s the sure fire hit of the summer. The first film introduced the self-made superhero to movie audiences and made Robert Downey Jr. an international superstar. Downey returns to the role of Tony Stark, the weapons magnate who created a flying suit of armour. “I think we just labored really hard to say okay, we’re audience members who made the first Iron Man successful and we’re smart which is kind of why we were drawn to it,” Downey said. “So what do we expect? We kept putting ourselves in audience seats. So to me, the mental and emotional aspects and development of Tony were a lot more [important], it’s strange to say personal because it’s not necessarily related to my life so to speak but just the mythology of saying you’re something, and being that thing are something entirely different. Also this whole idea of Howard Stark and the legacy and the shadow of that legacy that we always were talking about. “The trick is to feather them in so they don’t overwhelm the story and you don’t suffer from villainitis,” said director Jon Favreau. “By having Justin Hammer and Mickey Rourke’s characters come together fairly early, you really have two storylines that are weaving. You don’t have five separate storylines.
It’s the same thing with Scarlett as Black Widow, working her way into Gwyneth and Robert’s story. So we really tried to keep narrative flows going so that we didn’t get too convoluted, because I lose track of that stuff. Especially in sequels as the franchises get more complex, I don’t always remember what happened in the last movie. Not for nothing, I like to watch the stuff blow up, but I’m not going to do homework before I see a sequel to be up on everything. So we tried to keep that simple.” Rourke joined the cast fresh off his Oscar nominated comeback performance in The Wrestler. He plays Ivan Vanko, son of a Russian colleague of Stark’s father. Vanko uses the same Stark technology to create an electronic whip suit for himself. “I had a lot of fun,” Rourke said.
“It was great because I worked with some great people, and [Downey] was real easy to work with. It makes it fun. It was nice because I’d just come off working a film where there was no budget and I didn’t even have a chair to sit in, and I remember on the first day I asked for a cappuccino, and they said, ’What kind would you like?’ So it was nice.” Watching “Iron Man 2” is a little like taxiing in a plane – you definitely feel the g-force rush, but you nevertheless know you haven’t left the ground. Robert Downey Jr. is in fine form, and he’s brought a new, star-studded cast along for the ride: Samuel L. Jackson, Mickey Rourke, Scarlet Johansson, Sam Rockwell, Don Cheadle, and even Garry Shandling. Not to mention love interest Gwyneth Paltrow. It makes for a bundle of fun that effectively combines humor, CGI and metal-on-metal action, and if the movie feels like it’s little more than a setup for the franchise’s future, at least it’s a wild ride. The film takes off shortly after the first ended, with Iron Man flying high – his home-grown world peacemaker the envy of corporate competitor Justin Hammer (Rockwell), friend and military colonel “Rhodey” Rhodes (Cheadle) and even a snivelling US Senator (Shandling).
Of course, Tony Start (Downey Jr.) ain’t giving up the suit easily – especially when he desperately needs it to foil new baddy Ivan Vanko (Rourke), who has a old bone to pick with Stark – and the muscles, tattoos, and technology to pick it. Confusing the issue are man-with-a-plan Nick Fury (Jackson, who reprises a role from a post-credits scene in the first film) and his sexy right hand girl Natasha Romanoff (Johansson), who – as comic book aficionados know – are agents in the espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D. We’ll hear more from S.H.I.E.L.D. later (as in later Avenger movies) – which is part of what makes “Iron Man 2” feel like a franchise set up. Jackson and Johansson have significant roles to play in this film, but their presence barely moves the plot along; and in a film with this many characters, they represent an unnecessary weakness. Stranger still is a cameo by John Slattery as Tony Stark’s father and the posthumous assistance provided to his son via film clips and an oversized three-dimensional map of a “city of tomorrow.”
