Iron Man: Perfect everything, perfect cast, top notch visual effects, outstanding directing and solid script.

Rating: 9/10 (17 May 2008)

***POSSIBLE SPOILERS***
I just saw Iron Man in theaters with a friend. After a long wait I was able to see one of the few superhero movies that made it to the top 250 IMDb films of all time list. And that was what made me see the movie. It had an 8.3 user ratings and compared to other superhero movies, that's very high. The film was absolutely great. Let me start with the cast. Robert Downey Jr., who played Iron man/Tony Stark, is an Oscar nominated actor for the movie Chaplin back in 1992. Terrence Howard is a great actor who also was nominated for an academy award, so was Jeff Bridges, for 4 Oscars in fact. And who could forget the shining star of Shakespeare in Love, Gwyneth Paltrow, who walked home with an academy award for her lead role in the movie, Shakespeare in Love. The point I am trying to make is that the major stars of this movie have either won or been nominated for an academy award, which is what Terrence Howard stated when he was being interviewed for the movie premiere.
The fact that Iron Man is filled with this talented cast made the movie huge before it even hit the theaters. And when it did hit the theaters the audience flew like a river to see what this cast has to deliver. My personal favorite character in the movie, though I don't want it to sound obvious, is Tony Stark. I liked him because he was witty and most of the time relaxed, even though he runs a huge company, and even though he is in a serious or tense situation he still manages to brighten his and his colleagues' day with humor. Especially there is this one scene where he shows up at a press conference with a cheese burger. The other cast members were also cool. Gwyneth Paltrow plays a convincing and attractive assistant of Tony Stark and Terrence Howard delivers a solid performance by playing Jim Rhodes, a guy in charge of the weaponry in the U.S. army.
I also enjoyed Jeff Bridges' performance playing this seemingly nice guy who later turns out to be evil, though I did have a problem with that character, which I will discuss later. As far as the directing, Kudos Jon Favraeu. Perfect and consistent shots throughout the movie, unlike "The Kingdom"(2007), where the camera was too close to the actors' faces that sometimes part of their faces was cut out. Not that I am saying The Kingdom was bad, I am just saying that there was something wrong with the cameraman. Alright back to Iron Man, Iron Man has stunning visuals. The visual effects supervisors should be really proud of themselves. All the scenes seemed so real that at some point I stopped believing that I was watching a movie and started thinking that this is some sort of documentary with real people in it doing real stuff. That's how much convincing the visuals were.
Now I can tell you a movie that had fake and easily noticeable visuals, "The Matrix Reloaded"(2003). Remember the scene were Neo was fighting the agents, and it was him by himself and the agents were exponentially increasing in number? Anybody who's not blind can tell That scene was totally made up of CGI shots, I noticed that the very first time I saw the movie, though I am not complaining about those CGI shots, I am just saying that They should have at least attempted to make it seem believable.
I was watching the behind the scenes footage of Iron Man on TV Guide network the other day and Jon Favraeu was mentioning how they had to fight against nature to film the desert scenes, which proved to me the authenticity of the movie. All the scenes, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, seemed so real, and I could not tell which scene was CGI and which wasn't. I loved every scene in the movie from beginning to the very end.
Let me back away from all the positives of the movie and tell you the one negative thing that made me give the movie a 9/10 rating. The one thing I did not like about the movie is that Iron Monger/Obadiah Stone (played by Jeff Bridges) did not get enough time to display his evilness. There are only a few scenes were Mr. Stone is shown as the evil Iron Monger. Other than that for the most part, we only saw a friendly and nice Obadiah Stone that was Tony Stark's ally. Nevertheless, The fact that Jeff Bridges' evil character did not get enough screen time did not stop the movie from having a lot of action. Most of the action in the movie occurs in the second half of the movie, like most movies. And believe me, it has some good butt-kicking. Advanced weaponry that aren't seen anywhere else, voice activated robots, tactable holograms so on and so forth.
Now, I've been hearing these rumors and have also seen on IMDb that there is going to be an Iron Man 2. You know what they say, sequels aren't as good as the first ones. Prove me wrong, Paramount, Marvel, Jon Favraeu and whoever else is going to be involved in the second movie. As to the first one, it was two hours of my life and the money paid to go see it well spent. I recommend this film to whoever wants to see an action-packed, comic book based, superhero movie.