Ironman: Fairy Tales For The Guys

Much against my will and better judgment, I saw the movie “Ironman” a few weeks back and was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed it, because it was very much like the fairy tales I read as a child. I’ve come to realize, after seeing guy movies like the Star Wars, War of the Worlds, and now Ironman, that these movies are essentially fairy tales for men who never grow up, which pretty much implies all men on earth.

Tony Stark is a brilliant inventor and business mogul who is the envy of every man on the planet, for he gets to make a ton of money by inventing destructive missiles that he sells to an obliging government. While on a trip to Afghanistan to sell missiles to the troops stationed there he gets kidnapped by terrorists who try to force him to make him a brand new missile system for them as well. Oh, and incidentally, amidst this fracas, our hero has lost his heart (literally, not metaphorically) and is kept alive by a battery that uses magnetic forces to keep the shrapnel from his arteries. All straightforward so far? Good, because now the story gets really complicated.

With the help of a scientist who is also held hostage by the gang, Sparks develops a big hulk-like costume with advanced powers linked to his artificial heart, so that whoever wears it can launch himself into space and make a thorough nuisance of himself. All this while the idiot terrorists are thinking that he is diligently making missiles for them. With the help of his costume, Sparks becomes Iron Man and launches himself away from the terrorist hideout and gets back to civilization, where he announces that he will henceforth stop making war weapons, and spends all his energies on making a second Ironman costume, in flashy red, which he wears to rescue a bunch of people under attack by the same bad terrorists in Afghanistan. This new costume is even more powerful and can carry him high into the stratosphere.

Spoiler Alert.

But there is a twist in the tale. Sparks is double-crossed by an associate who steals the costume and tries to gain hegemony over the entire planet. After some complicated situations, Sparks and the double-crosser face-off and everything ends well. Through all of this there is Gwyneth Paltrow as Sparks’ super-efficient assistant-cum-girlfriend Pepper whose slim elegance recalls Wodehouse’s description of what Euclid would have whispered to a friend on beholding the very slim and very tall Horace Davenport, “Don't look now but this chap coming along illustrates exactly what I was telling you about a straight line having length without breadth”.

Ironman was incredibly entertaining, but what I want to know is, where were the Fairy Godmother, the Gnome, Puss-in-Boots and the Big Black Witch? If you can have men in red costumes launching themselves into space with the help of artificial hearts, you might as well have witches with brooms powered by radioactive fissile material that activates at a click of a button.