Comic Book Physics
We watched Iron Man last week. Eileene insisted; I merely acquiesced. Despite the excitement it generated in the geek world, I had learned from the examples of Spider Man and other great dumps of licensed Marvel material onto the silver screen, and my expectations were rather low. I was not disappointed. Not that the movie didn’t deliver on its promises of popcorn-crunching spectacle, but that it delivered the bare minimum of anything else. If my expectations were low, that’s only fair; the movie sets its own bar rather low as well.
I bring it up not to review the movie as a whole, but to discuss one scene in particular. Shortly after Stark masters the use of his super-powered battle armor, he sees a TV report of a terrorist attack in Afghanistan, armed with his own merchandise. Determined to set things right, he flies there immediately. Unfortunately, he alarms the USAF, who, unable to identify Iron Man as a good guy, chase him around with a couple jets, and even fire missiles at him. This is a bit worrisome. Stark zips off at Mach 2—which we learn from Air Force control room chatter—but it’s not enough. He launches some chaff, but a missile gets past. He weaves around. No dice. The remaining missile explodes just behind him, and Whooooooah he goes into an arm-flailing comic tailspin, propelled forward by the force of the explosion. Boy, that was close.
Hardcore nerdlings have already spotted my objection. Iron Man is zipping through the air at over Mach 2, that is to say, over twice the speed of sound. By definition, this is over twice the maximum speed at which a mechanical wave can pass though a medium, in this case air. That’s what sound is: a mechanical wave passing through a medium. Any faster than that, and the molecules at the edge of the wave get in one another’s way; the moving molecules can’t push any harder on the ones that aren’t yet moving, and the wave collapses in turbulence. The expanding burst of fiery gas wouldn’t suddenly propel Iron Man with a dizzying burst of extra speed because it couldn’t possibly reach him; he’s flying over twice as fast as the burst itself.
Now that’s not meant as a criticism of the movie. Not really. It’s more an observation of the nerd mindset. We generally know about basic scientific and engineering principles like the speed of sound. Often, we know much more arcane technical information as well, like computing times for search algorithms and decay patterns of high-energy bosons, but even the most ignorant nerd can recognize that guards thrown backwards by an exploding prison door will end up on their backs, not face-down as international movie extra body language uses to express the idea that “this minor character is dead,” which also happens in the movie. Nerds get excited about technical details; it’s what gets us up in the morning. We notice details like this, and they irritate us. So it strikes me as odd when a movie like Iron Man, squarely aimed at the geek audience, without the same hope for a more universal appeal like that enjoyed by Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, plays so fast and loose with niggling technical details like explosions at Mach 2. It makes the core audience want to argue.
Occasionally, such argument can work in a show’s favor, as the continuing buzz over the bad physics of Star Trek helps sustain interest through half-baked attempts to rectify the show into a self-consistent whole, and it occasionally generates a bit of extra merchandising revenue, when nerds go out and buy the book which explains it all. But far more often, too much careless physics makes nerds roll their eyes and leave for less “stupid” shows, with a greater reverence for continuity and technical detail.
I had a similar reaction to the latest Indiana Jones flick, a similar formulaic popcorn-cruncher designed to make a few more bucks on a well-branded intellectual property and to test how many more times it could be done. To be fair, the movie was staying true to its pulp magazine and serial film heritage, just as Iron Man is staying true to its often ludicrous comic book roots. (And, also to be fair, I dragged Eileene to the Indiana Jones movie the week before, while she merely acquiesced, because she wanted to see Iron Man. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, I suppose.) But consider just how great Raiders of the Lost Ark was, because it knew when to step back from the stupidly, insultingly implausible devices of pulps and serials, while the rest of the series wasn’t great, because they didn’t.
That’s precisely where Iron Man lies. It’s okay, but never tries to rise above itself, or the dubious quality of its inspirational source material.