One of the lesser-known Marvel superheroes, Iron Man has potentially one of the hardest origin stories to translate into the present day. In most of the other recent film adaptations, “genetic engineering” has been used in place of ‘radiation’ (the science buzzword of the 1960s when these characters were created) as the catch-all cause of superpowers. Iron Man, on the other hand, came into being trying to stop a warlord in Vietnam, and is definitely a product of Cold War concerns.
Under these circumstances, the writing team and director Jon Favreau have done a great job of translating the story to the modern day, although thanks must also go to the Bush administration for giving him another unwinnable guerrilla conflict to substitute for Southeast Asia.
Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is an uber-wealthy international playboy and genius-level engineer who runs his family weapons company. While demonstrating his latest product to the army in Afghanistan, he is captured by rebels and ordered to make them one of his efficient killing machines. Tony instead builds a robotic suit of armour and escapes the rebels’ clutches, vowing to stop making guns and to start helping people by using his new creation.
Unusually for this genre, the tidy storyline makes complete sense (barring, of course, the technology involved), and allows plenty of time for the performances from Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow to shine through. He is charisma personified and brings warmth and pathos to the role. Paltrow’s Pepper Potts (Stark’s Miss Moneypenny) is upright, organised, strawberry blond and everything you’d want in a secretary.
The effects are excellent, with the Iron Man suit always looking real and never like it’s been stuck on in Photoshop. Action sequences here may not be as exciting as those in Spider-Man, but this is a function of Iron Man’s power being slightly less cool, rather than anything the film-makers have done wrong; fights between robots easily become swirling chunks of metal and can be confusing to follow, as previously seen in Transformers. The rest of the film more than makes up for this, however, satisfying with genuinely charming characters and loads of funny moments.
