhero films is even more dire when it comes to Marvel characters. The first feature-length theatrical adaptation of one of their characters was :shudders: Howard the Duck. And before that, what we had were mostly TV movies, failed pilots to series that never came to be, and looking at them, you understand exactly why they never came to be. Obvious dirt-cheap production budgets, combined with some of the worst acting around, along with scripts clearly written by people who maybe read one or two comics and considered the material beneath them, while also being so 70s in look and tone that you can't look at screencaps without hearing "Do the Hustle" in your head. Link for those interested in entertainment history

The first Marvel hero to really succeed on the silver screen was Blade, played in all three films by Wesley Snipes. But Blade was more of an action-horror film than a superhero one and probably even fans of the films, didn't know about his comic book history.

At the time, Marvel embarked on this project, they also had to contend with the problem that they didn't own the film/tv rights to most of their characters. Spider-Man and X-Men were all in the hands of others. Since these characters were the most well-known in Marvel's stable they were already starting this project at a disadvantage, unable to use this cultural knowledge as a foundation to build on. While most of these characters weren't completely unknown to the general non-comic book reading public, with so many, the extent of the public's knowledge was that they knew the characters existed with a vague knowledge as to their shtick.

According to director, Jon Favreau, Marvel had used their characters as collateral when they asked for and received a $525 million, seven year deal, called a non-recourse debt facility, to get the funding needed to make films based on their properties. Basically if the MCU hadn't succeeded, they would have lost all the intellectual property rights to their library. Since they were already operating without their most well-known characters, if Iron Man failed, it would have been a real crushing blow financially.

And as if they felt they hadn't set the difficulty bar high enough for themselves, rather than start with a character people had more than a vague knowledge of, like Captain America or the Hulk, Marvel decided to begin their franchise with Iron Man, a character for whom most of the public's knowledge extended to "Yeah, isn't he that guy who flies around in metal armor?" if even that. The people of Marvel freely admit that the decision to start with Iron Man as opposed to one of the better known characters in their stable, was more because the character had greater toy/merchandise potential than many of the others they owned. Film may be an artform, but it's also a business as well.

Beginning your franchise with Iron Man aka Tony Stark was also a risky endeavor because, like I've said before, his creators, Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck, Jack Kirby respectively, deliberately set out to basically create an unlikeable character then make the readers like said character, which is no easy feat.

To use Stan Lee's words:

I think I gave myself a dare. It was the height of the Cold War. The readers, the young readers, if there was one thing they hated, it was war, it was the military ... So I got a hero who represented that to the hundredth degree. He was a weapons manufacturer, he was providing weapons for the Army, he was rich, he was an industrialist ... I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him ... And he became very popular.

Even Robert Downey, Jr., who played our titular lead, admitted that his portrayal of Stark was "a challenge of making a wealthy, establishmentarian, weapons-manufacturing, hard-drinking, womanizing prick, into a character who is likeable, and a hero."

As the character premiered, the 60s counter-culture was beginning to take flight and through that perspective, it's easy to see why Tony would be a tough sale. Comic book fans always have tended to be the weird kids, those who were never in danger of being popular in high school. Heck, the superhero genre was practically created by nerds and dorks (ex. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster who set everything in motion when they created Superman). As such, the readers tend to lean more towards the scruffy rebels*, side with the underdogs, over the classic clean, well-polished jock-types. So in the Silver Age 60s, that meant the readers were more on the side of the hippies, more apt to shout, "Hey hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today!" then sign up at their nearest ROTC. Granted, at the time of publication, the Gulf of Tonkin incident hadn't taken place, but my point remains.

Through this lens, it's easy to see why they would hate Tony Stark. Tony, to use the terminology of the time, is The Man. He's a filthy rich industrialist who made the bulk of his fortune selling weapons to the US military. With just those few lines alone, it's easy to the bar his creators had set for themselves.

Initially, Tony was in favor of the Vietnam War, but did eventually turn against it, like many of the other characters in Marvel's stable, and for the most part, Tony has long been depicted as the more conservative voice of Marvel's characters, though more Libertarian "Keep the Government Out of My Business"-kind of Conservatism, rather today's festering fucktangle of Neo-Nazis, child molesters, and war criminal fanboys.

Since often seeing the character's debut appearance goes a long way towards understand how they started and why they caught on, here's a link to Linkara's review of it. The debut is a fairly solid one, giving our hero a compelling origin. Unfortunately, it does have some Yellow Peril-esque traits that have not aged well and by tying Tony's origin to the Vietnam War, the creators are put in the position where his origin has to be constantly reupdated. Right now, the story is he was injured in Afghanistan in the War on Terror, but again, they will have to update it eventually. Then again, given how long the War on Terror has gone on, making it so that kids who weren't even born when 9/11 happened, are old enough to die in the military quagmires started in response to 9/11, yeah I might want to rethink that.

