Iron Man
Year: 2008
Rating: PG-13
Length: 126 minutes / 2.10 hours
After decades of superhero movies, it’s interesting to go back and watch some of the films that kicked off this whole interconnected cinematic universe. One wonders if, had a movie like Iron Man (2008) flopped, we’d even be in the aftermath of one of the most ambitious movie projects of all time. As it stands, the founding film for the MCU is a solid story that has great character growth and fun action sequences that would come to be the MCU standard for many of its films.
As far as superhero origin stories go, Iron Man feels the most realistic. There’s no radioactivity. No dead parents. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has a solid motivation to fight evil after he realizes his own technology that made him rich is being used to inflict suffering on others. Of course, this realization had to come at his own suffering to humble his otherwise cocky attitude (at least a little bit). As an engineer myself, I appreciated the montages of multiple prototypes, tweaks, and testing to get to the iconic mechanical suit.
Of course, the entire film really hinges on Robert Downey Jr.’s performance. His swagger and snarky one-liners make for a fun character, but there’s more to Tony Stark than being full of zingers. When Stark gets serious, that’s when things start to happen. It also helped that there were other high-profile stars to round out the cast, like Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts and Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane. Ultimately, the characters, dialogue, and action make this a fun film with heart and a fitting start to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
A realistic origin story held up by Robert Downey Jr.’s best role, I give Iron Man 4.0 stars out of 5.
This film appears in the following posts:
Cinema Connections #352. Wealthy Superheroes
Cinema Connections #353. Iron Men
