SpoutBlog on spout.com

So often reviews of films like Iron Man, even positive ones, give you the sense that the critics are a bit embarrassed that they’re required to go through the motions of critiquing a Hollywood product for which financial success and pop cultural domination is a foregone conclusion. I’m the first to sympathize with the critical crisis of futility, but it baffles me that so many critics so blatantly suggest that it’s barely worth their time to decode and deconstruct the films that are going to be seen by the largest number of people. Check the qualifiers that get thrown around: “As big-budget comic book adaptations go…”; “works well enough as your standard comic-book blockbuster.” Read: “Giving this film the full strength of my critical acumen would be beneath me.”

So it’s no surprise that the strongest and most considered review of Iron Man that I’ve read comes from a blog. Though io9’s Charlie Jane Anders admits that Iron Man “is not exactly a perfect movie,” she carefully deconstructs its political slipperyness and “Cronenbergian body horror” before branding the film “the first comic-book movie that’s actually better than its source material.” Traditional critics bitch and moan that their reviews of “sure” blockbusters don’t matter, but when millions of consumers invest in a shared entertainment experience, film reviews transcend arts reporting and become anthropology. It’s always exciting to see someone take the responsibility of that anthropological study seriously.

An excerpt from Anders’ review after the jump; you can read the full thing here.

Part of Iron Man’s great strength — and the reason it’ll probably make a squillion dollars — is that you can read whatever you want into its intensely political storyline. You can view it as a straightforward diatribe against America’s long history of arming thugs and the arrogant weight-throwing-around that has turned Afghanistan into a warlord-ridden wasteland. Or you can see it as a profoundly conservative polemic about keeping power in the right hands — Tony is wounded at exactly the same time that he starts to doubt his own righteousness as an arms maker, and he regains his strength when he starts flying back to Afghanistan and kicking the shit out of the bad guys there. Either way, Iron Man is not a pacifist movie, and it bends over backwards to be pro-military and pro-government, even in the midst of speeches about how weapons are evil.