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Iron Man [Blu-Ray]

Director : Jon Favreau

Screenplay : Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway

MPAA Rating : PG-13

Year of Release : 2008

Stars : Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark / Iron Man), Terrence Howard (Jim Rhodes), Jeff Bridges (Obadiah Stane), Gwyneth Paltrow (Virginia “Pepper” Potts), Leslie Bibb (Christine Everhart), Shaun Toub (Yinsen), Faran Tahir (Raza), Sayed Badreya (Abu Bakaar), Bill Smitrovich (General Gabriel), Clark Gregg (Agent Phil Coulson), Tim Guinee (Major Allen)

Iron Man You never know what you’re going to get from a superhero movie. Although they are currently the most popular means for a studio to ensure a lucrative franchise that draws a sizable summer audience and concomitant profits, hence their increasing proliferation in recent years, their very nature always risks overkill and silliness. For every grand slam that melds emotional resonance with a thrill-ride payoff like Spider-Man 2 (2004) or Batman Begins (2005), there is a ridiculous dud like Fantastic Four (2005), a morose downer like The Punisher (2004), or an admirable, but ultimately failed experiment like Hulk (2003). Iron Man, the latest superhero to be taken from the Marvel Comics stable, dusted off, and CGI’ed into big-screen material, doesn’t quite reach grand slam territory, but it has so many good qualities that I thought I’d just list them as a kind of run-down of how superhero movies can be done well if a little thought is put into them:

Casting Robert Downey Jr. It seemed like an odd choice when it was first announced that Downey Jr. was being hired to play a superhero, but only to those who weren’t familiar with Tony Stark, the brilliant bad-boy industrialist who would become Iron Man. Downey Jr.’s own personal demons provide the perfect template for playing a man who is suddenly and violently faced with the destruction wrought by his own sarcasm, arrogance, and cynicism and decides to do good with his potential, rather than profit from it. Downey Jr. brings vibrancy to the role, but more importantly he brings depth and a genuine sense of redemption that gives the inevitable action sequences weight, rather than just fury.

The hiring of Jon Favreau as director. Granted, his isn’t the first name you might think of to jump-start a potential franchise, but his work behind the camera on the comedy Elf (2003) and the kid adventure Zathura (2005) showed that he could handle effects, but more importantly, it showed that he understood how to incorporate said effects into a narrative. No one will argue that Iron Man is not an effects-heavy spectacle movie, but the effects are integrated into the story in a way that makes them feel organic, rather than tacked-on. One of Iron Man’s chief strengths is that it’s a good story well told, which is Favreau’s forte as a mainstream filmmaker. Unlike Michael Bay, he doesn’t let character and narrative get buried in an avalanche of whiplash visuals.

And, speaking of effects and whiplash visuals, Iron Man is a case study in how to use CGI well. Neither too much or too little, the CGI looks good throughout because they didn’t try to do too much (and this is, after all, a film in which a man in a flying suit outmaneuvers a pair of F-22 fighter jets).

All-around solid cast. Along with Robert Downey, Jr., the cast is nicely filled out by actors who can bring multi-dimensionality to supporting characters who might otherwise be shortchanged. Terrence Howard makes Jim Rhodes, Stark’s best buddy and military ally, a perfect foil for Stark’s self-indulgent ways; Jeff Bridges, with his bald head and silver beard, exudes well-manicured menace as Obadiah Stane, Stark’s business partner and eventual nemesis; and, most importantly, Gwyneth Paltrow brings to the unfortunately named Pepper Potts, Stark’s secretary and conscience, a rare combination of absolute sweetness and irresistible intelligence. She is the true yin to Stark’s yang, and their constant almost-romance adds a much needed softer edge to the story, not to mention some of the movie’s best laughs.

Socio-political relevance. Since their inception, superhero narratives have always been in some way about the social and political terrain in which they’re born. For Iron Man, who first appeared in 1963, it was anti-communism and Vietnam, two topics that don’t have quite the same relevance four decades down the line. So, the screenwriters have updated the scenario to Afghanistan, where Stark is demonstrating one of his new high-powered weapons to the military brass when he is captured by insurgents who demand that he build them a weapon. Stark, of course, builds himself a prototype Iron Man suit instead as his means of escape, thus his identity is forged in the heart of the war on terror.

Complicated morality. Speaking of the war on terror, Iron Man doesn’t take the simplistic view that there are always pure good guys and pure bad guys--Stark himself is the perfect embodiment of fighting one’s own demons for the greater good. On the other hand, the moral spectrum is not so gray that we can’t discern right from wrong. The Afghan terrorists are certainly nasty, but their global villainy is enabled by weapons produced by Stark Industries, thus indicting the military-industrial complex with helping to create the very terrorists it claims to be fighting. Sure, the film’s politics are ultimately more fantasy than reality, but they still engage.