Disney fans will immediately recognize the reference: it’s an absolutely intentional homage to Walt, the film almost precisely emulating Disney’s presentation of EPCOT on television in the 1970s. The implications of Tony Stark having Walt Disney as a father aside, it’s another curious sidestep to an otherwise fairly linear storyline. The film truly belongs to Downey Jr. and Rourke. Downey Jr. alternatively copes with his character’s faults in pensive moments and chews the scenery with comic bliss; a lesser actor certainly would not be able to pull it off. And Rourke offers up what the first film lacked: a charismatic enemy for Iron Man. The rest of the characters are mostly along for the ride. And you should be, too.
Director Jon Favreau keeps the action hot and the CGI hotter; if the movie starts at a pensive pace (it has much to set up in the first half hour), it wastes no time cantering to a gallop as soon as Vanko, wielding electric whips, attacks Stark on a race track – an event that the narcissistic and seemingly impervious Stark definitely does not see coming. When Vanko teams up with money man Hammer, it spells trouble for our self-absorbed hero. And great fun for us. For many, the story will lack the staying power of the original “Iron Man” – and it’s difficult to argue the point. But “Iron Man 2” is a worthy successor nonetheless; it’s lost none of its original hip and swagger, and it’s even dead funny at times. It’s not perfect, but who cares. It’s Iron Man. Come along for the ride.
by Fred Topell
INTERVIEWING THE MAN WHO REALLY BUILT IRON MAN:
If you don’t know the name Shane Mahan, that’s your loss. He’s the real Tony Stark, the practical effects wizard leading the team who constructed the actual Iron Man suit for the Iron Man movies.
How many Iron Man suits are there? I mean, are there a lot of extras if one breaks or a piece breaks?
This is the conundrum because you always want to have a backup suit, a stunt suit, and we didn’t have a backup Whiplash suit cause the Monaco scene is rough. It has a set of rubber arms as well as metal arms, but Mickey ended up wearing the metal arms most of the time. But in terms of the Iron Man suits, we had very little. We had one hero and a couple of head backups but that was it, and the same for War Machine. We had one suit kind of work for the whole show.
So are you sitting there cringing on the set?
Yeah, absolutely. Of course, because you’ve got to make sure that the hero shots look great and if you do some stunt work in it, you’ve got to fix it back up. It’s challenging. Hopefully on the next one we’ll get a few more pieces to spread around. It’s like having your teenagers take your Ferrari out. You don’t know where it is, and when it shows up something’s a little bit off… That was sort of how I felt the whole time.
So how many people are spending how much time actually constructing Iron Man ?
I think in the end, it’s a revolving door, with teams that come and go. I think we had probably close to seventy people and you’ve got four, maybe five months. Also, you’ve got not just the Iron Man suit but Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash suit, the drones and other aspects that you’re building. You’ve got teams of guys working at their limits. Whiplash’s suit was great fun because it was so different than anything that Tony Stark’s world has.
Yeah it’s absolutely different; and it’s probably a practical suit used in most every shot. Oh yeah, he’s wearing it. The thing is, there’s electricity being animated through it for obvious reasons—you don’t want to electrocute your actor. It’s meant to have deathly voltage coming out of it. But the suit he’s wearing with the practical chest lights, and then the arms and the chassis, that’s what makes up Whiplash.
Tell me about the new suit for Iron Man2, the Mark IV.
We had really great success with the overall design of the first film’s suit, which was largely designed by Marvel’s art team—a great bunch of guys who are comic book artists, or come from that aspect—that helped enormously. Having said that, though, we learned what worked and didn’t work from the first film and then wanted to employ those aspects into the second film. You can go down the path of the first film, which was a working prototype. In the perfect world, or in the real industrial world, you’ll build a prototype and then you’ll build it again. And you’ll probably build it one more time before you make it where it you’re happy with it. In the film world, you get X amount of time and resources and you really are racing to the finish line with the one piece. So you don’t have a lot of time to do a lot of experimentation. What’s great about doing a sequel is you can get all the brains together in one room to talk about what worked and what didn’t work before—let’s be very scientific about it. So there were certain guidelines that we created for ourselves that are within what Jon Favreau wanted from us and what the actors wanted: We made the suits lighter, and we made them go on and off quicker. That helps production and that helps everybody—at midnight on a Friday night that certainly helps the actor’s backs, too. At this juncture, in terms of physical wearable suits, we built them from the hips up there were no legs or feet on these suits. Those of the the hybrid shots, if they are together, there would be a digital hybrid where the lower legs are digital but the upper body is practical.
