When I saw Iron Man in May 2008, there seemed to be something revolutionary about it. At that point, superhero movies had been bright and slightly campy — thinkSpiderman and X-Men — until Christopher Nolan created the darkest, most angst-ridden superhero trilogy ever with a reboot of the Batman film series in 2005. With Iron Man, Marvel was declaring its faith in another route with a film that took itself seriously without sacrificing fun, starring a super hero full of demons who, unlike Bruce Wayne, wasn’t overcome by them. In a way, Iron Man 3 is the perfection of this back and forth between light and dark that the first film set up.
Iron Man 3, as the trailer reveals, meets Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr., who shines as our morally ambiguous hero) shortly after the events of The Avengers, last summer’s blockbuster. Tony can barely bring himself to mention the events — the aliens, the wormholes, the bomb he detonated in space — without breaking down. He throws himself into his work as a distraction, which eventually leads him to make some very risky threats against the terrorist the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley in one of his oddest roles).
For his part, the Mandarin has been bombing locations around the country, striking fear into the hearts of all Americans. He frequently hijacks satellite feeds to broadcast his crazed videos on TVs around the country. As I sat there and watched, I was honestly terrified — director Shane Black captures that post-9/11 feeling of dread exceptionally well. It was odd, though, to see fake terrorist bombings on-screen so soon after the attacks in Boston.
These are the dark parts: Bombings, deaths and Tony’s overwhelming anxiety. It’s rough. But this is Robert Downey Jr. and this is Tony Stark, and it wouldn’t be an Iron Man film if the one-liners weren’t pithy and the sass wasn’t overflowing. Only in these movies can something horrify the audience one minute, but then bring them to laughter the next. Admittedly, Tony often uses a biting remark as his security blanket, a way to convince himself that he’s still in control when he obviously isn’t.
Then there’s Tony’s other security blanket — the CEO of his company, his former assistant and girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Downey and Paltrow have amazing chemistry and their relationship just works on screen; it seems real. They fight, they mess up, but their love is what keeps the scientific mysteries, explosions and drama from feeling like too much. There’s a young boy who helps Tony out who I was initially very apprehensive about, but their interactions have enough wit to keep them from being too schmaltzy and help bring this hero back to earth. It also helps that Tony spends a lot of time outside of the suit — a strangely large amount of time, really, especially considering that Captain America criticized him for overly relying on it in the last film. Without the mask, Downey’s acting takes center stage.
Iron Man 2, released in 2010, did not live up to the standards set by the original. It felt like filler — they didn’t know what to do between the first and The Avengers, but knew they had to do something.Iron Man 3 could have easily fallen into this same trap, not knowing what to do after last summer’s film. Instead, the film takes what happened last time and builds on it in meaningful ways. Rather than ignore or dwell on issues presented in The Avengers, it embraces them and takes them to unexpected places. This might be the best film of all of Marvel’s new releases.
Of course, the film isn’t perfect. Kingsley feels a little underutilized, though he steals the scene when he is on-screen. The movie has less gratuitous moments of half-naked women than it’s predecessors, but these moments of unabashedly excessive male gaze still exist in excess and it’s bothersome. With the exception of Pepper and Maya, who are complex and wonderful in this film, women — like they often regrettably are in Marvel films — flit around the background as window dressing. It saddens me that a franchise I love so much has yet to do better when it comes to female or minority characters.
In a few years — maybe five or 10 or more — I think we’ll look back on the Iron Man franchise as strangely prescient of the problems our society faces. The series, at its most basic level, is about how technology changes and corrupts our morals. In the first film, this meant more traditional weapons — i.e., missiles, nukes. In the second, it was the Iron Man suit itself. In the third, it’s about using science to completely change humans, the type of genetic modification that isn’t possible yet, but will be one day. The series makes us confront the problems brought about by progress and contemplate the way technology, businesses and government can create deadly combinations. The Batman series may make us wonder how to survive the attack of a sociopath, but Iron Man presents us with the truth that sometimes evil isn’t the guy with clown makeup or a scarecrow mask, but rather it’s the guy in a lab coat, the woman in a business suit.
If that sounds like a lot to handle in a summer blockbuster, fear not — this movie is a really good time. Constantly thrilling, incredibly funny, beautiful to look at and very smart, Iron Man 3 is the summer movie season at its best — even if the film takes place at Christmas.
