DrowZ: Iron Man Kinda Sucks
Entertainment wise, much of cinema over the last ten years were dominated by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a series of interconnected movies about Marvel's cast of comic book superheroes. As a fan of comics, seeing many of the stories I'd read about play out on the big screen was titillating. I've gone on about it at length before. The original Iron Man movie sparked a decade-long obsession with high-budget blockbusting movies. Unfathomably expensive films which continued to one-up each other until things came to a head with Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame: two movies that served as a capstone to ten years of superhero movies.
Sitting here on the other side of that moment makes the experience feel minuscule. I got through most of my education, surrounded by these movies. Iron Man released when I was in middle school, Endgame happened one year after I graduated college. That's a lot of time.
But even as Endgame was approaching, I found myself slowly slipping out of love with the MCU, and I didn't know why. I didn't watch Ant-Man, nor Dr.Strange, there was fatigue, and I wasn't the only one experiencing it.
I don't think it's an astute observation to notice a pattern of the twenty-something films that form the MCU. The Superhero's journey, so to speak. There's the call to action, the introduction of a villain who's like the hero but different, the major setback to show you that there are stakes, and then the triumphant victory lap, with every corner of the movie packed to burst with safe, smarmy humor.
In the first Iron Man, Tony Stark makes his war-crime suit after he's kidnapped by terrorists using the same tech that his company developed. Upon his return, he announces that the company will stop developing weapons. This upsets Obadiah Stane, the company's manager, and propels him to make his own big war-crime suit. Stane tries to kill Stark by ripping out his heart machine, Tony survives, and then they have a big CGI fight across the city.
I don't bring this pattern up to insult the movies, more to bring up that there are shared themes among them. Over time, Marvel has refined this winning formula. On occasion, it has broken it, leading to some of the series' highest-rated movies; Spider-man Homecoming, Black Panther, and Thor: Ragnarok. These movies are unironically fun romps that take advantage of the shared universe all of these movies exist in. Characters are motivated by things that happened in other movies, and they continue to, even after Avengers Endgame.
In the MCU, two omnipresent characters drive the metaphorical bus- Tony Stark and Nick Fury.
Tony Stark, the Iron Man, as said before, is a billionaire playboy who runs a big tech company that, at one point, manufactured weapons of mass destruction. While Nick Fury is the head of SHIELD, an extrajudicial, transcontinental military force.
Up until the first Avengers movie, Nick Fury would appear at the end of each Marvel movie to recruit a character into the superhero group. After which, Nick Fury would take a back seat to Iron Man, they're who ultimately construct the backbone of the MCU, and it doesn't sit right with me.
Iron Man is a war profiteer, and the movies never take the time to note how irreparably bad that is. Normally, I wouldn't apply that sort of scrutiny to a PG-13 movie about comic book characters. However, the MCU's jump to the silver screen involves a lot of fictional middle eastern countries that the United States is fighting in for their manufactured war on terror. This was fairly common for movies because somebody needs to be the bad guys. If it's not Russians, it's the Middle East.
And to summarize Iron Man 2 without being too spoilery- the core problem that the characters deal with in Ironman 2 is preventing the proliferation of Ironman suits. The government takes issue with Tony possessing these weapons, the plot leads to them confiscating a suit. Then the company they get to mass-produce them turns out to have a vendetta against Stark specifically.
Iron Man comes close but ultimately misses it. Tony Stark isn't in the right because the US Government can't be trusted with these weapons, ultimately the plot spirals around Tony's family and corporate espionage, and it takes a while for the MCU to ever hit the mark.
In Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier, SHIELD is infiltrated by Nazis and is ultimately dismantled after the movie's end. This is where the MCU mostly decouples itself from its quiet flaunting of military might. It wouldn't appear again in any egregious amount until Captain Marvel.
A lot of the superhero genre's appeal lies in simple escapism - the concept of being a masked crusader and helping to make the world a brighter place by fighting the personifications of real-world follies. Anyone could be Spider-man, Superman's an illegal alien, but something that movies have struggled with is their relationship with the police and military.
Plainly put, the police are an instrument of the status quo, limiting social progress to the benefit of the elite class. And, as we see every day, they're covered in white-supremacists and Nazis. Unfortunately, they're seen as the closest real-world analog to superheroes. Similarly, the American military is an engine fueled by disadvantaged children, sending them halfway across the world to die in conflicts designed to make the billionaire class's pockets deeper.
Instead of anyone can be a hero, it's "Tony Stark is the best hero." The MCU's Spider-man movies suffer from this by tying the titular character to Tony Stark to the point where it is a major plot point in both movies.
