House of Eratosthenes

Tony Stark, billionaire weapons innovator, goes to Afghanistan to make a presentation to all them military guys about his latest superweapons. This is where you hear that quote used so much in the radio and TV trailers, “the perfect weapon is the one you only have to fire once.” But while there, Stark’s convoy is ambushed and he makes the discovery that (spoilers — highlight to read) the bad guys have been stealing the weapons created by his company and using them against U.S. troops. He is shocked, Captain Renault style, and from this makes the decision to shut down the weapons division of his company the minute he gets back stateside…which takes a little bit of doing all by itself, because first he has to escape. The bad guys think he’s building weapons for them, but little do they know that he’s constructing a bunch of high tech armor with jetpacks and flamethrowers that he can use to defeat them. This has got something to do with the fact that Tony Stark now has shrapnel in his heart cavity and needs a car battery to not die. It gives him superpowers, or something.

Once he is rescued, he puts his plan into effect to end all wars by not making any more weapons. His second-in-command, Obediah Stone, objects to this on the grounds that if we don’t make any more weapons here, someone else will go ahead and make them, and if nobody makes any weapons at all on our side, the bad guys are still going to find ways to get them or else make them themselves. Stark, undaunted, holds his ground. Stark and Stone battle for control of Stark’s company. It turns out that Stone ordered the ambush on Stark in the first place. His motivation for doing so, it seems, is that with Stark out of the way, Stone can go ahead and make weapons that Stark otherwise wouldn’t let him make…the weapons Stark decided they shouldn’t make anymore…after the ambush…which was ordered to eliminate Stark, who decided weapons were bad, only after the ambush. Yeah. I had a little bit of a problem with that too.

And so Stark decides to stand up and fight for what he knows to be true, now, that weapons are bad, by building a revolutionary new version of his miracle body armor, which is essentially one big weapon. And so he ends up blowing up lots of stuff and killing people to get people to stop blowing things up and killing people. In this way, Iron Man suffers from a bout of Star Trek Syndrome: You know…you’re the Captain, you give orders people damn well better follow them, but if Starfleet gives you an order it always turns out Starfleet is taken over by a microbe, a race of androids, or has it’s head crammed up it’s ass in some other way. The message isn’t important, whether it comes from the protagonist or from someone else is what’s important. Goodness is determined by who is putting the plan into motion.

You know, if all subtlety was removed from this, Iron Man could have been made into a much more logical and comprehensible story. See the way I would have done it, Obediah Stone would have sold Stark on the idea that, y’know, if Stark Industries wasn’t making weapons in the first place the ambush wouldn’t have happened and Tony Stark wouldn’t need a magnet in his chest to stay alive…therefore…Stone is the one with the idea that they should get out of the weapons business. And then, halfway through the movie Stark discovers that Stone is allied with and funded by the terrorists, and his plan all along was to make sure the U.S. in a position to be defeated by the terrorists, and as Stark Industries has been liquidating the hardware in it’s weapons division Stone was secretly diverting that arsenal to the terrorists when it was supposedly being destroyed. And then Stark says man, this is some bullshit, I’m gonna do something about it and then he builds his suit.

See, the lesson would have been exactly the same. The way they did it, the moral of Iron Man is that what makes a weapon “bad,” isn’t the fact that it exists, it’s the character and motives of whoever wields it; but it seems to me the lesson might have been lost on the audience, to say nothing of the producers of the movie themselves. My way, you have the same lesson, but it’s crystal-clear. It would’ve made for a much better movie.

Having said that, though, it was all right.

I think the idea might originally have been that Stone was after control of Stark Industries. Pure monetary motivation, same as selling weapons to terrorists. I noticed lots of “Corporation=Bad, Government=Good” overtones myself.
- Tom The Impaler | 05/13/2008 @ 10:19
Yeah, it could have been he just plain wanted a larger share of the company. Either way, it wasn’t too well thought-out.

One other problem I forgot to discuss.

(***spoilers***)

Tony Stark wants to get out of the weapons business.

Instead, he wants to get into finding alternative forms of energy.

He fights with the bad guy, using a weapon that was built to be a weapon, while the bad guy fights back, using a weapon that was built to be a weapon.

Having betrayed his principles about not building weapons anymore, with his self-betrayal seemingly going unnoticed by the very people who put the movie together — he commits the ultimate act of self-contradiction and irony:

He lands the killing blow on the bad guy, defeating him once and for all, using not a weapon built to be a weaon, but a weapon that was originally constructed for finding that oh-so-noble alternative form of energy.

His vision of forsaking weaponry for more noble hippie-gear, ends up being the very picture of self-parody. It collapses under it’s own weight into a puddle of self-contradictory and self-defeating spineless goo.

(***end of spoilers***)

The reports that the special effects were pleasing, and that it’s a great big bonanza of summer blockbuster fun, are accurate. The movie is a whole lot of fun. Parts of it make no sense at all. Sadly, if it was a piece of pro-war propaganda instead of anti-, pretty much everything would’ve fallen into place.

And to the producers’ credit, the good guy was good down to the marrow of his bones, and the bad guys were rotten down to the marrow of their bones. Unusual for Marvel.
- mkfreeberg | 05/13/2008 @ 12:34

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Iron ManTuesday, May 13th, 2008

Iron Man
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008