Iron Man
May 4th, 2008 by Brack
Hopefully the sparseness of posting will be over now. I’ve been feeling grotty and been laying low for the past couple of weeks, partly self induced as I wasn’t taking the medication I’d been given in the manner it was meant to be taken. So… howzabout that Iron Man film?
Right now I’m of an opinion that this is the best superhero movie we have. It’s at once true to the source material and accessible. And above all, it’s fun all the way through.
The fun is infectious, most of it emanating from Robert Downey Jr. Now the first two Spider-Man films are pretty fun, but when it gets serious the fun drains from the film. As good as Batman Begins is, a lot of the film is poe-faced, there’s warmth there in Caine and Oldman’s performances for sure, but it feels more worthy than a fun comic book film.
Even when Tony Stark is at his lowest, Iron Man maintains a sense of fun. The key to this in the characters. Downey deserves the bulk of the credit, particularly for making the pre-heroic Stark so likeable even though he’s an irresponsible ass. Which is key, as it stops Pepper Potts and Rhodey from looking horrible for being friends with him. Even when he was a “merchant of death” he’s so charismatic and full of fun that you’d want to be his friend.
A film that wanted to be pretend it wasn’t a comic book film would have had Stark become wracked with guilt to point of becoming a sour faced grump after his road to Damascus moment. What makes Iron Man fun, and thus great, is that the heroic Stark’s approach to changing the world is exactly same as his approach to having fun and making money.
One thing that I’ve not seen commented on much is how good the physical effects are. Stan Winston’s crew do a exemplary job on the physical armours and they blend seamlessly with the animated effects. The fact that there was physical versions of the armour makes them feel a lot more solid than a solely CGI effect might have given us. The general level of props and set dressing is splendid too. It’s particularly noticeable as the film doesn’t actually use that many locations - a great deal of the movie is Stark in his workshop essentially talking to himself.
I’ve read that plenty has been cut out, a lot of Rhodey’s scenes apparently fell by the wayside and the Ghostface cameo isn’t there any longer (we do get a new Ghostface track though in the scene on the plane), but by making the film roughly 2 hours and focusing it firmly around Downey works wonders. It’s a rare scene in Iron Man that doesn’t have Downey as part of it and he’s the glue that holds it all together.
***
The trailers we got with it were Crystal Skull, Hulk and Speed Racer. There may have been a fourth one but I can’t recall it.
The Hulk trailer was the first one, which thrilled me the first time I saw it, but left me cold on a second viewing. I think the direction and effects may be the weak spot here, the story looks a reasonable reworking of Abomination’s story, and there’s plenty of good actors in it. Norton seems to act himself small and timid as Banner which is pretty impressive.
The Crystal Skull trailer came off incredibly leaden. No shots were cinematically exciting and it has the aura of un-neccessity about it.
Speed Racer at least had me feeling “YEAH! CINEMA!”. Given past experiences of the Warchowskis, I suspect the story will be weak, but the visuals great. But I was fine with Dick Tracy and Cutey Honey live action films for the same reason, so I’ll be giving this a watch next week.
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