I finally saw Iron Man today…and was underwhelmed. Frankly, I thought his naive conversion to the idea of no longer making weapons was a little disingenuous, considering his invention of the Iron Man exoskeleton was essentially…building a novel and dangerous weapon. I mean, what else would it be good for?
Another thing that annoyed me: it’s simply nonsense to make the argument that the sophisticated sort of weapons his company appeared to make are huge agents of destabilization across the globe (as is alleged in the movie and as is believed in popular culture). The really sophisticated weapons are too big, immobile, expensive, and difficult to operate; they’re not usually available to tinhorn dictators. Okay, so what does destabilize countries? Huge numbers of small arms. Countries that have gone/are going down the toilet via political destabilization, military coups, or civil unrest do so because everyone and his brother has an AK-47 and some hand grenades.
I have to admit, I was kind of curious when he had his pacifist epiphany. Was it before or after he was using the flamethrowers on his proto-suit?
Also, Obidiah Stane effectively ran the weapons company for years, with full access to all the nifty-keen killamajigs. Why would he hire a bunch of third-world mopes to whack Tony? Just slip an atomic-laser death-wave toilet seat cover into Tony’s condo one day when he’s off banging ski bunnies in Aspen.
I think the epiphany that Tony had was that if you make instruments of death for anyone, they will eventually, through corruption or honest incompetency, fall into the wrong hands, and be used against the people they were built to serve. Sort of like the one ring not being suitable for any purpose other then eventual evil.
It also makes sense to me that Obidiah would try to off Tony in Afghanistan, no Starc inc. forensics experts to worry about.
I agree it was silly, but it didn’t really bother me. It was one of those things I could accept uncritically for the sake of the story.
The one thing that did bug me was the Austin Powers moment towards the end.
“Hey I know what we could do, we could just shoot him! It would take a second! I’ve got a gun with me!”
“Wait you’re not even going to wait around to make sure he’s dead!? You’re just going to leave him!?”
That said, I liked the movie. Liked it better than the Batman movie, in fact.
I don’t think that was quite it, since by that logic he should not have built the Mark II armor either. Rather, his epiphany was that, because of his hands-off management of the company’s business affairs, he had allowed the fruits of his genius to fall out of his control, and that his willful ignorance of the uses his tech was being put to did not absolve him of all culpability for his excuses. Thus he decides NOT to give the armor to the Air Force (clearly he’d been working on the design long ere Afghanistan, as Jarvis had the blue prints on file) but to restrict knowledge of it to the only two persons he trusted utterly (himself and Pepper) and to allow only himself to actually use it.
Can someone explain to me how the glowy thing in his chest turned from a magnet keeping shrapnel from entering his heart to some kind of power source that he needs just to live for the next couple minutes? I’ve seen the movie twice, and I didn’t see a mention of why he needs it to glow, needs power, and needs it desperately or he’ll die almost immediately.
The only thing that really bothered me about the movie is that no one told Robert Downey that car batteries weigh about 50 pounds. A guy who just had chest surgery and had to carry a car battery around would be in serious pain and would be sweating buckets. Not casually strolling around with it tucked under one arm.
The ‘glowy thing’ didn’t replace the electromagnet, it replaced the car battery that powered the electromagnet. The electromagnet was permanently implanted during the surgery that saved his life. The arc reactor was a lot lighter and easier to carry than the car battery, and stored enough energy to run the electromagnet for centuries.
The magnet and the glowy thing were separate items. The glowy thing was some newfangled power source that supposedly will provide energy for the magnet for many years to come.
Since Stark supposedly attended MIT, I was disappointed it had not occurred to him to make a separate backup power source for his magnet. Or to build it with a permanent magnet instead. How cool would it have been if the trope had played out all the way to the end, with the obvious fore-shadowing, the discarding of the “obsolete” model, Pepper retrieving it from the trash to make it into a trophy, and at the end, Stark just stands up by himself?
There just isn’t any plausible reason a person so egotistical and self-centered would not safeguard himself from such an obvious weakness.
Yeah, a permanent magnet seems like a better solution, to the point where the whole idea gets pretty ridiculous. Plus, he acts like he’s going to die NOW when the power source is taken out, plus he has the money to have the surgery to get the shrapnel removed.
I know it’s a comic book, but that’s just dumb. It actually kind of ruins it for me.
I don’t really see why Stane wanted Stark dead in the first place. Stane already ran the company; and Stark was the goose that laid the golden egg, a brilliant inventor and probably much of the source of the company’s innovation. Yeah, he turned into an annoying pacifist, but he only did so after the first murder attempt. We’re lead to believe that he was perfectly content with his lifestyle until that point.
Edit: He was also a popular, charismatic public face on what is (essentially) a rather unpleasant business.
Eh, I know more than one MIT grad who is completely enamored with his own cleverness, and wouldn’t see the need for a backup - the damn thing is failure-proof, and anyone who gets close enough to remove it would be able to kill him on the spot anyway.
What I got from the movie was that Stane hated Stark. Passionately. He thought that he should have been running the business all along, he hated having to clean up after Tony’s playboy lifestyle - like accepting an award and making an impromptu speech because Tony couldn’t tear himself away from the craps table. He hated how much smarter Tony was than him - “Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!” He wanted total control.
Are we? Wasn’t there a Time cover that showed Stark overshadowing Stane? The implication I got was that Stark was just now on the verge of taking a more serious interest in (and eventually assuming control of) the company, and the missile demo was going to be the project that demonstrated his ability to do so.
Of course, I’m still wondering why Stane used such a needlessly complicated (and demonstrably unreliable) method to take Stark out when he could clearly (and easily) have done so on his own. Heck, hire some call girl to hook up with Tony, have her slip him some kind of futuristicky nano-toxin, then kill her a few days later in a bomb accident… simple.
I do think part of it was making it impossible to trace what happened to him. If his body shows up in some hotel room, there’ll be suspicion. He goes missing while in the Middle East being escorted by the US military…well, it sucks but it’s a known danger.
His pacifist epiphany was a bit forced I thought. And the bad guy’s plan was just a little poorly thought out all around. That said…it did make for an entertaining movie.
It’s also possible that having Tony killed by terrorists was part of some other scheme he had going that had to be scrapped when Tony didn’t die. For example, Stane might have planned to use Tony’s death to encourage additional military investment in the region, resulting in even more sales of Stark weapons.
