A Road Less Travelled

This summer was a very good summer for movies. There were several movies that came out that I was very excited about. And Iron Man was the movie that started the movie season off. I really liked Iron Man and had resigned myself to waiting impatiently until it came out on DVD, but Erie is a blessed town in that it has a dollar theater. So I got to see Iron Man again before the summer was through.

Actually, I saw it twice this week. I went on Monday with Tom and Elizabeth and then I went on Wednesday with my dad. As Dad and I were driving to the theater he asked why I like this movie so much. I gave him the first reason that popped into my head and was rather surprised at what I said.

Iron Man is a movie about redemption. Tony Stark is a rich, fast-talking, playboy genius who’s gotten rich off of designing and manufacturing weapons. He cares about himself and no one else until he is attacked and captured after a weapons demonstrations by people wielding weapons he’d designed and sold. He’s injured in the attack and has to build himself a new power source for his heart. He makes a suit of power-armor to break out of his prison and makes it back home with a new perspective and a new heart.

And then he makes a better suit and there’s lots of explosions and fighting and flying, but that’s just gravy on the story. It’s a story about a man who is saved from what he’d been and from the legacy he was leaving behind. He uses his new heart to protect the people he’d thoughtlessly put in danger, he recognizes the value of the friends who stick by him and he never ceases being himself.

It’s that last part that I started talking about on the way to the theater. Too often in Christian stories a character is a well-rounded character made of flesh and bone until he is converted. As soon as a character becomes a Christian he turns into two-dimensional cardboard that is indistinguishable from everyone else. He loses all the bits that made him unique. I’ve read a bunch of Christian novels. Frequently, they start interesting and insightful, but then turn boring about the time the main character is converted. It very sad.

And it’s disorienting because that’s not how life goes. When a person is converted he doesn’t jettison everything that makes him himself. He’s washed clean of his sin, but not his personality. Maybe he has strengths that he had been using sinfully, but now he is free to use his strengths to bless and not curse.

Which is what happens in Iron Man. No, Tony Stark doesn’t become a Christian, but he goes through the best thing a fallen world has to offer. So he is free to use his genius and his money and his smooth, fast talking personality to protect and care for people. Plus, he makes a wicked cool suit that makes things explode. Honestly, what more could you want?

I give Iron Man four and a half stars out of five. It loses half a star for two scenes with some, how you say, sensuality. As movies go it wasn’t extreme and it was an important aspect of Tony’s character to establish, but, well, that doesn’t mean I have to like it. The scenes are close to the beginning and once they’re past that whole element is gone from the movie. There was violence in the movie, but I thought it was well handled. It wasn’t gory or romanticized. And there’s supersonic flight! Did I mention I like this movie?