Anyway my point is that with Tony Stark, there was just so much potential for things to go awry and the MCU to wind up dying in the cradle as a result. Yet as the several years-worth of films that followed prove, it did not. Marvel opted to build a franchise on a character whose footing was already fairly shaky, and it succeeded like crazy. Tony Stark is, at times, a maddening character. There were so many moments where I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him while shouting, "What the hell were you thinking?! What part of any of this sounded like a good idea?!" Yet despite how frustrating he could be, Tony still remained compelling: I still wanted to follow him and see what happened to him. Though honestly, most of my frustration about him was more towards the people around him, but I am getting ahead of myself.

So okay, how did Marvel manage to win us over to Tony?

Well, first of all, they hired Robert Downey, Jr. to play him, which is probably one of the smartest decisions they've made with the films. The success of the films has come to mask this, but hiring Robert Downey, Jr. was a gamble in itself. Robert Downey, Jr. is a gifted, charismatic as fuck actor, but at the time of the first Iron Man movie, he was persona non grata in Hollywood; it was hard to convince higher-ups involved in the picture to take a chance on him. As this short documentary shows, one of the key reasons Downey plays the part so well, is because he basically was Tony Stark for a while: gifted and talented, but nearly done in by his own demons.

During the 90s, it was something of a running joke about how Downey was constantly in and out of rehab, having brushes with the law, and doing stints in jail. At first all this seemed merely part of the excess inherent among the twenty-something set of 90s Hollywood; back in the early to mid 90s, making a wild, crazy, drunken spectacle of yourself was practically part of the job description of a twenty-something celebrity. But as the 90s wore on and Downey racked up arrest after arrest, it soon became apparent that something darker and sadder was at work with him.

After a while, his arrests and his stints in rehab became a routine part of Hollywood gossip. Downey seemed destined to become another sadly common statistic in Hollywood: the talented, young actor done in by his own demons. Downey himself seemed to see the writing on the wall, at one point saying, "It's like I have a loaded gun in my mouth, and I like the taste of metal."

Downey luckily managed to escape becoming another River Phoenix, but after spending a decade getting into trouble with the law and burning bridges, it's understandable that Hollywood wouldn't want to take a chance on him. Hollywood is willing to tolerate some excess and craziness from its talent, but it will only tolerate so much. Jon Favreau was inspired to cast him after seeing his performance in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and faced opposition from Marvel regarding the casting, but he held his ground and Downey received the part. Jon Favreau has openly admitted that he wanted Robert for the part because of his past.

"The best and worst moments of Robert's life have been in the public eye. He had to find an inner balance to overcome obstacles that went far beyond his career. That's Tony Stark. Robert brings a depth that goes beyond a comic book character having trouble in high school, or can't get the girl."

It's a testament to how far Robert Downey, Jr.'s star had fallen in that he was paid $500,000 for his part in Iron Man. I know, I know, to us, $500,000 is a massive windfall, but not so much in Hollywood. Terrance Howard, who played Rhodey in this movie, was the highest paid member of the main cast.

So okay, we’ve got ourselves a charismatic-as-fuck actor in the part. How else does the film make us like Tony Stark?

Well, you can’t ignore the wish fulfillment aspects. Probably plenty of us, guys, gals, and our nonbinary peeps, fantasize about the life of the idle rich, being able to buy whatever you want, spending your days partying with all the vices that come with it—-gambling, drugs, sex, all that Jazz—-rather than toiling at some job that feels more pointless with each passing day.

Don’t knock the appeal of this kind of fantasy. The world at times is so bleak and dull that it’s nice to disappear into a world where problems can be solved with punching. The world is so much more colorful and prettier on the silver screen. Most movies, even bad ones, have a kind of internal logic they have to follow and are still more colorful and interesting than real life. It’s shallow, but TV and movies are inherently visual mediums, so the aesthetic is part of the job. It’s one of many many reasons why I hate that one movie so much, because as if they didn't completely botch the character**, all the shaky cam, zooming, and how the director seems morally opposed to light and color, made it so gorram unpleasant in addition to being bad. If I can’t enjoy the basic act of looking at your movie, you have majorly majorly failed.

But a movie character needs to be about more than wish fulfillment and charisma. So what else?

Anyone who has ever read any writing advice, will invariably hear talk about the importance of likeable characters or just likeability in general, when it comes to crafting a protagonist/hero. And while there is some good advice in there, too often, it is interpreted in an overly simplistic way, along with Ernest Hemingway’s infamous dictum: “Write what you know.”

Because while it’s true that if you’re expected to follow a character over several pages, episodes, or two-hour long films, that there needs to be something that compels you to stick around, this reason doesn’t necessarily need to be a heroic one. I am fascinated with Cersei Lannister in A Song of Ice and Fire. Does that mean I like her and want to be friends with her? Hell no! I will be more than happy when she loses the game, so to speak. But I also understand how Cersei wound up where she did, why she made the choices she does, even if they are incredibly bone-headed. And really she’s kind of a Dark Mirror to one of the more moral characters in the story, Catelyn Stark. Both women are mothers driven by a desire to protect their children, but Cersei is willing to go to lengths that Catelyn is not. Though ASOIAF is helped by its multiple protagonists.

