Behold… Iron Man! Kinda.
Word had been going around this week that we’d get our first look at the title character from Jon Favreau’s eagerly-awaited superhero flick and today our chums over at Aint It Cool received this pic in their inbox, and so – ta-daaaa! – here’s Ol’ Shellhead in all his glory.
Now, a quick explanation here for the uninitiated. This isn’t the final armour that Robert Downey Jr’s brilliant (yet troubled) playboy billionaire arms developer, Tony Stark, will don in the movie, which is due out next May. That armour will be red, gold, sleek as a ferret that’s fallen into a vat of Brylcreem, and packed with more gadgets than a Currys.digital store run by Q Branch.
This armour, instead, is known as the Mark 1 armour, and is the first iteration of the Iron Man suit built by Stark when he’s held captive by Afghan forces in the movie’s prologue (an updated version of the comic book’s classic origin, which was set in Vietnam).
Forced to build a super weapon that will tip the war in their favour, Stark obliges, cobbling together the armour from spare parts and anything he can get his hands on – but he pulls a rather ingenious double-cross, donning the armour himself in order to kick butt and, more importantly, keep himself from dying. He has a dodgy ticker, you see.
So, the DIY nature of the first armour explains the bulkiness, the clumsy – although hulking, neatly RoboCop-esque – look, the serial numbers on his chest plate, and the colour. And frankly, we love it – it’s a neat homage to the 1960s comic books, but it’s also been rather cleverly updated, while Favreau has seemingly side-stepped one of the major potential pitfalls of the Iron Man armour: cheesiness. This thing looks badass, and the good thing is that it’s only going to get better from here, when the gold/red armour is revealed.
That may be sometime down the road – or maybe that’s the shot that USA Today will have. Either way, Iron Man is shaping up pretty nicely. It already has one of the best casts ever assembled for a comic book movie – Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow and Terrence Howard, as well as the ever-brilliant Downey Jr. - and this early image would indicate that Favreau is doing all the right things to ensure that Iron Man won’t get lost in next May’s mad shuffle, which also sees the return of James Bond and Indiana Jones.