Iron Man Movie

Tony Stark is a bright young man whose love of tinkering with gadgets continued on into adulthood and ended up with him becoming a military expert designing high powered weapons. Being the expert, he is asked to travel to Afghanistan to demonstrate his new weaponry, but would you know it, he goes and gets captured by terrorists. The leader, hearing of Tony's prowess at gadgetry tries to coerce Tony to build a weapon for the terrorists.
Of course, being a goody two shoes, Tony builds himself some armored%u2026ermmm armor%u2026that allows him to escape.

Reveling in his new prowess in his 'suit' he decides to stop making weapons, and instead concentrates on enhancing the suit so he can defend the people of the world!

You may note a tone of sarcasm in my synopsis. When I started watching the movie, and realized it was based in reality, in a terrorist situation in the real world, I thought that the underlying premise of the plot may be closer to reality. However, I was disappointed when the usual Superhero makes good and wants to defend the world plot started to appear. I really wanted to see a movie that was believable.

I guess true comic book followers out there will castigate me as having a movie that is based in the real world would go totally against the story from the original comic book and animated series. To have recognizable bad guys, and a recognizable hero is important to these followers - however, I feel that this lets down the mass audience in a way, as they have not read the comics and therefore have a more open mind on how the character develops.

The movie tries to build the character of Iron Man by using flash backs; some are flashbacks to recent events to give background to the developing story, while others are flashbacks to his childhood, showing that although he was a 'special' child he still led a pretty normal life. In a way this does help to build the character, and also educates the audience very quickly about the underlying reasoning behind the character, but I felt this was a little disjointed. I guess it was needed though, so I'm not hyper-critical about the inclusion of the flashbacks.

As the movie progressed, I felt that the balance struck between action and non-action was very good. For once, in this type of movie, I felt that the action was a cohesive part of the movie, rather than being 'fx' that are added to make the movie 'bang' and 'whiz' and give the audience some thrills. The makers of the movie seemed to actually ensure that the action was relevant and not overstated.

Don't get me wrong, there are some mega action sequences, but these were very well done and became more believable because of this I found it interesting in which the movie blended in scenes from Tony's workshop with the action - thus showing a little of the genius of the character rather than just concentrating on the 'super hero' - while movies like Batman have attempted this, this is the first movie that seemed to make me believe that the 'Iron Man' suit was actually made in a workshop. This probably is convincing because it had the feel of the workshops you see in a James Bond movie - and seemed more like a geek playing with his favorite toys, rather than a super-hero building a mega suit.

This also enhanced the idea that anyone could be a superhero. Tony wasn't bitten by a radioactive spider, or didn't get caught up in something fantastical in space, so he has no real super-powers, aside from his genius, and his ability to apply the genius to real world matters - I guess this parallels Batman in a way, but somehow for me this distinction of the Super Hero simply being a normal man doesn't quite come across in the Batman movies.

Overall, I felt that the movie was simply an introduction to Iron Man - it went a long way to explain his childhood, and his adult life and concentrated on explaining why and how he was driven to do good. There is plenty of action and a couple of cool bad guys, but the plot really wasn't that complex and it's my feeling that this movie was simply and introduction to the character, and now that they've gotten this part over with, they can concentrate more on plots and explosion in the future movies.

In a way, I felt that this actually made it a better movie - I like to know what makes my Super Hero tick, and while my adrenalin pumping male side of me was satisfied with the action, my hmmm more feminine, 'I want to know the real superhero' side was also satisfied, making this a well balanced and enjoyable movie.

As for the acting - well I always find it hard to comment on acting in movies like this - usually the acting is not important as the 'fx' dominate the movie. I have to admit though, Robert Downey Jr worked well as Iron Man. When I first saw him in the role I couldn't quite grasp the fact that he was a 'super hero', but as the movie progressed and as the character was built, I found myself accepting this, and this is down to Downy's acting abilities as he made me believe he was a normal man with extraordinary 'normal' talents that enabled him to become Iron Man.

As for the rest of the cast%u2026well they were there. It's surprising that such an illustrious cast, with the likes of Jeff Bridges and Gwyneth Paltrow, really didn't do anything for me - they simply were side shows to the main act - Iron Man. While they were competent, they really didn't have much to do as this movie was prevalently about building up the character of Iron Man.

Overall, despite the flaws, and despite the weak plot I felt this movie was very good. It made me want to find out more about the character, and made me want to go and see a second movie. The atmosphere that was built up was excellent, it was tension filled and exciting, and this was well matched by the romance and the character building. This is definitely one of the better Super Hero movies I have seen.....go watch it NOW!