Okay, I know I recently made a rather harsh comment about the biggest movie of the summer so far (the remark, if you weren’t paying attention, was “screw Iron Man), but of course I went to see it on opening weekend anyhow (along with, apparently, most everybody else in the country), and, as it turned out, it was a hell of a good way to kick off the summer season. If you happen to be one of the three or so people left who hasn’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it.

But Bennion, you’re saying, it’s just another damn superhero movie, and those are becoming so very tiresome. Well, yes, you’re right… even I think the superhero genre has rather worn out its welcome in the past decade or so. Part of the problem, I think, is that most every superhero movie is an origin story made with an eye toward building a future franchise, and superhero origins tend to be somewhat similar, for the most part, so all these movies end up feeling the same. You know, they all tell the story of young Joe Schmoe, a meter-reader from Generic Urbantown, USA, who one day inhales an exotic mixture of gases that accidentally got dumped into a line he just happened to be checking at the time and now he’s Gas-Man, the Most Powerful Man on the Planet™. Except that inside he’s still just the same shy, insecure kid he’s always been, and now he has this terrible burden of trying to figure out how to use his power for good and not give in to temptation, and there’s this girl he likes but he can’t tell her his secret, and meanwhile, across town, a wealthy industrialist is preparing to do something unspeakably nasty… blah blah blah. As I said, these origin stories all start to feel very similar if you see enough of them, and in recent years we’ve seen a lot of them, and the whole genre has suffered as a result. In addition to over-familiarity, these origin-story movies almost always feel incomplete in and of themselves… take X-Men, for example. A great movie in many respects, but fully three-quarters of its runtime gets eaten up with introducing characters and their abilities and setting up the actual plot, which then is dealt with in the final fifteen minutes or so. The whole thing feels like nothing more than a prologue for the sequels to come. And that’s a pretty common issue with these flicks.

And then there’s the brooding.

Oh, god, the brooding. Because, you know, being a superhero is such a drag, man. All the superheroes of recent years have focused to an unhealthy extent on the downside of having mutant abilities, and granted, there would be some problems with that. Being unable to touch another person or looking like a moving rockpile or a living skeleton or whatever would be tough, as would all the damn super-villains always beating the stuffing out of you and kidnapping your significant other. I don’t think it’s especially insightful to note that all the angst in these stories is a large part of why comics have always appealed so strongly to teenagers. But another big element of their appeal — which the filmmakers seem to have mostly forgotten forget — is the wish-fulfillment factor. Being able to fly or walk through walls or regenerate any injuries instantly would be cool. There would be some real joy in these abilities, and very few of the movies have admitted that. In fact, I can think of only two, right off the top of my head: Superman: The Movie and Spider-Man. Those two films balance the angst of being “super” with the pleasures. But very few other examples of the genre have found that balance; most superhero flicks have become downright dour, and where’s the fun in watching that? (I blame the Batman films for much of this, but that’s another entry.)

All of which brings me to Iron Man. Yes, it’s another origin story that’s primed to kick off a whole new franchise (maybe a couple of them, actually…), but it’s significantly different from the usual formula we’ve all grown sick of. And it’s a whole lot more fun.

The difference comes mostly from the nature of Iron Man — a.k.a. Tony Stark — himself. He’s not a mutant or an alien, and he doesn’t have any kind of wild, inherent abilities that set him apart from everyone else. Like Bruce Wayne, he’s just an ordinary man, who just happens to have an outrageously huge fortune, an ingenious mind, and a mission. Unlike Bruce Wayne, though, Tony has a sense of humor. But more on that shortly.

If you don’t know the story by now, Tony Stark is an industrialist playboy who makes exotic weapons for the military, drinks excessively, and chases everything in a skirt. (He seems to catch most of them, too.) He’s a brat, basically… but he’s a genius and a weirdly likable brat. As the movie begins (with a literal bang), Tony is in Afghanistan, demonstrating his latest invention, the awesome Jericho missile, to some wowed generals. Then his convoy falls under attack and Tony finds himself the captive of a terrorist group that bears a strong resemblance to a certain real-world terrorist group that shall remain nameless here. The terrorists want Tony to build them a Jericho or they’ll kill him, and they have all the components he needs because their ammo dump is full of crates bearing the Stark Industries logo. Knowing they’ll never let him live, whether he builds them a missile or not, Tony is inspired to construct something entirely different: a suit of powered armor that will enable him to escape the terrorist camp. Which, of course, he does.

Back home in the U.S., Tony begins working on a more sophisticated version of his battle suit, with one goal in mind: to somehow undo the harm he now realizes he’s caused by naively assuming his weapons would only be used by “good guys.”

