Welcome to the MCU!

Rating: 8/10 (16 December 2015)

After years of licensing out its marquee characters to film studios to stave off bankruptcy, Marvel finally launched its own production house to build its own cinematic universe. With Spiderman and the X- Men off their table, they gambled by turning to b-list Avenger Iron Man to kick things off, and it paid off handsomely. Because numerous prior attempts at bringing Iron Man to the big screen had failed, they have a wide-open canvas on which to world-build. The story and screenplay are open-ended enough so as not to close off possibilities prematurely, yet not so generic as to rob it of its own life. The character of Tony Stark fits Robert Downey Jr. like a glove; he fully captures Stark's obsessiveness and bemused arrogance. Most of the other actors in Stark's world seem to calibrate themselves off Downey, with Gwyneth Paltrow, Jon Favreau (who also directed) and Terrence Howard doing a good job conveying a sense of how exhilarating and exhausting it is to be in his orbit. The villain of the piece isn't technically revealed until well into the running time, but only people who've never seen a comic book won't have guessed (if only from the character's improbably evil name) the identity. This isn't a flaw -- the film doesn't have anything riding on trying to trick or misdirect viewers, but the story is structured in a way that we get explicit information only as Stark discovers it, which is an effective technique for putting us in his camp. The action sequences are everything we could hope for from a multi-million dollar tent-pole film, well-designed and executed and well-integrated into the story. I had trouble with the idea that someone supposedly as brilliant and worldly as Stark would be so naive about the geopolitical realities involved in arms dealing -- this is the source of contradictions in Stark's character with which the film tries to grapple but never successfully comes to grips. Still, it's an exciting beginning to a multi-film narrative the likes of which no enterprise has attempted in a long time.