So Iron Man was wearing green pants?
They had black ones with little checkered markers on them. Iron man is a tall suit, it’s a six-foot five comic-book proportion, so battling or having the guys in these long suits—it was unnecessary. Jon Favreau really wanted our practical suits to be for intimate work, for when the helmet or visor are up, when the guys are really talking to one another. There’s lots of great examples of that in the film. The design of the suit itself changed with minor things. Ryan Meinerding, who redesigned the suits, did a great job. We would work with him to get it to function over the actor’s bodies. And then we would take his designs, 2D designs and sometimes 3D designs, and remodel them to put in the process of how we manufacture the suits.
How do you actually fabricate the suit, do you use CNC machining?
Yeah, there’s just a rough pattern that’s made from, not a CNC, but rapid prototyping. Taking the digital model and making sure that the math is correct and having those grown. And then there is a lot of hands-on surface work, you have to sand and do a lot of work to those pieces to get them prepped. Then you remold them, cast them up, fabricate the suits, put them together, test it and paint it. There is a lot of processes to what happens—making sure we get the gold plating correct, the interior eye light and the hand light. There’s all these little details that add up and have to be very user friendly and easy to put on and off, and easy to perform in.
Do these suits really have a lot of moving parts and motors?
Well, there are joints that are moving parts. It’s the illusion of a surface of moving parts contained in a sort of hard surface. Obviously, when weapons deploy, even if it’s a practical shot, that’s a digital deploy on top of the physical suit because there’s not enough actual real-world space to put something like [missiles] in. Basically for the suits, the moving parts are the hands, the joints, the wrist, the torso, the neck and the arms. So the actor is performing it, the actor’s actually walking and doing the movements and that’s the way you have to make it—very user friendly. And the more comfortable you can make the suits, the more they’re going to be used, so that’s really what you go in thinking.
At Legacy Effects, you build actual, practical objects. How much does your team have to worry about the digital side?
There are going to be some shots that are completely animated because you can’y fly and roll through a house and come out unscathed with a practical piece of suit because it’s going to break. And having said that, you want some close ups where you want to really feel that Downey is wearing the suit. Working with the digital effects teams on both movies has been great. What we do is, we build the suit, we paint it, we get it all it surfaces ready from construction. Then they scan it and take hi-res photos of all the surfaces. The model they build is really the full-size suit. That’s the match, that’s how it works.
Even down to texture and paint, I assume.
The texture and paint yeah. So it provides them a map of what they need and it also keeps the authenticity of how the light works on the suit in the real situations. Then they can employ that into their technology. I think that their technology has gotten better in the second film and I think ours has too. We’ve got a much improved suit the second time around. That’s a really cool idea—the suit is modeled in 2D and 3D by artists, it’s manufactured in 3D and it’s rescanned to be a 3D model again. That’s what gives it its cohesive nature. I think that we embrace the digital technology and that’s why it’s a comprehensive visual effect. It’s one feeding the other.
A while back, you made a really interesting comment regarding digital vs practical effects. You said you knew your limitations and weren’t going to try to make Iron Man fly—those shots have to be entirely done with digital animation. But given an unlimited time and resources scenario, could you make it work?
That would be brilliant if that would happen. Wouldn’t it be cool to put a really great suit on one of those extreme parachuting kind of daredevil guys, and film him flying through the sky? That would be really cool. Just have some sort of hidden deploy parachute. I think you could get something amazing. But those are risky and not the sort of idea that goes well in a board meeting.
by Mark Wilson,
