In anticipation of the coming Avengers: Infinity War, I thought I'd refresh my memory and re-watch the films leading up to what is looking to be an amazing superhero movie. I've also recently got back into Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., one of the more under-rated superhero shows, I think. I am loving this season's arc thus far. Classic, full-on, superhero time-travel shenanigans. What more could we want? Sadly, though I'd love to do it some day, I won't be watching the television shows that intersect with the movies. One day I will, but probably only after I retire. Who has time for that otherwise?
And, of course, Iron Man is where it all starts. It had even slipped my mind that this film is the first time we meet Phil Coulson.
While watching it last night, I was struck by what a great movie it really is. It might be traditional to leave such a summation until the end of my assessment/review/blog post (whatever we want to call this), but I think it's an important thing to put out there up front: this is a really good movie. Even if it hadn't spawned what is ostensibly the first shared universe in film, it would still have stood on its own merits as an entertaining and pleasing piece of cinema. A good story arc, likeable characters, bad-ass special effects. It does everything an action movie needs to do. But it's more than an action movie, isn't it?
I should interject here and say that that's not a derogatory statement about action movies. Please don't misunderstand. I like a good action movie as much as the next person.
But a superhero movie is slightly different. It's getting, or has long been, cliche to talk about superheroes and myth. Any reader of my blog knows that, for me, it's a foregone conclusion that these stories are attempting to serve the same purpose in our culture as the major religious texts did, and do, in their own cultures. Isn't it the perfect embodiment of the post-modern deity that we're all completely aware of its artificial nature? And what better embodiment of that artificiality than Tony Stark and Iron Man? The classic reversal of Iron Man is the man of flesh with the iron heart becomes the man of iron with the living heart. He takes the grossest of our contemporary material productions, weapons, and, as the second film (which I'll get to in a couple of weeks) says, turns them into a shield. This is the lesson that Tony Stark's story tries to teach us, the kerygmatic aspect of this particular myth.
All that aside, though, it's also the film that kicks off the MCU, and it's blatantly designed to do so. The tiny stroke of genius that is the final scene of this film, combined with the final scene in The Incredible Hulk (next week's feature) did the one thing that superhero fans have been waiting for for so, so long. They told us that these two movies existed in the same place. That while Iron Man was having his scuffle with the Iron Monger, Bruce Banner was on the run from the U.S. government, sometimes as himself, and sometimes as "the other guy." And off on a different plane we'd come to realize that Thor was getting himself in trouble. Or that somewhere in the Arctic there was a plane buried in the ice containing a hero who would rise again in the hour of our greatest need (you never thought about Captain America as North American-ized Arthurian myth? Me neither til just now!). Finally, we had the Marvel Universe we knew and loved, and it seemed that movies had figured out what kind of a vehicle they needed to be for the tenor of the genre.
Well, at least until DC came along and managed to bungle it supremely. But perhaps that's fodder for another post.
Iron Man is a great place to start because it's a great movie. The MCU hits the ground running and never stops, really. Though the next film, The Incredible Hulk, is perhaps the slowest spot. We'll talk about why that might be next week.
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