Okay, so the title of this post is misleading, but hear me out. One of the down sides of being without television or internet, and being burned out on reading, is that one can sit in one's apartment and continue to watch the exact same movie on DVD over and over again ad nauseum.Well, maybe it's just me then, but this is what has happened to my life in the past week. I get home from work, I'm tired, so I sit down in front of my computer and watch "Iron Man". Boring, right? However, the more I watch it, the more I am disappointed by how absurd it actually is. I know it's supposed to be a superhero movie, and it is, but it takes place in the obvious real world. For that reason, I have many qualms with specific events in the movie. Here they are at random:
1.) When Tony Stark is escaping from the cave in the first Iron Man suit, he flies up hundreds of (if not over a thousand) feet, and then falls straight down into the sand. The suit completely breaks apart, but he is unharmed. Bullshit. He would be dead. Sand does not act as a cushion.
2.) Jarvis is the computer that runs Stark's house and Iron Man suit. I'm sorry, but there will never be technology that can render human equivalent thought processes. In order for Jarvis to communicate with Stark, they would both have to be on the same mathematical communicative scale. That is, computers "think" (operate) according to binary code. Computer thought is limited to a sequence of 1's and 0's. Science will never be able to replicate a metaphysical being, that being the capacity of human thought. Of course, we can create rules of logic and rules of law that something (let's say a computer) could adhere to, but the computer would never be able to operate in a way that Jarvis from the movie does. Tony and Jarvis's interaction is not merely functional, but conversational. "Working on a secret project are we?" A computer would not be able to detect signs of stress and secrecy. This is a deeply philosophical matter. I think I've made my point on this.
3.) When Pepper is watching the ransom video on Tony's work computer, she merely types in a command to 'translate'. I'm assuming (and don't hold it against me) that his captors were speaking Arabic, which is not a language that flows like English. That would mean that the computer would have to hear it in Arabic first, and then render it in English. But in the movie, it is translated and read in a linear fashion.
On a final note, I will say that I did enjoy this movie. It's an action film, and it entertained me. But now that I've seen it hundreds of times (not literally), I'm more likely to note it for its shortcomings.
