Long Live the New Flesh (Hope It Doesn’t Rust): Warren Ellis’ “Extremis” and Shane Black’s “Iron Man 3” On Page and Screen

By Bob Clark

Though it came out in the same summer as the critically lauded box-office smash of The Dark Knight, the  first Iron Man film has come to be one of the most important and influential of the past decade or so’s worth of blockbuster entertainment, the opening volley in Marvel’s steady domination of the summer season with one series of hit-fest superhero flicks after another. Even if it weren’t literally the lynchpin of an evolving brand of tentpole franchise filmmaking– setting up the dominoes for subsequent Hulk, Thor and Captain America films to topple over in the lead-up to the almost chemical inevitability of The Avengers‘ chain-reaction climax– the upbeat and colorful movie would’ve easily been one of the stand-out comic-book based movies in recent memory, if for no other reason than the fact that it was able to deliver a super-powered hero who could be taken at least nominally seriously without any aggressive layers of angst or camp. The fact that it was bouyed by Robert Downey, Jr.’s cocky, pleasure-seeking performance as Tony Stark and so effectively relaunched his career into the stratosphere after more than a decade of being a tabloid punchline and occasional art-house redemption story at best helped lend a patina of reality to all of the histrionic explosiveness on-screen. We’ll probably never see Marvel or Disney let Demon in a Bottle out and unfurl the hero’s struggle with alcoholism onto the screen, but thanks to casting any viewer old enough to appreciate that aspect of the character can pretty much fill in the blanks themselves.

And though Downey does as good a job of carrying this blockbuster franchise, and to a certain extent all of the films connected to it, the way that director Jon Favreau built the visual world and terms that Iron Man and the surrounding Marvel films on cannot be underestimated– between all of the shared designs, action set-piece mechanics and even camera angles (nobody’s come up with a better solution to show Tony in the suit than cutting to those holographic-HUD filled close-ups, and probably nobody will), he practically seems owed a co-director credit on Joss Whedon’s The Avengers. Perhaps the very best thing that can be said of Iron Man 3 is that, despite all that it owes to the past films in its and sibling franchises, it feels as close as you’re going to get to somebody deviating from the Marvel house-style, at least until the studio gets X-Men and Spider-Man back into its corporate cinematic fold. As co-scripted and directed by Lethal Weapon and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang bad-boy Shane Black, there’s a genuine sense of novelty to be seen in somebody outside the fold of the typical choices for superhero-film directors– even Captain America‘s Joe Johnston and Thor‘s Kenneth Branagh seemed to fit all-too easily into the genre forms they were handed in those films, with all the gee-whiz razzle-dazzle of the former’s The Rocketeer and even the high-speech and visual spectacle seen the latter’s Shakespeare movies comfortable precursors to the mantle of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Black injects a different kind of energy into the action-packed proceedings, the same sense of fun you might get in seeing a young kid play with someone else’s toys. With the exception of the increasingly frantic finale, set-pieces are imagined and covered with a new sense of groundedness, if never quite shaking off their high-concept origins. Between a heavy attack on Stark’s home by assault-choppers masquerading as news vehicles and a mid-air rescue of passengers sent screaming into the sky after an attack on Air Force One, there’s already enough in the film to satisfy the contractual obligations for splashy fights and big explosions that the better part of the third act just comes off as overcomplicated overkill. That can be especially frustrating when Black seems to be a lot more interested in spinning out a savvy little story relies more heavily on Downey’s natural charms as a performer, especially one who mixes with a nice kind of volatility with his cast, trading barbs with Gweneth Paltrow and Don Cheadle so naturally they always sound fresh off the cuff, no matter how convoluted and strained the writing behind them might sound, trying as hard as possible to sound “real” without resorting to R-rated language. It’s even more to Black’s credit that the movie swims along best when it’s given enough free rein to ping-pongs back and forth between two very different types of superhero stories, taken directly from different ends of Iron Man’s history.

On one hand, we have what might be the most post-modern retrofitting of a comic-book character for modern audiences since all but carved an A-for-Anarchism on the Joker’s costume, in Black’s treatment of the Mandarin– the best that ought be left said about it is that between the writer/director’s gift for turning on a dime between menace and comedy and those of performer Ben Kingsley, who seems to have as much of a good time playing and deconstructing his role, is that it makes as good a usage of an outdated and potentially offensive character as you’re likely to see in a mainstream blockbuster, and weaves it cleverly into the latest in a series of modern adventure movies predicated on manipulative plot-twists. On the other hand, we have a Tom Clancy-esque high-tech thriller that amounts to a loose retelling of the Warren Ellis scripted Extremis comic-book arc, which saw Stark faced with an anti-government extremist who gets his hands on a nano-bot injection that rewrites the human body into an ultimate biological weapon. Hailing from just before the time of the first Favreau film, the Extremis story shows an Iron Man who’s recognizable to the box-office audience in broad strokes– cocky personality, a hint of womanizing– but whose zealous dedication both to his commitment as Iron Man to the US Government and to a corporation trying to divorce itself from any and all connection to the arms industry feel just slightly at odds with the grandstanding weaponized Hugh Hefner of the films.

Ellis does his best to try and recast Stark the industrialist as more of a technological visionary of the Steve Jobs model who merely experimented with the military in his drunken youth, and while it might make sense for long-term readers of the comics who know where to fit this period of the character in between his classic days as a member of the Avengers and the modern Civil War period which saw him hunting down a rebel Captain America and heading up SHIELD, anyone who hasn’t dipped their toe into more than just the multiplex aren’t likely to see him as anything more than a mannequin with word-balloons hanging around his head (which is about what can be said of Adi Granov’s so-realistic-it-becomes-synthetic artwork in anything other than a fight-sequence). Black gleans a few nice details from the Extremis arc– it carries a lot of the same sense of human bodies in constant flux of repair and desrepair– but for the most part it only takes the MacGuffin and ignores even the finer moments of Ellis’ writing, musing on the links between modern nano-technology and natural hallucinogens. Even the director’s sense of action, on the large and small scale, bears little in common with the original comics’ impressive, but largely traditionalist series of superhuman fights (if anything, the more tech-heavy and detailed presentation of the Iron Man armor in Ellis & Granov’s work has shown more influence on the Iron Man franchise as a whole, providing a useful template for how to portray the character’s arsenal in a real-world context).

As such, you have a diverting enough movie, especially for when it inevitably comes to cable and can be enjoyed the way most of both Black and Marvel’s output is best appreciated– in the comfort of home, on the sofa, half-drunk off passable beer somewhere between Red Dawn and a Bond marathon, with friends who don’t bother to keep their mouths shut while they watch. That way you can still enjoy the better parts of the film and tune out during lamer stretches, like Tony Stark’s strained PTSD attacks after The Avengers or the addition of a grade-school side-kick from Bumblefuck, Tennessee who seems to have wandered in from a Spielberg casting call. You can definitely enjoy a bathroom break during the last twenty minutes or so of generic action, which don’t have anything near the wit or fun of what came before. And it goes without saying, but at least at home you don’t have to put up with waiting for the latest of Marvel’s post-credits teasers. Spoiler alert– this time it really is just a tease.