So. I've been thinking about this movie a bit.
It seems like it should've been just pure silly blow-stuff-up fun, and it hit all the right notes, but somehow it just… wasn't. I think I thought a little too hard about it, and there are things about it that once you see, you can't unsee.
In the first film Tony Stark comes, through a combination of genius and accident, to have control of an overwhelming military force in the form of the Iron Man suit and the arc reactor that powers it. The arc reactor is compared to the atomic bomb; the technology of the suit itself is easily modified into a series of unmanned drones which brought up, in my mind at least, uncomfortable comparisons to the sort of technology currently being employed by the United States in the Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As the sequel begins, Tony is attending a legal hearing aimed at forcing him to turn this technology over to the U.S. military on the grounds that America's enemies are aiming to reverse-engineer it to create Iron Men of their own to attack us. Tony refuses, saying that these unsavory types are still twenty years behind his technology and that, through the threat of overwhelming force, he has successfully "privatized" world peace. "You're welcome," he quips to the discomfiture of the Senator presiding over the hearing and to the cheers of the general public.
There's a problem with Tony's glib solution to national security beyond the obvious fact that it's based on an oversimplification of complex issues: Tony is dying from overexposure to the fictional element that powers the suit. The security of the free world relies on his remaining decades ahead of the competition, but he doesn't have decades. Tony stumbles drunkenly (sometimes figuratively, often literally) through the film, desperately searching for someone to whom he can entrust his legacy.
Can he hand over his military and technological power to the U.S. government? No. They are incompetent and hopelessly entangled with special interests, and when they do get a hold of an Iron Man suit due to Tony's trust in the one competent, honest soldier in the movie (played by a brow-furrowed Don Cheadle), its security is almost immediately compromised. Can he put his trust in the private sector, in the form of rival industrialist Justin Hammer? Lord, no. They are even more incompetent, not to mention irredeemably corrupt, providing financial backing to the film's obligatory mad scientist villain.
When Tony hands the keys of his company to obligatory love interest Pepper Potts, it seems less an act of trust than one of resignation, a total abdication of responsibility. In fact, even disregarding his illness, Tony himself is an entirely untrustworthy steward of the immense technological and military power he possesses, getting drunk and using it to perform tricks for party guests.
By the end of the film, of course, the villain is defeated, Tony's fatal illness is cured, and the status quo is restored. But the status quo is so unstable and utterly untenable to begin with that it left me with little comfort. The government is still incompetent. The forces of capitalism are still corrupt. Tony is still irresponsible. And the enemies of freedom are still working feverishly to catch up to the technological superiority that is all that keeps them in check.
To read all of the above, you might think that Iron Man 2 was a thoughtful and darkly conflicted analysis of the United States' position in world affairs. Nothing could be further from the truth. The film raises these issues seemingly by accident, and then seems almost embarrassed at the deeply disturbing questions it asks and the total lack of answers it offers to them. In a profoundly nihilistic fashion, its only response to any of this is to make something else blow up good or to show another group of sexy ladies literally dancing across the screen. We're all screwed anyway, it seems to say, helpless victims of forces far beyond our ability to influence, so we might as well enjoy the fireworks as everything is blown to hell, might as well listen to the band play on as the Titanic sinks around us.
In nearly every scene, whether it's the legal hearing or an F1 race or the Stark Expo which reminds one of the conferences in which Apple announces its next new gadget, Tony always has an audience. And the audience always cheers. Or screams. And all too often, it's impossible to tell the difference.