He then pwns the military by flying back to Afghanistan to blow up what America was already en route to blow up. What a blissful, solarpunk dream!Īnd a short-lived one, as Tony gets to work harassing his assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, who is impossible to take seriously) and installing his digital butler Jarvis (Paul Bettany – wait, doesn’t he play Vision?) in his new supersuit. For a brief moment, one can believe he’s about to completely divest from the military industrial complex and instead solve half of the world’s problems by open-sourcing the arc reactor. His arrogance is intolerable but the chaos he unleashes with his personality shift is hilarious. RDJ was born for this role, which is perhaps not a compliment but it works onscreen.
The story picks up after the overlong captivity. Some of this is explained by the revelation later on that Stark Industries second-in-command Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) paid them to kidnap Tony, but they just seem comical rather than intimidating. The flatness of the depiction makes it hard to take them seriously as a threat. The depiction of the Ten Rings is, unsurprisingly, indelicate and insensitive, generalizing Afghan culture as violent and regressive.
He doesn’t grow, he just happens to encounter a situation where his best interests include ceasing weapons sales. The irony of being blown up by his own weapons is supposedly the catalyst for Tony’s character growth, yet the film can’t land that moment properly because the real irony is that it took being personally affected by his profiteering to get Tony to reconsider. So much of the MCU rests on this character, and this is honestly a pretty shaky origin. Upon escaping, he declares that Stark Industries will no longer sell weapons. He escapes in a mech suit powered by the arc reactor, an incredible power source long neglected by his company that he has miniaturized and embedded in his chest to electromagnetically suspend shards of shrapnel that threaten to pierce his heart. The flagship of the Marvel Armada centers on fresh-outta-rehab RDJ as Tony Stark, a self-described “genius billionaire playboy philanthropist.” The weapons-manufacturing failson becomes Iron Man after being held hostage in an Afghan cave by a terrorist cell called the Ten Rings.
Let’s embark on a voyage through the MCU, starting with Marvel Studios’ Plan A that was such a smash they pretend they didn’t have a Plan B: the resurrection of Robert Downey, Jr. But it didn’t actually have to happen like this.
#What comes after iron man 2 movie#
It seems clandestine that this flashy, low-substance, star-powered, fan-servicing piece of blatant neoliberalism would kick off the franchise that dominated/ruined the movie industry over the course of the 2010s.
But in retrospect, it’s hard to believe that Iron Man, the zygote that would gestate into the abomination unto god and nature that we now call the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was released with low expectations. Sometimes remarkable things come from unlikely places. By Benjamin Robertson Netzorg and Contributing Editor Tasha Kiri Robertson Netzorg
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