For the record, just assume unless stated otherwise that when I talk about A Song of Ice and Fire or Game of Thrones, I'm talking about the books, unless stated otherwise.

Ultimately the reason why I kept coming back to Tony is that while he is, at times, an ass (a charming one, but still an ass), despite the mess of character flaws, despite how frustrating he could be at times, I never doubted that his actions were undergirded by a genuine desire to save the world and be remembered as something other than a merchant of death. He screwed up massively, but even when he did, no matter how much he made me facepalm and go, "What part of this sounded like a good idea?!", I still understood why he made the choices he did. His actions felt driven by a flawed moral compass, rather than the Idiot Ball.

While it was chancy to build the franchise on Iron Man, the decision worked so well that it's hard to picture it going any other way. And really, I'm not sure how it would have gone if they had opted to begin with any other character. Heck, one of the major defining traits of the MCU came about as a result of an adlib by Robert Downey, Jr.

Anyway, we got our hero. So let’s get this show on the road.

Meet Tony Stark

Well, that’s the gist. Tony Stark as the male power fantasy.

Unfortunately, things currently aren’t going so well for Tony.

As the astute comment below points out, you know you're screwed, when a bomb lands next to you and it literally has your name on it.



But perhaps we should back up just a little.

After the attack, Tony Stark wakes up to find himself injured and the prisoner of a terrorist cell called The Ten Rings.

tl;dr, the terrorists want Tony and his fellow hostage, Yinsen, to build them the weapon he had demonstrated earlier: the Jericho

I could question about two guys building all this in a cave, but that's the least of the unrealistic science in the MCU. The MCU, like most action franchises, has something of an uneasy relationship with science, regarding the laws of physics more as guidelines, really. In any case, there is a line later on that makes a nod at the ridiculousness of it.

Generally, when it comes to movie science, I don't care too much about how close it is to real-world science. I don't have much of a scientific background and chances are, neither do the fellow moviegoers. If a movie tries to explain it, chances are pretty good that they'll get something wrong (because Hollywood people generally aren't scientists, either), and thus lose credibility with those who DO know something, or bore the audience to tears. Just say some sciencey-sounding gobbledygook and get on with the story. So long as a movie's science isn't based super-obvious bullshit ala Lucy, I'm willing to play along.

So Tony is currently going through some shit. He’s got a heart full of shrapnel which forces him to invent the kind of insane science that only exists in movies. But most importantly, Tony is learning that he has spent his career being a merchant of death. Or as Raza the lead terrorist puts it, in the grandiose style only movie and film villains possess:

The bow and arrow once was the pinnacle of weapons technology. It was used by Genghis Khan to forge an empire that stretched across Asia, from the wintry woods of Ukraine to the Eastern shores of Korea. Now, whoever holds the weapons manufactured by Stark Industries rules the world... and soon, it will be MY turn.

That's the painful reality Tony is learning. Many have written far more in depth about this problem, but the tl;dr is that weapons flow like water when it comes to the global trade. In fact, they may flow even more easily than water. Because the truth is while the Cold War technically never turned, well, hot, it really was more of an umbrella term for a series of proxy-wars fought between the US and the Soviet Union across a wide variety of fronts. Sometimes the USA was directly involved ala Korea or Vietnam, but more often than not, we fought wars by organizing and arming all kinds of insurgent groups.

The Soviet Union operated much in the same way, secretly arming their own factions to fight the US by proxy. Given on the scale of which both the USA and the Soviet Union operated, that means a lot of high-quality well-crafted military arms were scattered all over the world, and here's the thing: weapons don't disappear once the war is over. Even after both the US and the Soviet Union ended their war, these weapons remained. And since towards the end the Soviet Union was pretty much hemorrhaging money, they sold off their weaponry right and left, not caring too much about whom they sold them to. The people they sold the weapons to, then proceeded to use them to settle grudges.

To add to the mess, did I mention large portions of Africa and the Middle East were carved up and shaped by European powers who knew little about the culture/history of the area and generally were more concerned about access to resources than the people living there? As a result, ethnic/religious groups that had long hated and mistrust each other, are now being forced to share a country, and a group that had been a majority in an area, now get to be the minority in country X, and so on and so on.

It's probably due to this sort of "planning" that the Kurds, despite being a distinct ethnic group made up of some 3 million people, still has no real nation to call their own, and exists in a perpetual statelessness, despite their numbers. The Kurds ally themselves with the US and other western powers with the hope of someday being given their own land, but at this point, the Kurds probably know they can't count on said countries to keep their word, but these ties provide them with some protections from the various dickheads looking to kill them all. It's not a lot, but some hope and some protection is better than none.

As a result, decades-worth of conflict ensue with all sides having plenty of fancy toys with which to kill en masse. And don't even forget all the fun side effects of US's repeated interventions.

