How the First Iron Man Movie Writes the Perfect Character Arc

By Rachel Leitch

With the help of some friends, I recently found my way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not only has it been a very epic experience to watch all these amazing movies, but it’s been a very interesting excursion for my storytelling skills to think through why some of these movies worked and why others didn’t.

Of course, there’s no other way to get into the MCU than through the 2008 film Iron Man. (I suppose you could do the first Captain America, but work with me here.)

Once I had moved past the overall adrenaline and the exhilarating feeling of finally being able to say I watched an MCU movie, would you like to know the first thing that crossed my mind?

That is the most solid character arc I’ve ever seen.

As is my natural inclination, I immediately started dissecting the arc in my mind and reading articles, trying to find some chink in its armor. But I didn’t find any! The character arc truly was as strong as I thought at first.

I’m not alone in my opinion, either. K. M. Weiland of Helping Writers Become Authors writes, “This is a brilliantly plotted movie. It had a ton of ground to cover, and it somehow manages to tie all its many disparate pieces together into a fast-paced story that weaves multiple subplots without shortchanging any of them.”

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The First Thirty Minutes

Much of the heavy lifting to turn Iron Man into a solid story was actually done in the first thirty minutes of the film. We’ve all heard horror stories from the first thirty minutes or, in a writer’s case, the first fifty pages or so. Tell me if you haven’t heard this one: If your first fifty pages are boring, then your reader will return it to the shelf and your book will be doomed.

The first thirty minutes are where you lay a solid foundation and let readers know what kind of story this is going to be. While some readers will inevitably put the story down because it’s not the story they need, your goal is to never have your book returned to the shelf “because it was boring.” Because readers can tell when something is missing, even if they don’t have the writerly terminology for it.

I don’t know about you, but my hand didn’t stray anywhere near a remote during the first thirty minutes of Iron Man. This might be because my friend was holding the remote and it wasn’t my house. But I digress.

Let’s find out how this worked. I saw two ways, just in the first thirty minutes of the film.

     1.  We knew who Tony was.

From the very first scene, we had some ideas of who Tony was. And guys, Tony wasn’t even in the opening scene.

I mean, what does it say about you when you don’t even show up to receive your own award? While we didn’t know anything for sure, we definitely had our first impression.

Iron Man used its first impression to its full potential—making us wonder just who this Tony guy thought he was anyway.

We quickly found out in very little time at all. It only took one, perhaps two on-screen scenes to set up what kind of person Tony was. Even when Tony was off-screen, it used Rhodey and Pepper’s perspectives to paint a more complete picture.

Even while we were shaking our heads at his various antics, we couldn’t help but like Tony. We saw things both through his eyes and the eyes of the people who had to put up with him. His likable characteristics were just as strong as his less-likable ones, which is saying something.

Characteristic moments aren’t the type of thing you nail on the first try. You may have to write your opening scene over and over again until you find the one that aces the first impression. You should really only need one or two scenes before you’re on to a new topic.

This is where those other significant characters come to the rescue. How do they treat your main character, and what does that tell us about the main character?

For more tips on characteristic moments pulled straight from this movie, check out this article: https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/multi-faceted-characteristic-moment/

Iron Man didn’t wear out its welcome. It showed us what we needed to know about Tony and then it was off to the inciting incident.

     2.  The inciting incident hit where it hurt the most.

And I’m not talking about the shrapnel, although that probably hurt, too.

The writers could have let just about anything happen to Tony. His best friend could have died. He could have lost his company and been homeless. He could have been sued by another company.

But none of those would have hit him where it hurt the most.

So instead Tony ends up in the middle of the desert, captured by terrorists using the weapons he helped design, with shrapnel heading towards his heart to end his life.

The scene where he wakes up immediately following his open heart surgery says it all without saying anything. His immediate visceral repulsion when he discovers the arc reactor embedded in his chest tells us everything we need to know.

Tony Stark, the untouchable, the one who had it all, the one who didn’t need anyone—now reliant on a device implanted in his chest to even stay alive because of weapons he created. Worse yet, he’s completely alone. All the people who always chased him down whenever things got too crazy are far away and unable to help.

While any of the scenarios I listed above could have been tweaked to land a little better, none of it would have packed the same punch, would it?

This inciting incident plays on both Tony’s weaknesses (his “solo” mindset, selfishness, lack of foresight) and his strengths (his genius engineering abilities, his genuine desire to do the right thing) beautifully. The battle is now intensely personal.

But none of this would have happened if a generic inciting incident had been thrown in. Don’t just kill off a character or blow something up and move on. Analyze your character. What is the one thing that would strip everything from them? Then do that thing and call it an inciting incident.

The Not-So-Murky Middle

With such a dynamic first act (I mean, not everybody can boast terrorists in their first thirty minutes), it would have been easy to lean on it as a crutch the remainder of the film. Tony could have just laid low and played the good guy. Because he learned his lesson, right?

But Iron Man doesn’t let Tony off so easily.

The middle of a book is often called the murky middle, because for some baffling reason, it’s so darn hard to write. (If you know the reason, please let me know in the comments.)

