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Perhaps the reason Iron Man, a movie based on a superhero without the brand name recognition a Super, Bat or Spider-Man, opened to $100+ million this weekend is that he’s a superhero for the gadget generation.
One of the most notable things about the film version of Tony Stark is the way in which he interacts with technology. Instead of Alfred the Butler, he has Jarvis, an equally sardonic AI. He talks to his robots and manipulates three-dimensional holograms of his designs by hand. For a demographic that interacts with devices as if they were human (how many times have you said “Where’s TiVo?” instead of “Where’s the TiVo remote?”) this is a perfect fit.
Like Bruce Wayne, Stark has no superpowers of his own (unless you count a combination of technical brilliance and acerbic wit, which would make House my favorite superhero), relying on technology to combat crime. Except that he’s not exactly fighting crime. He’s fighting terrorism, which makes him an even more apt superhero for today.
Then there’s the way in which director Jon Favreau shoots the film. For some of the beta testing scenes, he shows us the POV of one of the robot cameras recording the sessions. This gives the footage a distinctly 00’s DIY quality. As a result, one of the film’s biggest laughs looks remarkably like a YouTube video.
Inside the suit, Stark’s POV is much like a FPS video game. At one point he even asks for his suit’s power status to be relayed to him visually instead of verbally. Iron Man is a gamer, too.
He even has the ability to take mobile phone calls while wearing the suit. In the sequel, maybe he’ll Twitter mid-battle. “Getting killed by Onslaught here, folks.”
For all the ways in which Iron Man may resonate with the geekerati, the most fundamental may be the fact that Stark’s the ultimate hacker. He DIY’s his own suit, MacGyvering together the original out of whatever he can scrounge from his captors before creating version 2.0 in his kick-ass basement. For a generation versed in unlocking iPhones and modding PS3s into DVRs, what could be better?
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