US Foreign Policy in the Middle East from the 1953 Iranian Coup Onwards:

1. Throw lit matches onto regional powderkeg, making no plans what to do when the powderkeg explodes.
2. Be shocked when the powderkeg explodes.
3. Repeat

Though this happened all over the world, not just the Middle, including in South and Central America where most of the US's asylum seekers are coming from, usually fleeing catastrophic environmental conditions making it impossible for them to make a living or narco/gang wars. MS-13 is one of the GOP's go-to political bogeyman, but here's the thing: MS-13 actually originated in the good ol' US of A, not one of those scary countries south of the border.

Initially, MS-13 was started in Los Angeles by Salvadoran immigrants so they could protect themselves from other gangs in the area. It quickly turned into a more traditional criminal organization. In fact, it began to turn into a more traditional, well-organized criminal operation when Ernesto Deras assumed leadership of the group. Deras, FYI, had been a part of Salvadoran special forces and had been trained in Panama by United States Green Berets, probably for the same reason the US propped up and trained so many other awful people in Central and South America: we were scared of communism. So we fought proxy wars in Central and South America by arming death squads. On gaining leadership of MS-13, he uses his military training and know-how to discipline the gang and improve its operations.

Eventually most of MS-13 was deported back to El Salvador, where they proceeded to take the training they had received in the US, both on the streets and in our prisons, and start recruiting citizens of the country. And carnage ensues.

Because here's the thing: until MS-13 started getting deported back into the country en masse, gang activity in El Salvador was pretty low. These deportations took place in the wake of the end of the Salvadoran Civil War in 1992. As part of peace treaties signed, the Salvadoran government was basically forced to disband their army/police forces and to curry favor with military allies, El Salvador delayed re-establishing said police forces.

As a result, when MS-13 arrived, there was virtually no armed forces to stop their takeover and given that El Salvador's Civil War spanned decades (1979-1992), there were almost infinite numbers of weapons ripe for the taking. Needless to say, carnage ensues, leaving many citizens in a situation where their choices are Stay and Die or Flee and Possibly Have a Chance. So they flee to the US, which paints MS-13 as just some bizarre organization which sprang up out of nowhere, born from the inherent criminality of "certain people," and absolutely has nothing to do with decades of US anti-communist interventions in Latin America.

And let us not forget stuff like the ATF Gunwalking Scandal, which the ATF authorized legal gun dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers with the hope that in doing so, they would be able to track the guns to Mexican cartel leaders and arrest them. Spoiler alert, what wound up happening is that a whole lotta high-powered, military-grade weaponry wound up in the hands of the worst people.

Anyway, enough depressing real world stuff, back to the movie.

Tony Stark, naturally isn’t going to take this lying down and after building an infinite energy source in a cave with a box of scraps, decides to bust out. And most when faced with this kind of task, would, I dunno, secretly build a gun and make a move when someone’s back is turned or something, but we are not Tony Stark. For him, clearly the most sensible thing to do is build a high-powered suit of armor and unleash hell. Because God bless the over-the-top grandiosity that only shows up in so-called genre films.

Even if you hadn’t watched the video about Tony Stark’s debut issue in the comics, you probably already knew that his assistant/fellow hostage, Yinsen, was doomed. Yinsen is the classic character who exists to motivate the hero with his noble sacrifice. It is a bit of a cliched part, but I feel the actor playing him does enough with the material given to him that we can understand why his death would have meaning to Tony and serve as a further reiteration of Tony’s desire to be remembered as something besides a merchant of death.

Besides, just because a storytelling trope is a well-used one, that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad one. If it is used badly, then yes, but sometimes characters like Yinsen don’t need complexity. It’s perfectly okay sometimes to just have a character be little more than a bit player needed to move the story along, and not be developed that much. They shouldn’t be too textbook in terms of archetype, but a story needs a focus point and that means not every character gets fleshed out. While I adore TV Tropes like so many other scarily pop culture obsessives on the Internet, it is too often used for sloppy reasoning. Like they say, the terms “trope” and “cliché” are not synonyms. A trope can become a cliché if overused or used badly, but at their core, a trope is simply a convention or building block, akin to how music notes make up a symphony. All stories, regardless of their medium or their quality, utilize tropes, the way all music has notes or beats. Maybe if you typed “purple monkey dishwasher” for three hundred pages, you can claim to have not utilized any tropes, but would it still qualify as art?

Though given how crazy-extensive TV Tropes is, they probably have a trope page for the equivalent of a creative product that’s just typing “purple monkey dishwasher” over and over. There’s no escaping tropes, my pretties. :cackles:

It seems akin to what happened with classical music in the 20th century. The 20th century was basically about screwing long-standing rules regarding composition and just going nuts. But in screwing the rules, so they can do their own thing, composers inadvertently wind up creating new rules for other composers to break.

Then again, I personally don’t care much for the avant-garde composers of the 20th century. Too many of them, I’m like, “Okay is this supposed to be actual music or is the pianist just bashing his head on the keys over and over?” Bah, call me a philistine if you must, but give me Aaron Copeland and the guys who compose film scores any day.

