Ebert on Iron Man

Roger Ebert nails it on why Iron Man is such a good movie (and a better super-hero movie than, say, most of the X-franchise and so many others):

1. The grounded feeling of long-term reality around the Stark corporation and the relationships between Stark, Potts, and Stane.
2. Letting the Tony Stark character be who he is — avoiding taking himself (and the genre) too seriously. At the same time, letting the other characters be serious, not competitively witty. The tension there keeps the movie from either being camp and self-mocking, or being too self-importantly grave (no preaching about mutant equality, no overdoing the “great power / great responsibility” or Messianic Son of Krypton, no sense of the hero as being a real nutcase who ought to be locked up in Arkham Asylum, too).
3. Conveying the personalities of the guys inside the battle armor even as they’re fighting, rather than having them appear to be a video game break in a rock’em-sock’em-robot battle. Making the movie be about people, not the technology (or the SFX).

At the end of the day it ‘s Robert Downey Jr. who powers the lift-off separating this from most other superhero movies. You hire an actor for his strengths, and Downey would not be strong as a one-dimensional mighty-man. He is strong because he is smart, quick and funny, and because we sense his public persona masks deep private wounds. By building on that, Favreau found his movie, and it’s a good one.

Of course, the fact that the SFX are kick-ass fun doesn’t hurt.

Good times. Almost makes me want to go back and see it in the theaters again.

(via BD, et al.)