Fresh from the Foundary (An Iron Man review - contains spoilers)

With five days to go until the UK release of Avengers Assemble, I've decided to review the five Marvel Cinematic Universe films leading up to it, in order of release, one day at a time. For the first review, it seems only right to go back to where it all started.

Poster by Jesse Phillips.

2008 was something of a red-banner year for the superhero film, and did this in a one-two punch. The first came from Iron Man, which surprised many critics by showing the broken beating heart behind its main character's titanium-alloy shell; this was a blockbuster that focused on the story and the characters rather than the visual effects (impressive though they were), and was rewarded for it, grossing $585m worldwide. It would have been the superhero film of the year, if that other superhero film hadn't come along and blown everyone's collective brains out.

Nevertheless, Iron Man undoubtedly started the deluge. Superhero films and comic book adaptations had been a license to print money for a while now, but with 2008, they really were earning that paycheck. Plus, you had that famous after-credit scene, both laying the foundation for a larger cinematic universe that had never been attempted before, and inspiring countless jokes about eye-patched spymaster Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) turning up at the end of every film to recruit the characters for the "Avenger Initiative". Marvel have always been fortunate that their superheroes translate so well to film: X-Men, Spider-Man, the Hulk and Blade proved lucrative, whereas DC can only really boast Batman and Superman (Watchmen underperformed financially, and Green Lantern...we don't talk about Green Lantern).

With the preamble out of the way, get your arc reactors pumping as we look at Iron Man.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has every right to feel like he's king of the world. A child prodigy who has been managing the family business (the defence contractor Stark Industries) since he was 21, he's a genius inventor, a playboy, and as stinking rich as you'd expect any man who owns a private jet with a built-in stripper's pole to be. (The 1%, am I right?) But with pride goes the fall, and it's during a military demonstration that his convoy is attacked, he gets riddled with shrapnel from one of his weapons, and he's taken captive by a terrorist cell who want to use him as their own hightech blacksmith. With the aid of a fellow captive scientist (Shaun Toub), Tony builds two things: a miniature generator to power the electromagnet keeping the shrapnel from finishing him off, and a crude suit of armour to escape. Humbled by his experiences, he decides to put that brilliant brain to good use by improving his armour and making right what once went wrong as a shining sci-fi knight, dubbed "Iron Man" by the press.

"I love the power glove. It's so bad."

What's particularly interesting about Iron Man, and what I find to be a big plus, is how the action doesn't actually play that big a part. Throughout the two-hour running time, there are only three big set-pieces (four if you count Tony's run-in with the fighter jets), and the film never rushes to get to them, either. Time is spent on unfolding the story and developing the characters, meaning that the action is technically impressive and serves the story, but isn't really jaw-dropping. People expecting Transformers or Crank or something equally high-octane will be disappointed, but I really like this. The plot is incredibly well put together, with all the elements serving a purpose and all coming together neatly at the climax. There are no action sequences for the sake of having an action sequence; everything is here because it needs to be.

This tight-as-a-drum plot wouldn't work without the players, or the actors portraying them, and Iron Man has a big boost over most with Tony Stark, played nigh-flawlessly by Robert Downey Jr. Prior to the film's release, people were openly sceptical - Downey, who spent most of the 90s and early 2000s in a drug-addled haze walking in and out of prison, headlining a summer blockbuster? The news of his casting was greeted with a resounding "You wot?" from all, but therein lies the genius - Tony Stark is a gifted businessman, technological genius and perpetual charisma machine who invents and innovates with one hand clutched around a bottle of Perrier-Jouët. The film's version of Tony owes a lot to Mark Millar's depiction of him in The Ultimates (back in the good ol' days when Mark Millar didn't write crap), most notably his flippant sarcastic demeanour, which works very well with Downey, capable of throwing out brilliant lines while looking completely deadpan: calling for someone to "give me a Scotch, I'm starving", responding to whether he went 'twelve-for-twelve' with the Maxim Girls - "Yes and no. March and I had a scheduling conflict, but fortunately the Christmas cover was twins" - and casually brushing off a groupie ("Tony! Remember me?" "Sure don't."). 

