Saturday 14 June 2008

when your poetry
is published but amended
it’s not a good thing.

The Ugly One and I went off to the Bush of Shepherds today to their Vue cinema to see ‘Iron Man’.
I was very impressed with it. Robert Downey Jr, following up his excellent performance in ‘A Scanner Darkly’ plays Tony Stark, a suitably complex character; a mechanical genius who inherits a multi-million dollar weapons company and hasn’t thought through the morality of his company’s product, or indeed, the morality of anything.
When he is kidnapped in the Middle East by a terrorist group who want him to build them a Weapon of Mass Destruction he begins to realise the effects of his company’s work.
So, while pretending to build a supermissile, he assembles a powerful iron suit with built in weapons and manages to escape from the cave in which he has been imprisoned.
Returning a wiser man he then discovers chicanery within his own company, in the rather bulky form of Jeff Bridges (who seems to have turned into Goldberg since I last saw him).
He builds a new improved Iron Man suit in order to track down his company’s weapons, which have fallen into the wrong hands.
Thankfully, the terrorists are not the usual arabs, which have been the lazy option for many writers for the last seven years, but a group of multi-national baddies, called The Ten Rings, who have been employing Stark’s weapons to rampage around, destroying villages.
The foreign locations are suitably vague, and could be anywhere in India, the Middle East or parts of Eastern Europe.
As one of the new Marvel films it’s excellent, helped along by impeccable casting and the usual faultless CGI mayhem. If it has any faults, it’s that it is not individual enough. I suspect that in twenty to thirty years we will be looking back at this current period of Marvel film adaptations with the same mixture of fond nostalgia and critical hindsight that we employ with Hammer films.