Ten Men and a Movie: Iron Man

We caught Iron Man this weekend. We liked it. one of the better superhero movies. It delivered exactly what we expected.

Which ultimately means it was a disappointment- no Wow moments. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the 1st 2/3rds of the movie. In sequential order. So we were never really amped up during the movie, because we knew what would happen next- we’d already seen it in the preview. So, predictably, the best parts are the parts we did not see coming. Like the comic bits about his helper robots. And there's lots of love shown to the fans of the comic

More observations:

• Robert Downey Jr, was born to play this role. And we're sure he does a better job than this guy would have done.
  
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• This is a huge plus - Tony Stark who was infinitely more interesting than the Iron Man character.
  

• The effects were outstanding, but then, if you’ve watched TV in the last four month’s you’ve already seen all the effects. The shots of Iron Man in action were believable, unlike the Spiderman movies, where every scene of him swinging thru Manhattan looks like it was animated by a dropout from ITT Tech’s School for Animation.

Overall, this guy sums it up better than we could.

Some absurdities (spoilers below, so cover your ears kids)

• Tony stark opens the movie with a team of bodyguards who then disappear. He needs an escort to drive to the airport, but nobody to stay at his house and watch the doors?

• Future generations may look back and laugh at the first scene of Iron Man in action. An American flies to the middle east to save villagers from…. Other Arabs? In the middle of a US occupation and ongoing war? Ugh.

• You'd think a brilliant inventor like Tony Stark would have an alarm system at his house.

• So the villain walks into Stark's house (like we said, he needs to get an alarm system) and goes to all the trouble of stealing the nuclear-thingy generator, yet he doesn’t bother to walk downstairs into the lab? He’s not the least bit curious to see what Stark’s been working on? Its not even a lab, its his freaking garage.

• We don’t buy the villain climbing into the suit. Especially after we sat thru a scene where it was explained to us that an unmanned vehicle will never be better than a manned vehicle. We were expecting a proof-of-concept here.

• We see problems for future installments – this is a movie where your main character has no discernable eyes or mouth. They handled this pretty well- great mix of believable “cockpit” shots of Downey inside the helmet, but when it came time for Iron Man to speak to someone on the outside, it did not work as well. Almost as if they hadn’t figured it out yet. Sometimes we hear his normal voice, other times it’s a synthesized robotic voice.