The Smooth Iron

Iron Man, directed by Jon Favreau, left me with a simple thought. It wasn’t the fact that Iron Man was rather long (indeed, it exceeded two hours). No, it was the fact that Iron Man was so smooth.

Iron Man revolves about a character named Tony Stark. Stark is a genius inventor who produces advanced weapon systems for the army. His success in the field made him fabulously wealthy and head of Stark Enterprises. Think of Stark as a blend of Dexter from Dexter’s Laboratory and Bruce Wayne of Batman.

Stark builds a robotic suit that enhances his strength, reaction speed, resistance to damage, and enables flight. But what stood out about the suit was how smooth it was. There wasn’t a single rough edge or “point” across the whole suit. Which brings me to the plot.

Early in the movie, I get the impression that Stark is portraying a pro defense department, “The one who has the biggest stick wins...so make sure America has the biggest.” Then due to a plot twist it looks as if Stark converts to an anti defense department stance. But as we watch, we realize that this also isn’t the case (or at least, it is never explored in the movie.) Instead, Stark builds the “smooth machine” and flies out to Afghanistan to stop terrorists from using weapons he made. Ah! So he is going to set things right, kill the bad guys, make central Asia safe for democracy within all the “stan” countries.

That seemed like a simple enough story. Sadly, that also didn’t go very far. Not too long from then, the biggest, baddest terrorist group in the region is destroyed. Not by Stark, oh no, but by one of the chairmen of Stark Industries. Apparently that chairman was selling weapons to different vendors “under the table” (including those terrorists).

Well, the rest of the story was sadly predictable (less than thirty minutes). The big bad chairman builds his own robotic suit and makes his move. I don’t know exactly what the big bad chairman’s move exactly was at this time. After writing “big bad chairman” two times I must say it was cumbersome, so let’s abbreviate his name to “BBC.” It didn’t make a lot of sense why the BBC (ah, that’s better) was trying to kill Stark. It also didn’t make any sense what he was doing with his manufacturing company. Was he going to make several of these super robots and conquer the world? Was he going to sell them to different groups?

Anyhow, Stark’s favorite girlfriend leads a bunch of special agents to arrest the BBC. The BBC jumps into his suit, wipes out the agents, and proceeds to chase the favorite girlfriend around town. What makes it even sadder, is the BBC never even abducted her. Hell, there wasn’t even a brief hostage situation. Instead, she gets to observe the battle between Stark and the BBC.

Starting out the fight, Stark’s suit was low on power and, predictably, the BBC kicks his ass. The whole fight was depressing. What Stark winds up doing to defeat the BBC, is have his girlfriend overload some reactor which blasts the bad guy away. Wahoo.

As with the man’s suit, the problem with the movie, was it was too smooth. In fact, both were entirely devoid of a point.