IRON MAN

IRON MAN. John Favreau, dir. Matt Holloway, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby and Art Marcum, script. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, et al., Iron Man comic by Marvel.[[1] USA: Dark Blades Films, Marvel Enterprises, Road Rebel (prod.) / Paramount and others (dist.), 2008 (see IMDb for complex distribution). Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Shaun Toub, Leslie Bibb, and Gwyneth Paltrow, featured players.

"Near-in" S.F. set in our time, with advances in AI, robotics, and cyborg possibilities. See for a variety of high-tech weapons and for the Iron Man suits. Cf. and contrast the fighting suits and their relationships with humans in R. A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, J. Haldeman's Forever War, and related works. Control of suit in film mediated by a low-key, non-stressed AI—"Jarvis"—presented as just a HAL 9000ish voice (as in HAL in S. Kubrick's SPACE ODYSSEY). Note also semi-industrial robots with bit parts serving Tony Stark in his transition to Iron Man, and Tony's electromagnet heart-protector early in the film, replaced by what is visually a very high-tech ET-ish "heart." Esp. in the context of works featuring fighting suits, the politics of IRON MAN are significant: hardly non-violent or pacifistic but an updating of the comic's handling of US warfare in Vietnam to US warfare in Afghanistan (and elsewhere), rendering gung-ho weapons fetishism problematic.

Reviewed by Ronald C. Thomas Jr., SFRA Review #285 (Spring 2008): pp. 36-37[2]

RDE, 02/V/08, finishing 15Jan21