The superhero genre gets better the closer it is to the people because they're the ones who can change the world through their sheer numbers. Superheroes should embody the best parts of society, and that doesn't include billionaire war profiteers.
Iron Man sucks.
Sitting here on the other side of that moment makes the experience feel minuscule. I got through most of my education, surrounded by these movies. Iron Man released when I was in middle school, Endgame happened one year after I graduated college. That's a lot of time.
But even as Endgame was approaching, I found myself slowly slipping out of love with the MCU, and I didn't know why. I didn't watch Ant-Man, nor Dr.Strange, there was fatigue, and I wasn't the only one experiencing it.
I don't think it's an astute observation to notice a pattern of the twenty-something films that form the MCU. The Superhero's journey, so to speak. There's the call to action, the introduction of a villain who's like the hero but different, the major setback to show you that there are stakes, and then the triumphant victory lap, with every corner of the movie packed to burst with safe, smarmy humor.
In the first Iron Man, Tony Stark makes his war-crime suit after he's kidnapped by terrorists using the same tech that his company developed. Upon his return, he announces that the company will stop developing weapons. This upsets Obadiah Stane, the company's manager, and propels him to make his own big war-crime suit. Stane tries to kill Stark by ripping out his heart machine, Tony survives, and then they have a big CGI fight across the city.
I don't bring this pattern up to insult the movies, more to bring up that there are shared themes among them. Over time, Marvel has refined this winning formula. On occasion, it has broken it, leading to some of the series' highest-rated movies; Spider-man Homecoming, Black Panther, and Thor: Ragnarok. These movies are unironically fun romps that take advantage of the shared universe all of these movies exist in. Characters are motivated by things that happened in other movies, and they continue to, even after Avengers Endgame.
In the MCU, two omnipresent characters drive the metaphorical bus- Tony Stark and Nick Fury.
Tony Stark, the Iron Man, as said before, is a billionaire playboy who runs a big tech company that, at one point, manufactured weapons of mass destruction. While Nick Fury is the head of SHIELD, an extrajudicial, transcontinental military force.
Up until the first Avengers movie, Nick Fury would appear at the end of each Marvel movie to recruit a character into the superhero group. After which, Nick Fury would take a back seat to Iron Man, they're who ultimately construct the backbone of the MCU, and it doesn't sit right with me.
Iron Man is a war profiteer, and the movies never take the time to note how irreparably bad that is. Normally, I wouldn't apply that sort of scrutiny to a PG-13 movie about comic book characters. However, the MCU's jump to the silver screen involves a lot of fictional middle eastern countries that the United States is fighting in for their manufactured war on terror. This was fairly common for movies because somebody needs to be the bad guys. If it's not Russians, it's the Middle East.
The first leg of the MCU is especially packed with military iconography, which is partly because the United States military helped fund them. There's a lot of talk about how Stark Industries makes weapons for the good guys, and it challenges this with its villain in an alright manner, but then this scene in Iron Man 2 happens.
And to summarize Iron Man 2 without being too spoilery- the core problem that the characters deal with in Ironman 2 is preventing the proliferation of Ironman suits. The government takes issue with Tony possessing these weapons, the plot leads to them confiscating a suit. Then the company they get to mass-produce them turns out to have a vendetta against Stark specifically.
Iron Man comes close but ultimately misses it. Tony Stark isn't in the right because the US Government can't be trusted with these weapons, ultimately the plot spirals around Tony's family and corporate espionage, and it takes a while for the MCU to ever hit the mark.
In Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier, SHIELD is infiltrated by Nazis and is ultimately dismantled after the movie's end. This is where the MCU mostly decouples itself from its quiet flaunting of military might. It wouldn't appear again in any egregious amount until Captain Marvel.
Plainly put, the police are an instrument of the status quo, limiting social progress to the benefit of the elite class. And, as we see every day, they're covered in white-supremacists and Nazis. Unfortunately, they're seen as the closest real-world analog to superheroes. Similarly, the American military is an engine fueled by disadvantaged children, sending them halfway across the world to die in conflicts designed to make the billionaire class's pockets deeper.
In making these comic book characters more realistic, the ties superheroes have to law enforcement become increasingly uncomfortable. Captain America's costume, for instance, shares more than a few similarities with law enforcement. It loses the spandex and chain-mail that his 2-dimensional iteration had, and Tony Stark's influence on the overall plot weakens the superhero concept.
The MCU costume isn't bad, he just looks way more like a cop.
The superhero genre gets better the closer it is to the people because they're the ones who can change the world through their sheer numbers. Superheroes should embody the best parts of society, and that doesn't include billionaire war profiteers.
Iron Man sucks.
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Thanks for reading guys, this piece was actually supposed to release last weekend but I had a lot of trouble getting started.
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