After being rescued, Tony Stark wants a few things: a Burger King cheeseburger and a press conference.

The cheeseburger bit is a creative touch that comes courtesy of Robert Downey, Jr. In other interviews, he has said that the moment that convinced him to turn his life around happened in 2003. He had a carful of drugs and he decided to get a cheeseburger. He got one from Burger King that was just so disgusting, it made him question all his life choices. He wound up dumping the drugs in the ocean and going clean.

A really bizarre note regarding this little anecdote is Burger King actually did the promotional toys for this movie and its sequel, a fact which amuses me to no end.

So Tony holds a press conference. And what a conference it is.

And regarding the fallout that follows, hell yeah, it’s realistic. Tony Stark just threw a massive wrench into everything and that’s probably sent everyone below him scrambling. Probably even the janitorial staff are freaking out a little. It’s the reason why in the real world, CEOs seldom have that level of power. Yeah, they can try to take the company in a new direction, but it’d be more of a case of “phasing out something over a period of months” rather than shutting things down overnight. I’m fairly certain however grotesquely monstrous corporations may be, there are checks on this. I don’t claim to be an expert on corporate law, but all those scenes in movies where a character is like, “I own fifty-one percent of the shares in this company, y’all my bitches now!” wouldn’t happen. There are laws in place that protect minority shareholders. Since this is like a more massive version of the shareholder scenario, yeah it wouldn’t happen.

Which is probably for the best. When you confer that kind of power onto an egomaniac, you wind up with scenarios akin to the time Elon Musk tanked his company’s value with one stupid tweet. And yes, I provided that link, so I’d have an excuse to do my “Elon Musk is not the real-life Tony Stark” rant. You’re welcome.

To start off the rant, Elon Musk didn’t actually found Tesla Motors. He bought the company and in doing so, bought the right to call himself the founder. The guys who actually founded the company, are legally forbidden from referring to themselves as the founders. Elon Musk is, for all intents and purposes, a marketer who has unfortunately come to believe his own bullshit. Because yeah, he has talked big, but how much of this stuff has he actually done? How much of anything he’s done has actually gone anywhere beyond talk?

And oy vey, his stupid-ass publicity stunts. If he had really cared about the kids trapped inside the cave, then he would have just been grateful that they were rescued, even without his stupid-ass submarine. When he did that space car launch, he forgot to sterilize it before launching it, so if the car had followed its intended trajectory and made it to Mars, it would have forever contaminated the planet’s surface and ruined any searches for life.

Plus (and I freely admit that I am leaping ahead to be petty), say what you will about Tony Stark, but he gave his kid an actual name. Even by the low standards of celebrity baby names, X AE A-XII sucks. Poor kid already has it hard enough, being the son of a thinned-skinned egomaniacal douchecanoe.

Plus, however much I enjoy fantasies like Tony Stark, the truth is science seldom works that way. Real-world innovations are the product of years of mind-numbing hard work done by many many people. If we ever go to Mars, it will likely resemble how we got to the moon, via a government-funded agency with a veritable army of people working behind the scenes to make sure every “i” is dotted and every “t” is crossed, not because of the son of an Apartheid-era emerald mine owner.

Because despite memes painting governments as being stodgy and inefficient, most of society’s greatest innovations came about because of government-funded research. I cite as an example the smartphone where just about every part came about from decades of government-funded research not massive corporations. Corporations, in general, are bad at innovation, because they exist to make money and as such, they must immediately start turning a profit. They don’t have the capacity to go down the rabbit hole and follow an idea that might take decades to come to fruition.

Why the overly long lecture? I am a firm believer in “All art is political,” a message which will come up a lot in these things. The truth is for good and ill, the messages we receive from any medium, have an impact and get interwoven into both the internal and wider culture at large. From there, important decisions that greatly affect the world as a whole are made.

For example, ScriptTorture created her tumblr on the subject of torture, because most people get their “knowledge” on the subject from fictionalized portrayals like “24,” whereas the massive amount of evidence proving that torture doesn’t fucking work, tends to be found in ponderous academic papers that are usually shut behind paywalls. So she created the tumblr to make this information more accessible to the public at large, because both writers and consumers will, without given knowledge of the subject, base their stories/actions on what they’ve seen in other mediums.

And hey, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying escapist, unrealistic fantasies. The reason I am so obsessed with pop culture and fiction in general (I’m basically Abed from Community), is the escapist aspects, how the world makes so much more sense and is so much prettier in art than it ever is in real life. But we are receiving messages from these stories that need to be acknowledged.

Quick poll: which is more depressing, Bush II making “torture is wrong” into a radical statement or the dumpster fire-in-chief managing to turn “Nazis are bad” into a radical statement?

All right, all right, back to the movie.

After delivering that bomb of a conference, Tony decides to do the most sensible of activities: build an even better version of his cybernetic armor. Hijinks and montages ensue.

Along the way, we have this scene between Pepper and Tony.

