Iron Man (Ultimate Two-Disc Edition) [Blu-ray] | Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow

Iron Man (Ultimate Two-Disc Edition) [Blu-ray] | Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow | Fantastic acting

DVDs:

Iron Man (Ultimate...

	Iron Man (Ultimate Two-Disc Edition) [Blu-ray] Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow Paramount, 2008 average customer review:based on 313 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Suit up for action with Robert Downey Jr. in the ultimate adventure movie you?ve been waiting for, Iron Man! When jet-setting genius-industrialist Tony Stark is captured in enemy territory, he builds a high-tech suit of armor to escape. Now, he?s on a mission to save the world as a hero who?s built, not born, to be unlike any other. Co-starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard and Jeff Bridges, it?s a fantastic, high-flying journey that is "hugely entertaining" (Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal).

Top notch superhero flick

Very strong movie that stands up there with the original Batman with Michael Keaton and the original Spider-Man with Toby Maquire, and let's not forget about Superman! Who knows if they'll ever make a decent Hulk, X-men or Avengers (coming soon). Good modern adaptation of the story. Ending was a bit heavy, and I wasn't particularly enamored with Bridges role, but Downey and Paltrow worked great. They'll have to get creative with SHEILD for the sequel to work.

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Fantastic acting

Robert Downey Jr. is a very talented actor and even though this was just a fun fluff piece for him to act, he did it with such finesse that it was a work of art.

Movies that make you go YES!

This was a great movie. Awesome story, awesome acting, great special effects and who doesn't love a superhero?! This looked great on blu-ray. I did have a small issue with the movie slowing down on my ps3 but I think i've determined that its a hardware problem on my end, not any fault of the disc itself. I would still reccommend this even with my tiny slowing down problem.

Does not work with Cyberlink Power DVD 8 "Ultra"

Awsome movie, loved it in theater but was dissapointed when I popped it in my HTCP and found out the hard way does not work with Power DVD 8 .

I have downloaded all patches and have the latest build. I reseached it and found oout on thier forums that this is a know issue and no statement has been issued whether they fix it or not... I hope they will :-(

If anyone knows any workarounds please share, thank you.

JC

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Solid, but could use a stronger heart

Iron Man is solid super-hero fare which employs the traditional themes, tropes and symbols. It should prove satisfactory to a broad audience, but could have been so much more satisfying, probing, or insightful if it used more clever storytelling. Other than the themes it introduces about the military-industrial complex and US foreign policy, it is the same superhero origin story you have seen many times.

Robert Downey Jr. and Jeff Bridges offer excellent performances. Downey Jr. mixes cocky arrogance, critical humor, and a compelling transformation of a character who represents the worst aspects of the military-industry complex experiencing an inner conflict over the destruction that his inventions have caused. Jeff Bridges was terrific, but the film used him to less effect than it could have. At the onset, I thought Bridges only touched on his potential usefulness, which is when he plays someone who is operating at many levels, particularly as "the Dude" in The Big Lebowski, where he is always up to something, and nothing, all at once. So at the beginning, I thought he might be up to more than just helping out Tony Stark; but, his character shifted from a helper to a plain-old greedy bad guy without the transformation that I think Jeff Bridges could have pulled off if the film gave him the time and context to do that. Gwyneth Paltrow offers a convincing performance of a woman who sees beneath Stark's stark exterior and sees the man behind the jerk, and the suit.

The visuals, including Iron Man's heads-up displays and Tony Stark's computers and droids were fantastic. The portrayal of the software underlying the hardware suit seemed to explain how this suit could actually work, and perhaps explains why this film could be made now instead of years ago - not only can digital rendering make a believable-looking suit for a movie, but the possibility of such a suit in today's world is itself more believable. It's not a man in an iron suit, but a man with a multi-layered shell that is mediated through a software interface. The film is aware of this, as Stark even comments on the newspaper's characterization of him as an iron man. Nice touch. Stark even suits up in a neoprene layer that would help to explain the buffer between him and the metal, as well as possible housings for the software - how the filmmakers missed the opportunity for an Under Armour product placement is beyond me!

The themes about US policy, weapons and industry lent an air of integrity to the film, but it seems those issues rapidly disappeared. The irony, that Tony Stark becomes injured by the very weapons he manufactures, provides a great means to propel Stark toward his transformation. The updating of the specific context from Vietnam (in the early comic books) to Afghanistan works very well, and shows that comic and superhero characters often reflect issues of their time and should be considered valuable forums for cultural dialogue. However, the film seems less interested in those issues, and more interested in Stark's new suit. It's unclear just what Stark's peace plan was, which means that although the film raises questions about responsibility and power (in both a personal, superhero sense and a national policy sense), it just leaves them behind to tackle the more personal issues and get the superhero flying around. It could have also explored the theme of technological and human development, the boundary between machine and man, the exteriors we present to others compared with our inner needs and drives, etc. Doing so would have made the film truly invincible, but unfortunately it just flies right on by those issues.

The biggest problem I had with the film, was that it was basically a two-hour origin story that followed, in the abstract, the same formula that every other superhero origin story follows. Couldn't the writers have told us the origin story mixed in with a story progressing in the present? I felt like I sat for two hours watching could have been a five or ten minute origin story. Now that the film is over, I am ready to go see an Iron Man adventure! In some ways, this is the problem with almost every super-hero movie - each new movie is just the same story with a new character, and then when it makes some money, the studio approves a sequel. Two models that Iron Man could learn from are Star Wars and Speed Racer. Part of why Star Wars (Episode IV) was so engaging is that Lucas explicitly left out the explanations - we were already caught up in an unfolding plot (he explains this in the audio commentary to the DVD releases that include the original film formats). The opening sequence of Speed Racer manages to introduce the necessary origins at the same time it moves the current story forward. Iron Man, however, is a movie about how another movie might yet come to be. The filmmakers know this, and if you wait until after the credits, which for some reason I let the film run and caught this, you will see that they have one eye looking toward this future film.

Although Iron Man is a fun film that has some great visuals, conceptualizations, acting and political relevancy, I wondered why I had to sit through yet another origin story. It is solid, though, and should please comic fans and general audiences. Now that I've gotten the origin story out of the way, I look forward to the first of the Iron Man Adventures!

Format review: The Blu-Ray disc that I watched has a nice special feature on the history of Iron Man, including interviews with Stan Lee and various other artists and writers who have worked on his stories.

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