Iron Man

Lisa and I saw Iron Man last night. We had seen three very serious movies in a row - two of them about Nazis - and needed a break. It is exactly that. Conditional on genre it is excellent (with a wonderful surpise / setting up the sequel ending). I do have two minor complaints.

First, near the beginning of the movie our hero, Mr. Stark, spends three months in a cave in Afghanistan. When he comes back, he wants only two things: an American hamburger and to hold a press conference, in that order. What hamburger does his highly paid staff obtain for him? Burger King! After three months in a cave! It is true that in 1979 after two weeks in the USSR and communist Poland, most all of our high school tour group made a beeline for Burger King in West Berlin (ein Whopper mit Kase bitte!). But that is because we did not know (and indeed there may not have been) better burger places in West Berlin in 1979. There most certainly are better burger places in Los Angeles in 2008. I have no objections to product placement per se, but it should not fight against the coherence of the movie. The Maxim product placement works a lot better.

Second, at one point Stark's trusty computer butler tells him not to do something in his newly constructed Iron Man suit because "terrabytes of calclations" remain undone. Now, I recognize that in some broad sense the whole point of Iron Man is ignoring the realities of physics and engineering. At the same time, it seem like in a movie of this sort, if there are details that can be handled correctly, they should be. If you can spend 100 million plus to make the movie, then you can afford to have some actual technical person look at the script. A terrabyte is a unit of computer memory; a gigaflop is a unit of calculation. Jeez!