The premise of Iron Man is pretty ridiculous, even by comic-book standards. To think that one man could build something like a flying, heavily armed, AI-enhanced armor suit equipped with science-fictional “repulsor” technology all by himself, and that, even while wearing such a suit, he could survive some of the stunts we see in this film — well, it’s way beyond suspension-of-disbelief territory. And yet the movie works, and it works in large part because of its star, Robert Downey, Jr.

Downey is an actor I’ve long admired, but he’s never seemed able to find the right breakthrough vehicle, and, as others have noted, he’s often seemed to be holding his characters at a distance, projecting a layer of ironic self-awareness, as if he’s winking at the audience and saying, “we all know this is a part I’m getting paid to play, right?” But in Tony Stark, he’s finally found the role he was made for. He’s fully invested in this character, bringing Tony to life and endowing him with the actor’s own intelligence, charisma, and dry wit. (It probably helps that Tony is something of a mirror for Downey’s own troubled personal life.) Yes, it’s crazy to think that a single man could build that suit in his garage, but Downey sells it. He sells it by understanding that if you take away the money and the babes and the cars, Tony is a backyard tinkerer, a man not too different from my own father, creating something no one else has thought of before out of spare parts and sheer willpower. The audience knows people like that and we admire them, so we identify with the movie’s protagonist.

Moreover, Tony Stark is a character who evolves through the course of the movie in a way that not many other cinematic superheroes do, moving from spoiled and self-involved to noble and at least somewhat wiser, while still remaining, at the core, the same person. It’s a subtle change, one that could’ve been botched by a less-talented actor, but Downey is up for the task with a surprisingly graceful and endearing performance. He’s still a smart-ass at the end of the film, but in his eyes and his posture, his whole manner, you can see that he has matured. Again, Downey’s personal life is no doubt informing his portrayal, but it’s just what the character needs. And it works.

Downey is assisted by a tight script that hits all the necessary origin-story details (including some nice Easter eggs for the fanboys — be sure to stay through the end credits!) and still manages to tell a complete, self-contained story that develops organically throughout the film, and isn’t just tacked on after we’ve seen the creation of the suit. A sequel is, of course, already in the works after the movie’s tremendous opening receipts, but this movie could’ve stood on its own as a completely satisfying work without one, and that’s refreshing. (It’s also refreshing, incidentally, that this movie is populated by grown-ups, A-list actors in their 30s, 40s, and — in Jeff Bridges’ case — 50s, instead of generically beautiful kids. In more ways than one, this is a superhero flick for adults.)

Iron Man also, surprisingly for a summertime blow-’em-up, provides some good food for thought. It walks a fine line politically by both condemning the kind of arrogant meddling that got us into our current situation (i.e., arming and training the mujahadeen in the ’80s, who then became our al-Qaeda enemies in the ’90s) and simultaneously making a case for unilateral action when its required (i.e., Iron Man marching into a beleaguered Afghan village and kicking some terrorist ass). The movie doesn’t suffer from expressing both perspectives — this isn’t a case of confused themes brought on by multiple drafts of the screenplay — but rather it’s a delicate and deliberate balancing act that never veers into heavy-handed moralizing or superficial talking points.

Leaving aside all the movie-critic posturing, though, the movie is just plain fun without crossing the line into dumb. Unlike the usual deadly serious superhero flicks, this one has a sense of humor about itself, a wit that arises naturally from the characters and the situations, rather than from the insertion of obvious (and frequently lame and/or tacky) punchlines. And of course it’s a thrilling spectacle. with spot-on-perfect visual effects that don’t have so much as a whiff of video games about them; the aerial scenes, as so many others have already mentioned, are incredible. Earlier, I mentioned that wish fulfillment is one of the primary appeals of comics; well, Tony’s first flight test is one of the finest examples of that ever put on film. I found myself grinning stupidly throughout, just as I did when The Rocketeer took to the skies for the first time back in 1991, thinking to myself, “wow, I have got to get me one of those!” The tagline for the original Superman was “you’ll believe a man can fly,” which back in ’79 was pretty hard to pull off. The same tag could be applied here, because you will believe it… and you’ll gasp when he accelerates to supersonic for the first time, because it’s just so damn cool.

My one complaint about the movie is some overly obvious product placement for Burger King and Audi, but that’s unfortunately a reality of modern filmmaking, and a couple of plot holes I won’t reveal here (and which aren’t really so bad, but stand out because the rest of the movie is so well-crafted). These things aside, however, I really think Iron Man is one that’s going to stand the test of time…