Iron Geek, er, Man

I am such a geek sometimes.

Not exactly a newsflash, that, but I’ve definitely been feeling my geek oats this week in anticipation of catching the new Iron Man movie. Yeah, that’s right, I’m all aflutter over a comic book movie about a guy who puts on red and gold armor to fight bad guys using “repulsor rays” and such.

There are reasons for this.

One is Robert Downey Jr., one of the great actors of his generation (my generation), who came perilously close to flushing his career – not to mention his life – down the toilet back in the 90s with a series of drug- and alcohol-fueled run-ins with the law. A decade later, Downey returns to the big screen as what appears on paper to be the perfect choice to play a desperately flawed hero -- an arrogant, hard-drinking uber-capitalist whose comeuppance forces him to question everything about his life, and convinces him to try to make something positive of it while he still can.

Another, I must admit, is the pure giddy fun of seeing another of my childhood heroes hit the big screen. Yes, I did collect comics all through my grade school, teen and even college years, and no, they didn’t rot my brain, thank you very much. They may have implanted some very archetypal ideas about good and evil, wrong and right, romance and loyalty and such – but what exactly is wrong with that, anyway?

A third is the fact that, while he’s never been my favorite, the Iron Man of the Marvel comic books has for most of his modern tenure been a wonderfully dysfunctional hero, a cocky s.o.b. with major alcohol and intimacy issues, not to mention shrapnel lodged near his heart that could kill him at any moment. All indications are that the movie is faithful to that vision, combining 21st century whiz-bang special effects with an equally three-dimensional lead character whose deep flaws give his heroism dimension and emotional impact.

Or maybe it was just that they closed the trailer with THE perfect song, Black Sabbath’s 1971 industrial music prototype “Iron Man.” Yeah, that was probably it...