Comic relief. Between the comic timing of Robert Downey Jr.’s sarcastic quips and Favreau’s willingness to throw in a few moments of pure slapstick humor, Iron Man finds a delicate balance between the serious and the funny. In fact, the film’s best sequences are in the middle section when Stark is testing out his various Iron Man technologies, which sometimes result in his being flung against walls and doused by a fire extinguisher at the end of a robotic arm that has more personality and humor than many flesh-and-blood movie characters.

Given everything that it does right, it is somewhat disappointing that Iron Man doesn’t quite fly to the stratosphere. Some might blame the fact that it is, for all intents and purposes, a two-hour origin story, but I found that to be one of its most compelling aspects, much like Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), the superhero movie against which all others are still judged. Rather, Iron Man ultimately stumbles because it bogs down in the last half hour when it turns into a more conventional action movie, giving us an inevitable climactic showdown between Iron Man and a massive nemesis that turns into a lot of chaos, but not much payoff. Thankfully, the film ends on an up note, as Stark attends a press conference to officially deny that he is the “Iron Man” the newspapers are talking about, and the film smartly and humorously cuts to a close on an all-too-appropriate line of dialogue with which any Black Sabbath fan will be more than familiar.

Iron Man Ultimate 2-Disc Edition Blu-Ray
Iron Man is also available in two-disc and single-disc DVD editions.
Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
Audio	English Dolby Digital TrueHD 5.1 surround French Dolby Digital 5.1 surround Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 surround
Subtitles	English, French, Spanish, Portuguese
Supplements	“Hall of Armor” 3-D gallery The Invincible Iron Man documentary Deleted and extended scenes I Am Iron Man 7-part making-of documentary “Wired: The Visual Effects of Iron Man” featurette Robert Downey Jr. screen test “The Actor’s Process” featurette The Onion “Wildly Popular Iron Man Trailer” excerpt Four theatrical trailers Four still galleries
Distributor	Paramount Home Entertainment
SRP	$39.99
Release Date	September 30, 2008

VIDEO & AUDIO
No big surprise here--Iron Man looks stunning in its high-def 1080p transfer on a dual-layer BD50. The painstaking detail work that went into every element of the film’s visual design, especially that amazing suit, pop off the screen with bright, vivid, but always lifelike colors. The film has an overall bright, saturated look, with the opening scenes in the desert dominated by blooming whites and intense contrasts. The darker scenes fare very well, too, with dark, inky blacks and excellent shadow detail. The Dolby Digital TrueHD 5.1 surround soundtrack is equally impressive, with a wide front soundstage, immersive directionality, fine sonic detail, and a floor-rattling low end that gives Iron Man’s flight scenes a real kick.
SUPPLEMENTS
Although there is no audio commentary (which is quite surprising given the extensive nature of the supplements), this two-disc Ultimate Edition still packs more than four hours of supplementary material to keep fans occupied between viewings of the film itself. Newbies to the Iron Man mythology would do well to start on the first disc with The Invincible Iron Man, a 47-minute documentary about the Marvel character’s origins and his various developments over the years. Also on the first disc is the Hall of Armor, an interactive gallery in which you view close-up detail and computer-generated 360-degree views the three Iron Man suits and the Iron Monger suit. There is also a section of 11 deleted and extended scenes that run about 24 minutes. The second disc opens with the impressive 110-minute I Am Iron Man making-of documentary, which is comprised of seven featurettes: “The Journey Begins,” which traces the film’s preproduction and previsualization; “The Suit That Makes the Iron Man,” which deals with the physical nature of the Iron Man suit; “Walk of Destruction,” which covers principal photography; “Grounded in Reality,” which looks at the stunts and set design; “Beneath the Armor,” which examines the overall look of the film and its practical effects; “It’s All in the Details,” which focuses on postproduction; and “A Good Story Well Told,” which takes us through the final fine-tuning of the film and ends with its premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. These seven featurettes include interviews with some two-dozen people involved in the film’s production, including director Jon Favreau, stars Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard, and Gwyneth Paltrow, producers Avi Arad and Kevin Feige, and executive producer Peter Billingsley (yes, the one who starred in A Christmas Story). “Wired: The Visual Effects of Iron Man” is an additional 27-minute featurette that goes into more depth exploring the film’s CGI effects. And, just to show that it’s not all CG and wire work, the disc includes Robert Downey Jr.’s screen test (6 min.) and “The Actor’s Process” (4 min.), a brief glimpse at Downey Jr. and Jeff Bridges rehearsing a scene under Favreau’s direction. Also included is an excerpt from The Onion’s fake news broadcast titled “Wildly Popular Iron Man Trailer to Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film” (3 min.), which is actually a rather incisive satire of how the art of theatrical trailers is threatening to usurp the films they’re ostensibly advertising. You can judge for yourself with the trailer gallery, which includes the original theatrical and teaser trailers, as well as two international trailers. Finally, there are four extensive stills galleries: “Concept Art,” “Tech,” “Unit Photography,” and “Posters.”

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick