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A Technofiction Review of
by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright May 2008
Summary
Iron Man was fun to watch, and the technofiction wasn't too bad, either. I loved watching all the inventing, and the integration of computers, robots and other high tech into the inventing process.
Pretty Good Story
From the technofiction perspective, this story came out pretty well. Tony Stark, the center of this story, is an arrogant, precocious inventor of weapons systems. We get to see him do a lot of inventing in the movie, which I liked. He was also technology friendly, he used computers and robots to help him do his work. It was fun to watch.
He also made mistakes. Those weren't quite so fun to watch because they were handled in a comical fashion rather than in a "test this safely" fashion... but they were at least shown, which is very good.
So, all in all, pretty good consistency, pretty good technofiction.
Inconsistencies
Here were inconsistencies I saw:
- I had a big problem with the motivations of the chief villain, his business
partner Obadiah Stane. Scruffy Afghan rebels are not going to have big bucks
available to buy state-of-the-art weapon systems, so why was Stane selling
weapons to them? He should be interested in customers with billion-dollar
defense budgets, not a terrorist outfit with a fifty man army that is starving
in cold caves in remote mountains.
- Having those advanced weapons show up in the hands of hillbilly Afghan terrorists
would be public relations suicide for Stark Industries, and Obadiah states
clearly that he wants Stark to prosper and profit. (Stating this motivation,
by the way, and talking about the power of the board of directors, is one
of the good features of this film).
- I had a smaller problem with Stark's arrogance, especially that portrayed
early in the film. Rich, powerful people get rich and powerful because they
are first and foremost good cooperators, the idiosyncrasies come later.
- The icing problem when the power armor flies straight up is bad science.
That suit would be getting hot from air friction, and it was already hot from
being warmed by air at a low altitude. Good science would let it ice up coming
down, after it got cold in the stratosphere, it would not ice up going up.
- The air-to-air combat scene left me uncomfortable. The flight performance
characteristics of the suit were too much like those of the fighters. Also,
those fighter pilots were pretty quick to start shooting: routinely shoot
what you can't identify and you're going to do a lot of friendly fire damage,
or a remake of the Korean Air 007 situation, where Soviet fighters shot down
a passenger jet that flew over Kamchatka.
Those were the biggest problems I saw. Compared to many action SF films, they were small. And... I loved watching Stark doing his inventing.
All-in-all, a fun movie to watch.
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