A Modern Marvel

Iron Man Cometh

After resisting the temptation for some time, I finally succumbed and went and watched 'Iron Man'. Why was I resisting? I don't even know, but i must say I'm a little disturbed by the rend of comic books turned movies becoming the dominant voice in cinema. Then, it's one thing for Hollywood to be picking up characters created by comic book artists as intellectual property, then there's the disturbing development whereby Marvel have formed their own movie production company to exploit their own stable of characters.

It's actually a seismic shift in power relations as it reflects the true power of the teams that bring comic books to life over the naff film executives in Hollywood negotiating deals.
What's the big deal? the big deal is that traditional Hollywood is being cut off from the source of much fodder.

When the first Superman movie starring Christopher Reeve hit the big screen back in 1978, there was a lot of doubt as to whether a comic book character would translate to the screen, an in fact win audiences. Since then, there have been a host of superhero movies based on comic book characters that have proven that there is in fact a strong market for these films. In fact, by the time the Spiderman franchise finally made it to the big screen, adapting comic book heroes had become an important part of the Hollywood machine.

Consider this list (off the top of my head):
Superman movies 1-4 plus Superman Returns = 5 films
Batman movies 1-4 plus the new Batman movies starring Christian Bale as Batman = 6 films
3 Spiderman movies
3 X-Men movies
2 incarnations of the Incredible Hulk
... not to mention Hellboy, Punisher, and the spoof, Mystery Men.
That comes to 22 films since 1978 by my count.
Add in the spin offs of Wolverine, Justice League and Hell Boy 2, it's averaging about 1 a year.

Each and everyone of them has been a blockbuster. Hollywood has needed every film made this side of 1996 to bolster a flagging box office. Yet, if Marvel are going into business on their own, thus keeping artistic control as well as a chunk of he profits, Hollywood's cut is going to be much less than before.

What should be worrying some exec somewhere is that during the last 25 years, Hollywood has actually developed very few franchises to which it can run back. Perhaps this explains the urgency of having another Indiana Jones movie s well as the new superhero movie 'Hancock'.
One would imagine the exec who green-lit 'Hancock' was totally aware that the well was about to run dry and felt the need to establish something of their own in the market place.

It is against this background that 'Iron Man' makes its presence felt as the first film produced by marvel themselves - and it's none too bad. Suddenly one gets the feeling that Hollywood is going to be in for a rocky time if it's going to compete with Marvel for the audience dollar.

What's Good About It

I was never a fan of Tony Stark and Iron Man as character. I never saw the appeal. Maybe it was the hyper-adult goatee that alienated me as a kid. Or maybe not. There's a lot to like about Tony Stark played by Robert Downey Jr. Gwyneth Paltrow makes a come back of sorts, playing Pepper Potts. It's a little weird that the caliber of actors they've got playing these roles is so high.

Robert Downey Jr.'s performance is compelling because he actually draws you into the world of Tony Stark in a way that I didn't quite imagine going in. The playfulness of the character is supplanted by a greater anxiety of being perhaps off-kilter. The sense of unbound ego conflicted with his ethics is played quite nicely in many scenes and he carries what is otherwise a paper thin film.

Ms. Paltrow in her heyday of being the 'It' Girl of the late 90's could play an English Woman in period and deliver Shakespeare lines seamlessly as she went about doing her thing. No mean feat for an American gal. In this movie, we see she is asked to play some kind of lonely American spinster, and it hardly seems to challenge her prodigious acting skills. Still, like all things in this film, it's a solid performance.

Even Jeff Bridges turns in a solid performance as Obadiah the bad dude who betrays Tony Stark. It goes to show that if you could cast these things with good actors, they tend to fly, especially because lot of these characters are well formed in their preceding incarnations in the comic books. Even the secondary characters come in to their film incarnation with oodles of back story.

What's Bad About It

When it comes to the conceptual framework of a film, I'm always intrigued by films that dare to question the status quo in politics. In that sense, portraying Stark Industries as some kind of weapon-mongering monster corporation just to show how America military intervention in the Middle East might be creating problems. this is the kind of maturity comic books are going to need to be relevant in the cinema. To then have the super hero swoop right in with his suit and rescue some kid is just silly.

The film struggles to say something but at its heart it is just kid's entertainment so the film stops short of saying anything meaningful about the weapons trade and America's role in the market. Maybe that is asking too much on Marvel's first outing with it movie, but at the same time, they're the ones who tabled the topic in th story, so you expect there to be a follow through. It's actually a cop out if the film makers think they've said all that is relevant to the concept of Iron Man. Nonetheless you sort of think, "Is there all there is to it in this story?"

I guess I'm being harsh when I hold the inadequate handling of the international arms trade angle of the story. There are other films out there that deal with this topic in one way or another, and I understand that in a comic book adaptation, it's only there for the context of the Freudian psycho-drama.

One of the things about Iron Man the character is that he comes out of America that is completely locked up in the Military Industrial Complex. Created in 1963, in the year JFK got assassinated by the very same MIC, Iron Man has always been an ambivalent figure. That is to say, Tony Stark and his company are part of the gigantic industrial complex that takes money from the government to produce weapons in order to sustain jobs and an economy.

One presumes that if they're making sequels (and why wouldn't they?), we're hopefully going to see a development in this angle.

Other Thoughts

I don't know if I like cinema to go in the direction of more and more comic book fodder. I don't think that more Marvel comic character movies is what the world of cinema needs. While it is not unwelcome, I'm not sure that the landscape of cinema would be better for having block buster super hero movies every half-year. Not that Hollywood itself is doing itself any favors.

The demise of the Art House cinema has been a wreck for cinema in general. Gone are the films where filmmakers experimented and challenging ideas were tested out in practice. It's as if the big R&D engine of the film industry has upped an vanished. Since the demise of the Art House, we've seen a gradual decline in the innovation in cinema - excepting the field of special effects. It's not really fair to be grousing about crowd pleasers just having praised Steven Spielberg for Indy 4, but the advent of the comic book film has made cinema a paradise for toy fiction and a desert for real narrative fiction.

A lot of this material in comic book movies and even Indy Jones was once considered 'B' product, not just because of the budget but because of the creative aspirations involved. Cinema today is obsessed with squeezing as much money out of the market with its 'B' product.

Signs of creative decay are everywhere in Hollywood. The endless stream of TV show re-makes seems incredibly sad given that once upon a time films were considered the better property than TV shows. It's as if the executive end of Hollywood has collectively shrunk away from taking creative risks themselves and they keep wanting to bank on the risks other people have taken (and succeeded).

I don't know to what degree they are going to let this trend continue, but in the absence of studio-originated content, they are going to find themselves further along the road to intellectual-property bankruptcy.