Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Iron Man
2008 · Jon Favreau · Iron Man on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how long Favreau holds on faces during dialogue. (performance)
Downey talks fast, overlaps, trails off, doubles back. The camera stays put and lets him. Much of this was worked out on the day rather than written, and Paltrow answers him in the same rhythm.
Payoff: The film's engine is a man thinking out loud, not a costume; that is why the action can wait.
Notice the handheld grit of the cave against Malibu's gloss. (light)
Libatique shoots the Afghanistan sequences rough and close, then switches to clean, composed, glassy light for Stark's cliffside house and the corporate offices. Two textures for two worlds, applied consistently.
Payoff: The look tells you which world made Stark and which one wounded him, before anyone says it.
Look at the arc reactor glowing under Stark's shirt. (setting)
It starts as a car battery wired to a magnet holding shrapnel back from his heart. Then it powers the suit. Then other people want it. The same glowing disc keeps reappearing in new roles.
Payoff: One object holds the film's whole argument: the thing keeping him alive is the thing he sells to kill. In the reading: symbol (relation-image). The reading calls this a symbol: a single object that gathers up every relation the film runs on.
Track the build montages: tinker, fail, refine, repeat. (cutting)
Lebental cuts engineering into forward motion. Each pass adds to the last, failures included, so the sequences grow rather than collide. The pleasure is watching a problem get solved by hand, scrap by scrap.
Payoff: Competence becomes the spectacle, which lets a two-hour action film spend most of its time in a garage. In the reading: organic montage. Organic montage means cutting that accumulates like growth, each repetition enlarging the one before it.
Listen for the servo-whir and hum whenever the armor moves. (sound)
Every joint, flap and thruster has its own sound, layered with the reactor's hum and the chatter inside the helmet. The suit is audible even when it is still.
Payoff: Sound makes the machine feel worn rather than worn out, a body Stark lives inside.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: This is a film about a man building things with his hands; the fighting is a consequence.