I Watch Films: Iron Man 2
At the end of Iron Man Tony Stark revealed himself to the world as Iron Man. At the start of this one he claims to have successfully privatised world peace. Inevitably this has brought out enemies. These include the US government who want him to hand over the Iron Man suit, Justin Hammer, a rival arms manufacturer, Ivan Vanko, the son of a brilliant scientist that Tony’s father screwed over, and, of course, Tony’s own spiralling problems which include being poisoned by the reactor in his chest and getting drunk.
Anyway, this is the first step in Tony’s journey to Age of Ultron*, but honestly Age of Ultron is not all that interesting so I don’t care? More interesting is the villain, that Tony is a dick to people and his Dad was a dick to people and that keeps coming back to bite them, but that doesn’t stop them being dicks.
Howard Stark is a character in Captain America: The First Avenger and his box and Nick Fury’s revelation that Howard was a founder of SHIELD firmly ties the MCU together. (Also the post credit reveal, but that’s a tease for the next film, rather than saying, in the text, “here’s how the events of these two films are related.”) We’re all very attuned to this now, expecting it even, but this was big at the time.
So has it aged poorly? Maybe not, every time one of these comes out there’s a big load of hype, and then eight times out of ten we forget it as the next one comes along a few months later. It’s just that this was back at the beginning of this cycle.
Watch This: You’re watching all the superhero films and this is one
Don’t Watch This: If a ten years deep MCU film gives you a feeling of nothing
* You could argue that it’s the second but I feel Iron Man is about Tony Stark and about superheroes and what they are, it isn’t about "what next?" and "how do we keep people safe?", which is how Tony gets on the Ultron train. He’s still a dick about it obviously.
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