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There’s a noble effort, to be sure, in giving a conscience to an initially amoral character. It’s a classic superhero origins story; the flawed protagonist is made to atone for past misdeeds by becoming a champion for the oppressed and defenseless. For the most part, it works thanks to Robert Downey Jr.’s consummate skill in playing the lovable rogue. Tony Stark is, psychologically, no Bruce Wayne. But it says something that even when presenting a highly destructive new missile system to eager military personnel, Downey’s rogue character delivers a counteroffensive of charm that belies the inherent horror behind the sales pitch. Yet the film’s fetishism for military hardware – the U.S. Air Force gets to show off their new toy, the F-22 Lightning – taken in conjunction with the unmistakable nature of the Iron Man armour as a weapons platform, works, in a philosophical sense, against Stark’s change of heart. “Iron Man” represents a safe challenge to the established moral order of things, a buck to the system rather than a thorough dismantling. Stark may feel bad about creating weapons that get into the wrong hands, but becoming a one-man tank isn’t exactly fighting fire with water. Given reports of the Pentagon embedding analysts in the media to promote their agenda and a cozy relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon that, in the words (http://www.motherjones.com/news) of journalist David Robb and author of Operation Hollywood, aims to “aid in the retention and recruitment of personnel,” “Iron Man” is as establishment as it gets.

This goes a long way to explain why, despite a fertile setup for a splashy moral conflict, the story is content with treading water in the shallow end of the philosophical pool. And while this could all be dismissed as the result of contextualizing the movie rather than dealing with the movie itself, a hasty dismissal would ignore the somewhat disappointing devolution of the plot to include the standard war corporatist villain, suavely played by a bald and bearded Jeff Bridges, and an equally standard battle between Iron Man and his bigger, uglier, evil counterpart the Iron Monger.

Among the Best

Yet the movie gets so much right and generates so much excitement that it counts as one of the best comic book adaptations out there. Jon Favreau is a director’s director, able to give classes in both old school and new school effects-laden filmmaking. He’s got energy, he’s got style, he’s got class. Unlike the stuffiness of the “X-Men” franchise, the cheery B-grade nature of “Fantastic Four,” or the sappy melodrama of “Spider-Man,” his “Iron Man” steps up to the A-List plate – almost like a “Batman Begins.” The film’s science-fiction elements, from artificial intelligence and advanced robotics to the armour itself, fit seamlessly into the film’s universe, making the futuristic technology smart and plausible rather than gimmicky in the way only a bad sci-fi movie can be. And the script hits the right comic notes, with a few well-placed gags that effortlessly lighten the mood, without giving in to camp to compromise what character drama there is. Romance achieves the same good balance, wisely pulling back, hinting at love, never consummating; Stark and his assistant Pepper Pots (Paltrow) get the adult treatment, and the film is all the better for it.