Iron Man, however, suffers from no murkiness. And here are two reasons why.

     1.  Tony doesn’t get it all right.

Sure, Tony has had a literal and figurative change of heart. And he’s got a lot of ideas to get him and Stark Industries to a healthier place.

But old habits die hard. And when he is finally rescued by Rhodey, he returns to California and all of those old habits.

He tries to single handedly orchestrate the switch from biggest weapons producer in the world to zero weapons with no thought for how this will affect things in the future or affect his employees.

Good intentions. Not so great execution.

Tony doesn’t get it right on the first try. Or the second. Or the third. He doesn’t just do a complete one-eighty because of the inciting incident. He knows the destination he wants to arrive at, but he largely has to figure out the directions on his own.

Tony is still Tony, which means he has Tony’s weaknesses to work against.

His battle against his weaknesses naturally keeps the plot rolling. Sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses, but we never really know how it’s going to be. It makes waves and causes tension and drama as if it has a life of its own. And readers love drama.

Perhaps one of the causes of the murky middle is we’re just not letting our characters try enough.

     2.  The villain created foreboding.

Despite the number of well-done twist villains in the world, Obadiah Stane does not succeed because he’s a surprise twist villain. We pretty much all saw Obadiah Stane coming, right? One of my sisters I think actually called it in like the second scene he appeared in.

Obadiah creates foreboding, not because we don’t know he’s there, but because we do, we just don’t know what he’s up to. So every time Tony or another character trusts him, we cringe inside.

We don’t know what he’s up to, but it sure ain’t good. And we hang on for the revelation of his evil plan and for how Tony’s going to get out of this cleverly laid trap.

The mystery of Obadiah and his active antagonizing of Tony picks up wherever Tony’s weakness lags. When Tony isn’t battling his own weakness, when he’s actually getting things right for a change, in comes Obadiah and brings it all crashing down again.

The Final Battle

But of course, we can’t just let Tony’s weakness and Obadiah’s mystery fight it out until the end of the ages. Because who has time to watch all that?

The climax is the make or break point. It can be the most solid story of the year, and if the climax flops, the story sadly often goes with it.

Your first act built the wings. Your second act taught your character to fly. And now your third act needs to stick the landing.

So let’s look at two ways the last thirty minutes of Iron Man stick the landing.

     1.  The low point puts Tony back where he started.

With one snap of Obadiah’s wrist, the arc reactor is out of Tony’s chest, and Tony is right back where he started. Held hostage by his own weapons, no one to help him, and shrapnel headed for his heart.

Like the inciting incident, Iron Man could have settled for any number of things as a low point. But we’re not looking for something that will merely make your main character sad, we need something that will devastate them.

From the inciting incident, we already know what will devastate Tony, so the low point just uses that in a new and creative way.

Because the low point hit that soft spot again, we were on the edge of our seats waiting to see if Tony would react differently this time, to see if Tony had really changed. (And you know, to make sure he wasn’t going to die, that was a big motivator, too.)

If Tony hadn’t had this test before the climax, his upcoming win would have felt entirely too convenient.

     2.  The climax was immensely personal.

But it didn’t stop there! The low point is only the pop quiz. The climax is final exams.

Arguably, the climax was worse on Tony. Not only does he have to fight a long-time trusted cohort, but every weakness inside him is tugging in the other direction.

Tony can choose whether to sacrifice his own life for someone else as Yinsen did for him way back at the beginning of the movie, or he can give into that very-much-alive natural weakness to save himself with no care for the fallout.

He can let Pepper activate the reactor, thereby “officially” defeating Stane. Or he can try and seize the glory for himself and likely get them all killed.

And the thing is, the Tony that has to make that choice could very well make either one of those decisions. We’ve seen him win. We’ve seen him lose. Sure, his low point showed us he could do it.

The climax shows us whether he will do it.

And so we cheer when he makes the right choice because all of his hard work (and thereby ours in sticking with him) has paid off.

Conclusion:

The resolution shows us that the Tony we liked hasn’t changed.

If Tony had just stuck to the cue cards Pepper gave him, I don’t know about you, but I would have been wondering where the fun Tony went.

Tony still has his strengths and weaknesses, and they will probably never go away entirely. He still has a lot to learn. But he can grow past those weaknesses. He’s harnessed his strengths to take him to amazing places.

He’s a different, better person than when we started.

And that ultimately gives us hope.

Because we all, like Tony, know what it’s like to see something wrong in ourselves and want to make it better. Experiencing someone, even a fictional character, try and fail and succeed encourages us that we just might be able to do the same.

That’s ultimately why Iron Man works. It touched our own soft spot.

And that’s why character arcs are so important. Character arcs are our touch point into a foreign story, into events and worlds we’ve never experienced. Character arcs are where a fictional story meets real life, where the magic happens.

Excuse me, is that your story’s character arc soaring in the distance?

*What did you think of Iron Man? What are other character arcs that you think earn the “solid” label? Let me know in the comments below!*