Iron Man, 2008

I was hugely disappointed with several of the other Marvel-to-movies (eg, Fantastic Four), but the trailers looked good. And I was, finally, not disappointed. Although it gets a little old seeing Stan show up so many times. =)

I thought Robert Downey Jr. made a great Tony Stark. Maybe a little too self-absorbed, but definitely efficacious in playing the part of a hi-tech, toy-crazy, ambitious geek inventor. I am a sucker for "high technology"; I love playing as the Protoss in Starcraft, even though they suck in the early game.

What largely makes this movie work is that it walks the line of tenuous, suspended disbelief quite well. With the huge exception of Obadiah (aka, "Iron Monger"), which I will get to shortly. We have a guy who has been playing with technological advances, and continuously improves upon his own design. After being shell-shocked by being on the receiving end of his own weapons (and this misuse), he appropriately experiences a paradigm shift. The powered exoskeleton is full of wonderful little details, and the CG actually starts to look good for this. Usually. I am not exactly crazy about some of the "learning to fly" scenes, but the little flaps and pieces that move autonomously are wonderful examples of attention at the micro level.

Some other details were flagrantly either ignored or looked over. Some simple matters of physics; I do not care how strong your armor is, you cannot simply hold out your arm and expect to stop a rain of bullets without the resulting momentum driving your arm back. And how did he end up with bullet holes in his first suit, but no bullets? I can forgive all that.

I cannot forgive the Iron Monger. Sheesh. Where to start.... there is this pivotal, critical scene where Obadiah berates a scientist for being unable to minaturize the Arc Generator; the classic response "We are not Tony Stark". So how the heck does he end up with this RoboTech mechnoid? How is it that it just happens to accept an Arc Generator Tony designed for his own suit? How is that Obadiah can apparently master his monster creation faster than Tony, who has the help of "Travis". Puh-lease!

Another annoyance was Tony's house/lab. It is gorgeous, true, but apparently easy to break into. And the helper bots were poorly animated (by some dweeb holding a little joystick?). If they were meant to be comic relief, they failed; more like comic torture.

I felt kinda bad for Gwyneth Paltrow. She just does not have the sci-fi persona. She makes an awesome "administrative assistant", but I had time seeing her having a romantic attachment to Downey's character.

Overall, great flick. Glad I saw it on the big screen.
But the time is quickly approaching when the big screen will be obsoleted, especially if they cannot make the presentation more spectacular, comfortable and user-friendly.