So I Watched: Iron Man (2008)
Iron Man is weird.
Even if you haven't seen any MCU movies in a decade - or at all - it's pretty easy to understand this intuitively by way of it being the film that started the multimedia franchise we're all kinda sick of. A film so disconnected from even the notion of a 'franchise' that the post-credits scene, which is explicitly sequel bait, was filmed before they got approval to make more movies.
And, honestly, I was braced for some weirdness. With cultural juggernauts - even ones much, much smaller than the MCU in scope - there's always something Different with the earlier entries. The musou genre, one of my favourites of all time, starts off as a tech demo for the PS2 that exists for little reason than to showcase how many models it can render at once. The Yakuza series which everyone knows and loves for its whackiness (or so they say) starts off as a fairly lowkey crime plot that pays homage to movies people on the development team liked. So on, so forth.
But I wasn't really expecting Iron Man to have politics… at all. The MCU as a franchise is so deeply terrified of seeming political that The Winter Soldier features "nazis have infiltrated the government" as a plot point which it promptly swerves 90 degrees into oncoming traffic to avoid the implications of that.
Iron Man in contrast opens with a play on the standard convoy ambush that was endemic to military fiction in the 90s/2000s before near-instantly turning into a story about an egotistical self-serving war profiteer who's life is upended by the revelation that his company's weapons, ostensibly being made to 'keep peace', have done nothing but further ruin the Middle East, displace thousands, and get even more Americans killed in a pointless war. He is, in a sense, dragged out of his ivory tower and forced to experience the lives of people who have Stark Industries weapons pointed at them: Disabled, humiliated, and executed. His captors even praise him as the greatest murderer of the present day.
There's this scene immediately after Tony announces a shock exit from the weapons market where a parody of stock market investment advice channels starts crashing out because Tony displayed a modicum of humanity and was visibly changed by his experiences in Afghanistan. This, arguably more than the reveal that the board of directors is equally incensed by Tony not wanting to be a war profiteer, paints a better picture of the movie's politics. That, and it's one of the few movies set in Afghanistan to even bother addressing that the people who live there speak far more languages than merely Arabic. It's a small thing, but it makes Jon Favreau's insistence that they kinda let him do whatever much more believable.
An aside: Wow, you can tell this movie predates the Department of Defense getting too involved with the franchise.
It helps that this is one of the rare MCU movies that try to do "ooohhhh the villain mirrors the hero~" (and there are a LOT of those) which actually succeeds at it. Stane is the version of Tony that the American business and government worlds would much like and who, in a deleted scene, quite blatantly says that he's mad at Tony for not giving his tech and ideas to "the right people". In fact, I'll just print the entire spiel here.
Civilization has been preserved because the right people have had the right idea at the right time! This technology, it comes along once in a generation, and it's a gift that has been put in our hands. And why is that? It's because we have a vision, a vision for the future of this company, of this nation, of the world order!
Cut content sure but the ideas and beliefs present are written throughout his character. He is in many ways the American zeitgeist's conceptualization of a True Patriot: Egotistical, fiercely nationalistic, and fanatically dismissive of the Arab world. Also he speaks Urdu to a guy whose primary language is Arabic. Whether it's a production error or an intentional joke, it's a great way to sell the point. Tony meanwhile feels genuine remorse for what he's done to the Middle East and, while he never gets to say it out loud, is quite obviously opposed to the United States using his company as its military arm. While future MCU stories would go on to use fictional stand-ins for places outside the Western world, Iron Man quite firmly anchors itself to Afghanistan which is a huge boon to its storytelling.
That said, the film's one big problem, IMO, is that the middle of the story leans a bit too heavily on the white man's burden. It tries to walk the tightrope of Tony's genuine attempts at contrition but the badass action sequence and the stuff surrounding it carries an undercurrent of "it's not the technology bad it's that it's being used by the wrong people" which kinda kneecaps an otherwise solid story. Iron Man isn't up there with Jarhead as far as anti-war stories go but it's still pretty good for a 2008 Marvel production so the story briefly slamming the brakes to deliver an overwrought action sequence where the payoff is a child being reunited with his father is… Eh. I dunno man.
I was also smitten with the final fight, honestly. I've come to associate the MCU with weightless combat and choreography that's flashy but completely lacking in any weight or tactility so imagine my shock when I get to the end of Iron Man and it's more akin to small scale Transformers beating the shit out of one another than whatever the hell they had going on in that Spiderman crossover shlock. Beautiful.
Anyway next up is The Incredible Hulk which I'm not looking forward to because like… How bad do you have to be for even Kevin Feige to ignore you entirely???