No one saw this coming

It was the ’90s. Our president was cool and played the saxophone, I was a lot shorter, and Saturday mornings were reserved for cartoons. It was a glorious time that I got to enjoy whenever my mother didn’t decide to pack my day with activities (the activities were fine; starting them at 7:30 a.m. should be admissible as evidence. I deserve compensation).

I watched Spider-Man and X-Men, both with punishing narrative tempos. If you missed an episode, your favorite character went from doing just fine to fighting on a new planet and crying about his credit score. Those Fox cartoons were excellent.

Now, I knew about Iron Man. I had an issue or two of the comics, my father liked the character, and he even had quick, blink-and-you-miss-it cameos in those cartoons. But he didn’t have much cultural impact.

In the late ’90s, when Marvel Entertainment was bankrupt, they tried selling off their IPs. They sold the X-Men and Fantastic Four to 20th Century Fox, The Incredible Hulk to Universal Pictures, and Spider-Man to Sony Pictures. They tried to sell off Iron Man too, but there were no buyers.

So when I tell you that Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr., a Hollywood nepo-baby screwup, and directed by the director of Elf, came out of nowhere, believe me. It was 2008, and this film about a C+ level hero (YES, C+) stormed into theaters two months before The Dark Knight, and we were all shocked.

For every good superhero film (Superman, X-Men, Batman), there were at least two bad ones (Superman III, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, X-Men: The Last Stand, Batman & Robin, Captain America, Daredevil, Steel, etc.). The good ones didn’t need to change the world. We just wanted respect for the source material, competent acting and directing, and for OUR favorite thing to be featured.

So let me reiterate: I was shocked, yes, shocked—not by what they got right, but by what they didn’t get wrong.

Iron Man did all the right things. Robert Downey Jr. channeled Tony Stark’s comic-accurate confidence and charm. The Iron Man suit was both impressive and believable. Save for Terrence Howard, the entire cast had chemistry to burn. Iron Man has a weak rogues’ gallery, but Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane/Iron Monger was threatening and served as a dark foil to Iron Man. The effects still hold up, mostly because of smart uses of shadow and camera work. The score was tight. The pacing was smooth and deliberate. The movie is funny when it needs to be and deathly serious when the moment calls for it.

Iron Man wasn’t trying to be more than a lot of fun, but by doing all of the little things right, it managed to become a defining moment in the late spring of 2008.