I chose to point out this scene because the subtlety of the special effects involved, but also because it demonstrates another key reason Tony Stark works as a character: the fact he keeps people like Pepper and Rhodey around. It demonstrates that for all his ego, deep down, Tony knows he needs people to keep him in check, people unafraid to tell him, “Tony, you’re being an idiot.” That seems to be a key flaw that winds up doing a lot of rich people in: they surround themselves yes men and from there, their egos become massively inflated. Things usually go south from there.

But Tony soon receives some bad news: the board has filed an injunction against him and someone has gone behind his back and started selling weapons again.

On a note that is surely unrelated, it’s a nice little subtle touch, having Obadiah Stane play a piece by Salieri, when he shows up at Tony’s house to tell him about the injunction.

Clearly, only one option remains for Tony: fly halfway across the world in his newly-made armor and blow shit up.

After the shit has been blown up, there is this scene between Pepper and Tony.

Looking back after over ten years of films, after knowing how things work out for Tony, this scene acquired a certain resonance. Over the course of the MCU, Tony proceeds to become more and more riddled with PTSD to the point where it becomes increasingly obvious that being Iron Man has become an elaborate act of penance, a super-powered hair shirt. For all his ego, Tony feels a desperate desire for atonement, a sense that he must be punished physically and psychologically for all his sins, for every weapon that wound up in wrong hands, for every innocent life taken.

Since this is just the first movie, being Iron Man is still something of a thrill, but the exchange shows seeds of the penance motif to come.

Many times in the MCU, you’ll be forced to ask several times, “How many of this reality’s problems could be solved by getting Tony into therapy?”

Though that is another strength of the MCU: how the writers factor PTSD into the story. Tony’s case is the most obvious as he becomes more of a quivering mess with each subsequent film he appears in, but I think all the others have varying degrees of it, which manifests themselves in a wide variety of ways. The changes can at times be subtle, but if you pay attention, you can tell Hero Character isn’t quite the same character he was in his intro film.

There is stuff I think could have been done better and I’ll rant about it when we get there, but the fact that they attempted this, is quite impressive in itself. Usually with superhero films, too often the angst can be summed up as, ”I smolder with generic rage!” There are probably a lot of factors behind this screw-up in storytelling, but I primarily blame toxic masculinity.

The director or writer behind the project is aware that good characters have flaws, so naturally, they pile on the angst as a means of giving them flaws. But toxic masculinity opposes any real physical or emotional weakness. So the hero’s angst is expresssed by having them be a little unshaven, have them drink a little too much, or yell at people. Those are considered manly, masculine ways of expressing feelings. No one suffers panic attacks or chokes at the worst possible moment or breaks down sobbing, because all those are considered unmanly; the hero needs to be vulnerable, but not really, because that is all feminine and weak, and it might actually interfere with the hero’s chances at winning, forcing the people involved to put in extra effort to make the hero triumph.

Hence why we wind up with “I smolder with generic rage!” rather than anything truly compelling.

As if Tony didn’t have enough problems, he receives a Betrayal Five from his dear mentor, Obadiah Stane. And from there, the massive all-out climatic battle ensues.

Since it goes without saying who the victor is, I’ll take the opportunity to discuss one of the major problems with the MCU: the villains. One oft-heard complaint about these films is that the villains tend to be bland, and I agree with these criticisms. With the exception of Loki, it isn’t until Phase Three before we start getting colorful, memorable villains. Since a hero is only as good as his villain, that does hamstring the films a bit.

The MCU manages to overcome this deficit by making the heroes interesting, making them well-written and compelling. Even if the villains just seem to kind of be there, we still want to follow the heroes.

Ideally, when it comes to action movies, you manage to make both the heroes and the villains interesting. This is something that isn’t easily pulled off, but you have to at least make one side interesting.

You can have the villains be all colorful and dramatic with style and charisma out the wazoo, and have your uninteresting heroes react to them; in reacting, the setup forces the heroes to become interesting. This setup is often used when it comes to children’s TV and you can see why it works. The heroes are stuck being bland do-gooders, lest they be accused of corrupting the next generation, but the villains are under no obligation to be role models. As a result, the villains are better able to access the full spectrum of human emotion and have actual flaws, which winds up making them so much more interesting than the heroes. By reacting to them, the heroes are forced to develop and become a little more interesting.

Or you could do as the MCU opts to, have the heroes be colorful and interesting, so we’re invested in them, which forces us to care about the fight.

It’s one of the problems that has hampered the DC Extended Universe: neither the heroes nor the villains are interesting, thus rendering the movies bland messes. The DCEU seems to be finding its legs, but there’s no denying that those past cinematic farts of films still loom over the franchise.

Anyway, now let’s do some ranking. Ranking will be done on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being represented by Loki because for a while, he was the only interesting villain of the MCU. Feel free to debate in the comments where everyone falls on the scale. For the record, there is one villain whom I’ve chosen to classify as a zero as in there is nothing remotely interesting or memorable about him as a villain. Feel free to debate the identity of Zero.

