Iron Man (2008)

  So I went ahead and bought the big-ass special edition Avengers box set.  You know, the one that looks like an aluminum suitcase with the Tesseract in it?  I'm weak.  It's freaking gorgeous, though.

We cracked it open Saturday night and, after much debate, decided on watching them in order of release.  I realized afterwards that I started this blog in December 2009 so I never reviewed the original Iron Man.  It's a little weird now, since I'm pretty sure everyone has seen it but that's never stopped me before.

Billionaire industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is demonstrating a new weapons system in Afghanistan when he is kidnapped by terrorists from the Ten Rings.  They want Tony to build them his newest toy, the Jericho missile system and threaten to kill him if he doesn't.  However, the one thing you don't do is put a weapons designer in the same room as a buttload of weapons.  Another prisoner, Yinsen (Shaun Toub), had previously installed an electromagnet in Tony's chest to keep shrapnel from entering his heart.  Tony improves upon the device and creates a miniaturized arc reactor, which he then uses to power a mechanical exoskeleton and escape from the terrorists.  Upon returning to civilization, Tony announces that his company will no longer create weapons, angering his business partner Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges).  Unconcerned, Tony begins the process of refining his exo-suit, eventually settling on the distinctive red and gold design.  And thus, it began.

The special features aren't really anything to write home about on this disc.  It does have six episodes of the Iron Man animated series, which I will have to revisit at some point and some deleted scenes that were interesting but that's about it.  Hopefully, the rest of the box set will make up for it.