A great start to a promising movie viewing season

Rating: 9/10 (3 May 2008)

Seriously, this was a surprise. I went in thinking this was an action film and find it is an action enhanced drama. A bit preachy at times but only in light the of current state of a world in chaos, the movie works through its plot at a steady pace slowly building towards the eventual showdown between good and evil. For a plot, you discover that our hero builds and sells "bad" things that hurt people and destroy countries until he is thrust into a situation where he comes face to face with his own creations. Stocks start tumbling and the government begins to panic when his conversion takes him to a place where he wants to save the world instead of control it through fear.
The mechanics of this movie are fun, even for non-geeks. Not that we haven't seen some of this action before: The Human Torch in Fantastic 4 and of course the sequences of conversion used in Transformers were a little on the obvious side. However, the one thing that was injected into Robert Downey Jr's portrayal of Stark was a live sense of human trial and error. The development of the power source was a little hard to believe, seeing his first prototype was assembled in a cave with very little technology to help him; but once he starts putting the armor in place his obsession swings into overdrive. If a movie pulls you into an experience that the current character is witness to, I call that a successful filming.
I have no problem with the idea of kids watching this, though for both kid and the rest of the audiences enjoyment an adult should be with them if they are under 12. It's tame on any intimacy, and though it is there, it briskly moves on mainly to emphasize the developing characters. It's fun. It's bold. It has some cool action scenes that are highly geeked out. It is a movie where the CGI and gadgets support the script instead of the other way around (A failing many movies make).
This is a great start to what is looking like a great blockbuster season. -B
PS: You need to sit through the credits for a surprise.