With Iron Man being the first live-action adaptation of this character, there is, as with the first X-Men film, plenty of origin and exposition. Stark is a man with a mission and doesn't waste time with petty criminals. As a result, there aren't too many outright action sequences ? three, by my count. What we get instead are beta tests and trials as Stark designs and builds his exoskeleton. Ever been an alpha tester? I'm betting you giggled like a fourth-grader through this part.

Though potentially hokey, these scenes also invite viewers to marvel (no pun intended) at the potential of a common man when given the right equipment. Without his suit, Iron Man is just a man, and that's what makes him easier to relate to than anyone who can climb walls or leap skyscrapers: We know that Stark's kryptonite and our own are one and the same. So true; I have nothing but trouble with the arc reactor in my ch... oh, wait.

Though the suit itself is the most evident example, Stark's lab (which doubles as a garage -- hey, it worked for Woz and Hewlett and Packard and plenty of others) is itself a work of art. The computers feature multiple displays, with items draggable from one to another -- realistic. The input device is some sort of light pen or Wiimote to drag and drop -- also feasible. But those items can behave differently based on which monitor they're on. Digital objects on the horizontal monitor become 3-D holographic projections that can be directly interacted with. Parts in a diagram can be rotated, separated and dragged to the trash, or worn like a glove. Tres cool. It would be wrong to beat up on a movie like this for unreasonable tech expectations, but never mind the holographic CAD, the Turing-worthy robot AI, the arc reactors -- I kept wondering where he got the never-fail voice-recognition interface. My horizons, they are low.

Stark also sports a digital butler: Jarvis, an unseen servant that's a nice change from the old Alfred Pennyworth type. We even hear Jarvis being uploaded to the Iron Man interface, which is a detail that could've easily been overlooked and then nitpicked in a review such as this. Wait ... Jarvis manages the arc reactor guarding Stark's heart ... heart. Jarvis -- Jarvik-7 ... ooh, I was slow there. Penalty, insufficient nerdiness, 5 yards. First down. (The initial model of Stark's suit is also shown as its operating system is uploaded, with snippets of code scrolling on a screen. I'd love a freeze frame to dissect that code; I betcha it has nothing to do with superheroics. I expect great things from the DVD for this scene, don't you?)

As for the suit itself, it's certainly a feat of engineering. More than just a mechanical contraption -- (as I suspect its real-world counterparts are) I suspect any current "real-world counterparts" are more along the Arrested Development functionality line -- this machine has a heads-up display, multiple concealed firearms, supersonic flight capabilities and sufficient plating to sustain heavy assault -- all this, powered by 0.16 grams of palladium. I'm still getting my mind around the logistics of walking upright while that weighted down, but somehow Stark can still react quickly enough to twist his torso and avoid a fired missile by mere inches ... not just once, but twice. I couldn't do that even when encumbered by only my own 160-pound frame! Our wise colleague Eugene Demaitre points out, by the way, that a powered exoskeleton would make that movement a lot easier. On the other hand, a powered exoskeleton would likely generate sufficient heat to not ice up like that. On the other other hand, those hand blasters also cheerfully ignore the laws of physics. This is about the time my eyes start bleeding.

The closest we get to honest-to-goodness real-world IT is when Ms. Potts does some "hacking," but her methodology, though enviable, is unbelievable. To bring a computer out of screensaver mode, she plugs in a USB drive that automatically grants access. Eh, I gave that a pass -- advanced USB dongle, why not? She then opens a folder called "Ultra Secret" (Where does a supervillain keep his master plans? In a neatly named desktop folder, of course! I prefer the more subtle "Misc," myself ... um, wait, ignore this comment.) and finds a foreign-language video, which she watches after typing the word "translate." Argh! Yeah, because no one in the media would have been on that broadcast like ugly on an ape -- Western playboy military-tech bazillionaire hostage footage wouldn't have aired on al-Jazeera, and if it did, no one would have made the effort to figure out what the heck they were saying, especially not Stark's high-military-command best-friend-since-college. Right. Even in Tony Stark's world, where the journalists are as shrill, stupid and slutty as Christine Everhart -- and, apparently, where Vanity Fair writers have all the professional bearing and access of underage MySpace bloggers -- this plot point was deeply dumb. I'm pretty sure that was a private video from the captors to Stane. Fair enough, though in that case, why the Daniel Pearl-type staging?