Anyway, grading is done based on plan (complexity, scope, and intention), personality, presentation (basically, style), factoring in possible wild card elements. Sorry, couldn't figure out how to keep up the alliteration with the last element. If anyone in the comments has any suggestions, feel free.

Obadiah Stane's plan is really simple: he wants control of Stark Industries. Tony stands in the way of that. Hence why he tries to get rid of Tony, first by having him abducted and murdered by a terrorist cell, then by doing the job himself via mech suit.

Simple motives aren't always bad ones; massive ones like "Rule the World!" can be so big as to be too abstract to envision. In fact, an example of this can be found in a later MCU film, Spider-Man: Homecoming. The villain of the movie, the Vulture, does not envision reshaping the world or ruling a massive empire; his motivation is more that for years now, he's been turning a steady, illegal profit and would like to keep this venture going, thank you very much.

But the script and Michael Keaton's performance adds layers to the character (how he is both a warm, friendly father figure-type and a gangster who has no problem with effing people up, and can switch between these modes fairly quick), which makes him considerable more interesting than Stane.

About the only interesting aspect of Stane is the role he has played for Tony as a mentor/father figure, but that emotional connection isn't properly mined in this film. I suppose you can make the case that it is explored in later films with Tony's repeated daddy issues, but again, when I do these reviews, I'm talking about the MCU as it currently existed at the time of the film's premiere. I may leap ahead a little, but again, we will generally stick to what the average moviegoer's knowledge would have been, because even though the MCU is a massive over-arching series, a good movie stands on its own.

If you need a bunch of supplemental materials to understand and appreciate a film, then it is a bad film. It's one of the reasons why in discussions about the Star Wars prequels, I don't consider the oft-heard defense of "Oh yeah, but that was all explained in the Clone Wars shorts," regarding the issues with character of General Grievous in Revenge of the Sith, his underdevelopment and blandness, to be a good one. Supplemental materials are supposed to be like a spice adding a little extra that makes the story a bit more enjoyable, not a rickety scaffold trying desperately to hold together a nonsensical mess. If your main material is good enough, it may make the consumer willing to seek out these supplemental materials and become a rabid fan, but you got to make the main material compelling and worth their time, be they a hardcore fan or a relative newbie. Both should be able to understand and follow the plot.

Basically, outside the father figure/mentor aspect, Stane really doesn't have much going for him personality-wise. His presentation isn't much either. He's basically just a corporate suit. In the big climax, when he faces down Our Hero, his plan is basically "Just like the hero, but more!" which isn't that interesting. Now if he had, to borrow from Nigel Tufnel, gone to eleven, then it might be more interesting. Like if Stane had really tricked out his mech, made it way huger than Tony's, added some really interesting elements (a better paintjob than the dull steel-grey color, different weaponry, etc.), this could have been way more interesting.

I will say that I love this moment of Stane's where he makes a nod at the sheer ridiculousness of Tony Stark's tech, something of what Turkey City Lexicon calls A Signal From Fred.

But other than that, there aren't really any memorable moments/aspects to Obadiah Stane. Hence why I would give him a 1 on the scale. Those who disagree, may make their case in the comments.

After the big fight, comes the big clean up. Luckily, Agent Phil Coulson from SHIELD is here to help.

And yes, I am among those who are Phil Coulson fans. Suit-wearing government agent who is also a superhero fanboy and has dry sense of snark? I'm swooning. Like Harley Quinn from the DC Universe, Phil Coulson is a character that was created for a media adaptation that has ascended to become a part of the comics-verse, which is a big sign of his popularity. And the thing is, no one involved intended for him to become anywhere near as huge. Phil Coulson was created as a bit character; his role was to introduce Tony to the organization affectionately known as SHIELD, try to do cleanup for his big catastrophe, and shuffle off stage. But he touched a nerve and as a result, achieved Ascended Extra status.

The alibi Coulson has given for Tony to read to the press is that Iron Man is his personal bodyguard, Tony was partying at his yacht when the big climatic battle happened, and had nothing to do with all this. Every hero has an alibi to protect their secret identity and that was the one used in the comics: Iron Man is merely Tony Stark's personal bodyguard, even though he is never ever seen with Tony and that kind of makes him a shit bodyguard. Well, okay, it is admittedly a better alibi/disguise than wearing a pair of glasses, but not by too much.

And now we can talk briefly about the secret identity trope. This is an old, long-standing superhero trope going back to the Golden Age, but nowadays, if it comes into play, it is usually with some nods at the ridiculousness of it (for all the flaws of that movie, Green Lantern has a good example of it). Most heroes usually have a small cadre of people who know their identity and serve to provide backup, but the audience isn’t quite as welcoming to the trope as they used to be, leaving many writers spinning their heels, trying to use this trope because it is a traditional part of the lore, but times have changed and it doesn't really work anymore.

Robot Hugs does a concise job of laying out the problematic aspects of the secret identity trope with pictures to make the learning go down easier.