Even more impressive? The film was almost entirely ad-libbed. The story beats were all there but there was no completed script, and so the actors improvised all the dialogue. Keep that in mind when you watch this:

The supporting cast are very good as well. Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane, Tony's affable guardian turned iron-hearted traitor, manages to riff on his usual friendly and likeable persona to great effect; the audience feels the betrayal too when cuddly old Obadiah nonchalantly paralyses and murders one of his partners with the same easygoing smile on his face. It helps he also gets the film's most memorable line. Gwyneth Paltrow is witty, graceful and charming as Tony's unfortunately named secretary Virginia "Pepper" Potts, and when she and Downey share the screen, the scene crackles. If there's any sort of weak link, it would be Terrence Howard as Tony's long-suffering buddy and military liaison James Rhodes; not that he's bad, far from it, but Rhodes isn't given much to do in the film. When you consider that Howard had the highest salary of the cast, higher even than Downey, he's not exactly justifying his paycheck.

Like his leading man, Jon Favreau was considered an unusual pick to helm an action film - he'd never directed one before, and his resumé includes family-friendly outings like Elf and Zathura and supporting roles in Friends, The Sopranos, and Swingers (the latter of which he co-wrote). This gambit on the part of Marvel Studios has paid off in dividends; the character-driven approach suits the film, as Favreau is something of an actor's director. This is obvious in the journeyman-like quality of the action scenes as well, as Favreau's adaptation of Cowboys and Aliens lacked the charm and heft Iron Man had. The director excels in letting his cast play off each other, and fortunately the script gives him a great set of tools to play around, with each major character getting their own arc and all the actors playing off each other well.

But are there any noticeable chinks in the armour? Well, there's the fact that the film has no real "villain" to speak of, no intimidating antagonist. The Ten Rings, the organisation at the start, don't dominate the film in any real way and seem so bone-headed (sure, why not give the genius inventor lots of tools and never bother to keep proper surveillance? What could possibly go wrong?), they just aren't threatening. Stane does better, but his final form, the Ironmonger mech, isn't distinctive; it's just a bigger version of the first Iron Man armour but with more guns. Furthermore, Stane is a cunning and shrewd businessman, but he's not a scientist or a technological expert; for something so clearly designed to be Tony's equal, it ultimately falls flat.

I think he's compensating for something.

This isn't a weak point, but it is something I'll discuss further when I review the sequel - the libertarian ideas surrounding Iron Man as a character. To keep things simple, libertarianism is a political philosophy that espouses the rights of the individual above all else; think the views of Andrew Ryan in BioShock, but less...scary than that. A recent character trait of Tony, helped brought to fruition by Matt Fraction during his run on The Invincible Iron Man, is his ongoing fear that his technology - including the Iron Man armour - may end up in the wrong hands. This is explored a fair bit in Iron Man: after he ends up injured by a Stark Industries-produced warhead (and it's no coincidence that Stark Industries' logo resembles that of the defence contractor Lockheed Martin), and following his return to society, he shuts down the weapons manufacturing division of his company - a company that almost entirely specialises in arms production. Later, he dons the Iron Man suit "officially" to incapacitate a Ten Rings cell using his weapons to terrorise a Middle Eastern village, taking great care to destroy their tech. This will be explored in greater depth in Iron Man 2, but I find it interesting that the germs of the idea are already here.

In any case, Iron Man still holds up as a solid superhero film, and as a great character piece. It keeps true to Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck and Jack Kirby's vision of a super-capitalist brought low by his own ego but still returning from the fires of his own creation; a superhero always slightly in danger of turning into his own worst supervillain. As a foundation for the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it sets a precedent most would follow - focus on story and character, give extra weight to the spectacle. I don't think you could get much greater starts to a franchise next.

Tomorrow will be a review of Louis Leterrier's famously troubled The Incredible Hulk. This is the only "Road to Avengers" film I haven't seen, so I'll be going in blind. This should be interesting. Tune in tomorrow, same time, same Jack-channel.