Herein lie Iron Man spoilers, so be careful.
So imagine you have this highly advanced little trinket that you’re able to whip up in a manner of days from parts you found in a cave. Imagine, too, that it keeps you alive for the foreseeable future. When you get back home, you’re going to build like fifty of them to keep on hand, right?
Not if you’re Tony Stark. You should only ever have one. If you upgrade and replace the first one, you should destroy it. It’s never going to break because you’re just that frickin’ awesome, right?
Seriously, this guy would have a problem keeping his company’s website up 24/7, much less creating high-tech superscience on a stable, dependable basis.
Granted, Tony gets points in this case because he’s preventing the device from falling into the wrong hands, but, with proper security, building two couldn’t be that much more of a risk. Especially when it’s the size of your fist, and you could create a compartment inside of your suit to carry it around.
You’re trapped in a cave. Terrorists are forcing you to build a single missile launcher, or they’ll kill you. What do you do? Well, if you’re smart, you build one very large weapon and some form of shield–something extremely quick to design and build, because you don’t have much time. And while you’re building it, you disguise it to look like a missile launcher. That way, when you finally do bust out, you have the element of complete surprise.
Tony Stark says screw that noise. Tony Stark’s solution is to build a suit of experimental power armor fueled by an even more experimental power source, which would take friggin’ forever. Tony Stark’s solution is to build a crapload of guns that can be installed into it. And there’s no need to disguise it as a missile launcher, even though a suit of power armor looks markedly different to build.
Also, screw creating any protective gear for the people helping you, so that they can escape. You’re a main character; they’re not. They don’t deserve to live.
To be fair, his solution works, but only because the terrorists who captured him were stupid and gullible. In the real world, they would probably have put a bullet through his head at the first sign that he was trying to cross them. What do they care if he doesn’t build them an experimental missile launcher? They’ve obviously got a direct connection to get the goods from his company; it’s eventually coming their way.
If there’s one thing you learn from taking on extremely ambitious projects, it’s that you can’t do it alone. Sure, you might have all of the skills to do each element of the project, and you might be able to use them on a small project. But it doesn’t scale, because trying to switch from one skill set to another is mentally expensive. Try building something more complicated–like, say, a ridiculously experimental suit of flying power armor–and you’re going to get burnt out. And it’s going to take forever.
Tony Stark, however, can somehow do it in no time at all.
So, from what I was able to discern, Tony Stark is filled with shrapnel, and needs an electromagnet to keep it from accumulating in his heart. That’s a pretty elegant solution for a doctor trapped in a cave to come up with.
But he needs to wear this solution forever? What? Seriously, they have cured certain forms of cancer–a disease where cells indistinguishable from the rest of your body’s attack it, which makes targeting them really difficult. Cleaning up some metal flakes should be child’s play. If you can pull them away with a magnet, surely you can collect them. At the very worst, it’s going to take a year of treatment or something and then follow-up appointments to make sure that nothing was missed.
And Tony Stark would probably know this if he would go to a doctor who would, you know, know more about things like that. I mean, this is the equivalent to blowing off a kidney transplant and requiring dialysis (OK, to be fair, portable superscience dialysis) for the rest of your life.
“Hi, I had an epiphany, so I’m just going to stop all production of every product my company makes. OK?” That’s great, but how are you going to explain to little Timmy and Susie why Daddy can’t afford food this month?
Tony gets points for completely stopping the process (his entire company) to try and analyze what went wrong (why weapons got into the hands of terrorists). And he gets extra points because he actually gave a crap about his products being used for evil. However, Tony loses points for going into crisis mode before analyzing the severity of the situation–was this a small leak of weapons to terrorists, or is there an ongoing hemorrhage?
… it’s a really good thing that Tony Stark has that superhero thing going, because he’s just not cut out for business or manufacturing.
Also, I overanalyze the hell out of movies… but I likes my realism dagnabbit.
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