Kennelco Film Diary

(2008) dir. Jon Favreau
viewed: 05/06/08 at AMC Loews Metreon 16 with IMAX, SF, CA

Iron Man is a superior superhero movie.

It’s funny (or not so) that during the trailers the audience is shown the upcoming The Incredible Hulk (2008) and the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight (2008) which are coming our way this summer as well.  Actually, there are a ton of superhero movies in the pipeline and the success of Iron Man, commercially, gurantees more sequels and more of these things going into production.

Iron Man had a pretty kick-ass trailer, I thought.  The best of the summer trailers that I have seen for big action films anyway.  The Dark Knight looked interesting even before actor Heath Ledger’s untimely death earlier this year (now it has a morbid attraction on top of all that).  But The Dark Knight looks interesting more so for the Joker himself, the tone and feel of the film.  Iron Man simply looked pretty kick-ass.

Amid a range of reviews, I guess my expectations were not high.  Director Jon Favreau hasn’t actually made a good film until now, his Made (2001) was okay, but his holiday Will Ferrell film Elf (2003) and his kiddie movie Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005) didn’t really give you the sense that he could pull off something good.

I mean, this is a superhero movie done well.  And a lot of credit should go, as it has been, to Robert Downey, Jr., whose prattle and charm carry the movie through its segments that aren’t CGI explosions, gadgetry, robotics, and sci-fi slickness.  And that is often the downfall of many of these films.  You go for the action and sit through the plot development.  In this film, the plot and character development are engaging, starting out with Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark as a scotch-swilling mega-millionaire genius creator of weapons of mass destruction whose morality was checked at the door.  After being captured in Afghanistan by some rogue militants (clearly not muslim dudes, nor Al Qaeda), he comes to realize that much of the technology that he has created is not protecting America, but being used against it and against innocent people a world away.  After cobbling together the Iron Man suit 1.0, he escapes, freshened with morality and returns to become an unlikely superhero.

And this morality change works.  At least it did for me.  I bought into the storyline.  I liked it.

The thing that is a little dodgy about the film is its handling of politics, terrorism, and torture.  I’ve read that the scene in which Stark is waterboarded is considered the most touchy of all, an image of a torture by Arabs on Americans rather than the current reality of the reverse actually happening in the prisons that the United States government is running.  I think Favreau and the filmmakers really tried to dodge the bullets here (ironic metaphor), though overall it works to have updated the narrative from it’s 1960’s original origin story which was set in the Vietnam conflict (and apparently wasn’t even trying to be PC.)  But it’s a touchy area.  Can one really make a movie set in Afghanistan like this at this point in time when the U.S. government has so many troops and so much control there and have the film be politic-free?  Is in a sense that not a political statement? Turning the blind eye?

The film does try to portray the people there in a combination of ways and tries to make the villains from all over the place.  The biggest villain being Stark’s right-hand man in his weapons company, a far less than moral fellow who ultimately dons his own robotic suit to fight him in the finale.

But the film is about a man who comes to a moral change.  It’s about a man who decides to take action, change his life, fight for good because he has seen destruction and injustice firsthand and must do something about it.  So in that sense, this film intends moral enlightenment while skimming the surface of one of the most morally complicated regions for the United States today, touching the topic for its narrative constructs, while not really commenting, nor taking a particular stance regarding the military’s place there.  Or maybe worse.

Still, as I have said in a different context (regarding baseball), you don’t go to a big summer movie for moral ambiguity.  You go to enjoy the ride.  And it’s a very good ride.  I predict probably one of the better summer movies that will strike us this year.