The secret identity bit is one of the reasons I struggled to get into The Flash tv show. My brother convinced me to stick with it, saying it had fun comic book action, but lordy, the first season was at times excruciating. For some reason, Barry couldn't tell Iris, his closest companion since childhood, whose house he grew up in, for REASONS! Watching Barry and his cadre repeatedly gaslight Iris was just awful. They did finally let her learn Barry's identity, but she took this constant secret-keeping entirely too well. She should have at least shivved one of them. What really made it cruel, was how for some reason, Barry was willing to let everyone EXCEPT Iris know his identity. In one episode, he reveals his secret identity just so he can lord it over a guy who bullied him in high school, but while Iris's father knows as well as most of her friends, FOR SOME DAMN REASON, HE COULDN'T JUST TELL IRIS! SHIV 'EM IN THE EYE, IRIS!

The movie is clearly familiar with the trope and how it was used in previous films like Sam Raimi's Spider-Man with this exchange before Tony goes to the press conference:

If I were Iron Man, I'd have this girlfriend who knew my true identity. She'd be a wreck. She'd always be worrying I was going to die, yet so proud of the man I've become. She'd be wildly conflicted, which would only make her more crazy about me...

But keeping with Tony Stark's "Don't tell me what to do!" personality, he proceeds to ditch the alibi entirely, go to the press conference, and just go, "I am Iron Man."

And it is for this reason that while Tony Stark was a rather interesting choice to begin the franchise with, really it is now impossible to imagine the series going any other way, or anyone but Robert Downey Jr. playing the part. Because this is yet another one of Robert's ad libs.
In doing so, Downey established what became one of the MCU's primary traits: with a few exceptions, the films mostly ditch the idea of secret identities.

Marvel Studios president, Kevin Feige says he chose to do this because he felt just ditching the cue card and going with it, was exactly the kind of thing Tony would do. He explained the impact of the adlib and how it affected the writing of the MCU this way:

"That success inspired us to go further in trusting ourselves to find the balance of staying true to the comics and the spirit of the comics but not being afraid to adapt and evolve and to change things," Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige told Deadline in 2018.

This change would mark the first of many changes, big and small, carried out in the MCU, but it also served as the foundation for one of the defining characteristics of the franchise in general: the MCU would choose to focus primarily on the main characters, not as their superhero alter-egos, but as people as they struggle to carry the weight of the world on their broad shoulders. Another example of this can be seen in the ensemble films, where even the characters themselves seldom refer to each other by their superhero monikers. You're more likely to hear something along the lines of, "Steve, can you help us out here?" rather than him being called Captain America. Thor is just Thor and doesn't even bother with the Donald Henry Blake identity. And Natasha and Clint are generally referred to as Natasha and Clint, rather than being Black Widow and Hawkeye.

One adlib and Robert Downey, Jr. forever altered the course of the franchise.

And that's Iron Man. Sorry again for taking so long with this, but a confluence of factors (crippling anxiety, world events, shitty executive functioning) just came together. Hand of God, I will try not to put my faithful readers through this again. Feel free to give advice/comments.

Stan Lee Cameo: "Hef" at Tony's party

Post-Credit Scene: Nick Fury is here to talk about the Avengers Initiative

*Of course, now the scruffy rebels are somehow Rich White Men, because it's not enough for them to have everything, if they can't have the tears of losers as well. Hence why they have to act like that when it comes to suffering, they've got Jesus beat. But really, we mustn't overlook the horrific plight White Men experience. Maybe someday, God willing, 44 out of 45 US presidents will be White Dudes and they will make up most of the board of directors/CEOs of massive corporations, and basically control the world of entertainment, getting labeled the default, while everyone else is some bizarre special interest group. But until that day comes, they can only sob and sing, "We Shall Overcome."

**I really need to undergo that procedure in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when it comes to that movie, because I am in serious danger of alienating everyone in my life with my frothing "I will have your head on a platter of gold, Zack Snyder" rants.

But seriously, the DCEU's employment of Snyder is one of the things where I question if DC really wants their universe to succeed or if this is some elaborate The Producers-style scam.

Because first, they decide to hire a raging Objectivist who openly expresses contempt for idealistic superheroes, to direct a film about the most idealistic superhero of them all. But okay, that movie does have its defenders. I'm not one of them, obviously, but still.

And then after he screwed the pooch so spectacularly in Batman v. Superman, managing to so badly screw up such an inherently cool concept that it crosses the line into "How?! How did you manage to screw up this badly?!" Credit where credit is due: this massive a screw-up is proof that Zack Snyder does has some talent, because a screw-up on this level takes more than mere incompetence to happen. Have to admit, I didn't see the film because I hated that one movie so much, but I know the reception it received and the overall gist of it. And it makes me be all hipster "Posers. I hated Zack Snyder before it was cool to hate him."

But even after Snyder screwed up that badly, DC was like, "Y'know why don't we have him direct our big ensemble film."

For the record, even if the Snyder cut exists, it probably wouldn't save that wet fart of a movie, and I'm not sure why people think it would. I'm like, "You saw how badly he managed to screw up Batman v. Superman, right?