Last weekend, sort of as a Mother’s Day celebration, we went to see Iron Man.  Now, I was never a huge fan of the comics…  And I didn’t think the previews looked all that good…  And I’ve been a bit burnt out on all these superhero movies lately…  So Iron Man certainly wasn’t high on my list of movies to see.  I basically intended to get it from Netflix eventually.  But I kept hearing good things about it from other people, the reviews were almost entirely positive, and there wasn’t anything else interesting at the theater.  So, Iron Man it was.

The good news is that it was a surprisingly decent movie.  Sure, I’ve got complaints - I always do - but I don’t regret spending the money to go see it.  It was entertaining pretty much from start to finish.

The special effects were very well done.  The robot suits were all surprisingly believable.  The fight scenes were a lot of fun.  The characters were mostly enjoyable.  The acting was pretty good.  The plot was generally engaging and interesting.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching Tony Stark develop his suit.  I enjoyed seeing the trial and error it took to get the thing working right.  That was probably the best example I’ve seen in ages of the Scientific Method at work.  No, of course none of this is actually scientific…  It’s a movie, from Hollywood.  It’s all fluff and fiction.  But the process of developing the suit…  Coming up with designs in the computer, prototyping it, testing bits and pieces out, having mishaps, refining the design, discovering new problems…  That’s science in action.  And it was fun to watch.

But, honestly, Iron Man was not as good as I expected after listening to everyone rave about it.

I guess I’ve got two big complaints…  And my wife has a third that I don’t really agree with…

The biggest problem, for me, is that we see precious little of Iron Man.  We see an awful lot of Stark…  We see the prototype thing he develops over in Afghanistan…  We see him developing the Iron Man suit…  We get one good “trial run” type fight where he flies overseas and stops a small attack…  And then we get the big showdown with the evil supervillain.  We don’t really get to see Iron Man doing his thing.

We don’t see him fighting crime, saving kittens, stopping evil, etc.  And half of the time we do see Iron Man, the suit is in some kind of disrepair…or malfunctioning…or being tested…  We only get the briefest of glimpses at a fully-functioning Iron Man.  And I wanted to see more.

Another major problem for me was the fact that about 75% of the way through the movie Pepper Potts goes from being a very impressive woman to a simple damsel in distress for no other reason than to advance the story.

Throughout the movie she is very, very capable of handling pretty much everything the world throws at her.  She is supremely competent and self-assured.  Stark would literally be unable to function without her.  And then he sends her off to hack the computers for no other reason than to put her in peril.  And she happily agrees.

Why not hack them remotely?  Why not use your crazy-impressive supercomputer AI thing?  Why not walk into the offices yourself?  Why send Pepper at all?  Just so that she can be put in danger and then you can rescue her.

And there’s absolutely no attempt made to explain the situation at all.  There’s no “oh, no, I can’t hack in remotely because they cut the lines” or “I can’t go in to the office because they’ve suspended me.”  Nope.  Just send in the woman so you can save her later.

And Terri’s complaint, one that I don’t wholly agree with, is that Obediah Stane doesn’t seem the type to jump into a giant robot suit and go on a killing spree.  I guess I can see her point…  Obediah is more of a businessman.  He’s got underlings to do his killing for him.  He obviously doesn’t have a problem with murder or mayhem…but he seems to want to keep himself removed a bit from the action.

The end result is that by the time the movie ended I was feeling pretty dis-satisfied.  I didn’t like how Pepper had turned into a simple damsel in distress, I wanted to see more of Iron Man saving the day, and Terri didn’t like the supervillain.  It was still enjoyable…  But I really think it could have been a much stronger film.

They’re obviously going to make a sequel.  You don’t even need to hang around to see the teaser after the credits to know that - everything’s got a sequel these days.  Hopefully, now that we’ve got some of the exposition out of the way, we’ll see more of Iron Man doing his thing in the sequel.  And maybe the next time around they can find a better villain and a new damsel to throw to the wolves.

Posted on May 16