From sinner to saint: The evolution of Iron Man in the MCU

Eleven years, nine movie appearances from Robert Downey Jr. and seven (yes, 7) viewings into Avengers: Endgame, it’s hard to shake the impact the character of Iron Man has left on me. Below are my final musings on the full story-arcs of the “MCU Big 3:” Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. Though if you clicked on this article I’m sure you’ve seen Endgame at least once by now:

*MAJOR MCU SPOILERS & RECAPS AHEAD!*

“Saving” the best for last: Tony Stark

Iron Man. The one that started this whole “Shook Me All Night Long” ride of the Marvel Cinematic Universe back in 2008.

But here we are, 23-MCU movies in, with Avengers: Endgame at 2.689-Billion dollars and climbing as it tries to keep running towards Avatar to earn that All-Time Box Office Worldwide Gross record. With only the man behind Groot (Vin Diesel) dawning the same movie character in the Fast and the Furious’ movies (in 9 of 10 movies), Robert Downey Jr. has been Iron Man in 9 different MCU movies (Iron Man trilogy, Civil War, Spiderman: Homecoming and all four Avengers movies). That is no small feat.

And this is no small article, but feel free to humor me as I walk you through the transformation of Tony Stark.

The Prodigal Stark

While there is quite a lot you can take from the MCU’s Tony Stark in his successes and as well as his failings, early Stark most reminds me of the Prodigal Son.

In the first Iron Man, we are introduced to the fun loving, money spending, lady’s man, “genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist” Tony Stark. He makes no qualms about sleeping around, even in front of his trusty assistant, Pepper Potts, whom he (much later) comes to love and marry. In his weapons pitch to the U.S. military (still present in the Middle East during a then-living Osama Bin Laden fearing world), Stark’s Humvee is bombed and he gets taken prisoner from what, at first, looks you’re your run-of-the-mill terrorists. It is not until building his Mark I Iron Man suit to escape imprisonment from a cave and being picked up in a middle of nowhere desert that Stark realizes there is a wolf in sheep’s clothing somewhere within his company, Stark Industries. That wolf is Obadiah Stane, one of his departed father Howard Stark’s most trusted in-company confidants. Stane has been double-dealing, selling Stark weapons to the U.S. military as well as to terrorists around the world. Ironically, creating the Mark I Iron Man suit technology flushes out the traitor. Stark fights Stane’s overly large version of a suit – Iron Monger – and defeats him.

While that is all fine, dandy and very entertaining, Stark still hasn’t given up his spotlight seeking, prideful ways, telling the world at the end of the first movie “I am Iron Man.” He was in it for the glory. He was in it for the fun. In short, he was enjoying the spoils of his father’s inheritance.

In Iron Man 2, Stark tells the U.S. government they can’t have his Iron Man tech but they should thank him for successfully privatizing world peace. This movie’s villain, Whiplash, aka Ivan Vanko, rears his ugly-from-envy-and-resentment-filled head, targeting Tony for Howard Stark’s slights to his father, Anton Vanko, in their former partnership, one which helped create the arc reactor that powers Tony’s Iron Man suits. In this film Tony’s use of palladium for his arc reactor cores begins to poison him increasingly as he uses his suits, so after batting back Whiplash from trying to kill him in a Monaco Grand Prix race, Tony throws himself what he thinks will be his last birthday party.

In this party it is easy to see Tony’s irresponsible and self-centered side. On the surface it seems like he’s maybe “just having fun,” yet, anyone that knows anyone who says that when they are drunk, also knows the reality that sloppy “fun” can turn tragic in a heartbeat. Pepper and his best friend/military contact James Rhodes try to shut down the party and get him out of his Iron Man suit before things get out of hand, but when Tony begins endangering his guests by drunkenly shooting repulsor blasts from his hands, “Rhodey” dawns an Iron Man suit for the first time, and an indoor Iron Man vs. War Machine fight ensues. Rhodey commandeers Tony’s Mark II suit and takes it to his U.S. military superiors.

Luke 15: 17-19 reads, “Coming to his senses he thought, ‘How many of my father’s hired workers have more than enough food to eat, but here am I, dying from hunger. I shall get up and go to my father and I shall say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son; treat me as you would treat one of your hired workers.”

Though Tony Stark never runs out of money, his early MCU poverty of morals is the same as the Prodigal Son’s bad choices which led the Prodigal into abject monetary poverty.

Yet Tony Stark doesn’t get into repentance mode for a while.

Nick Fury, newly discovered undercover S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Natasha “Black Widow” Romanov (which Tony discovers in Iron Man 2), and even Captain America/Steve Rogers (in The Avengers) have to give Stark a handful of lectures before he can put aside his ego long enough to fight for something other than himself. When Rogers tells him he isn’t “the type to make the sacrifice play; to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you,” Stark looks for ways out. He gets defensive. In the argument with Steve, he does everything he can to keep his shoes clean…until proving him wrong in the “Battle of New York.”

When Loki and his outer-space army on-loan, The Chitauri, are almost proving too much for the newly formed Avengers, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s top brass pull rank on Fury and order a nuclear missile to be fired into the heart of Manhattan to stop the alien threat from spreading. Cap’s words must have had an effect because Iron Man manually guides the missile and flies it straight through the Tesseract/Space Stone’s portal and into deep space, effectively nuking the main Chitauri mothership. It serves as an Independence Day-like knock out and depowers all the other Chitauri in New York. So ends the first Avengers movie and then it’s schwarma time.

In Iron Man 3, Tony has a major transition. After PTSD-like panic attacks at the mention of the Battle of New York or anything Chitauri or space-related, he wants to keep fighting as Iron Man vs. a new Bin Laden-like villain, “The Mandarin,” yet Tony also realizes being Iron Man is putting a strain on his romantic relationship with Pepper. A threat on the West, some sleuthing to the East, a fake Mandarin here, two mad scientists there and a scary lava-esque Aldrich villain later; Tony decides he is going to hang up – or rather blow up – his Iron Man suits for love of Pepper.

Does that hold?  Nope.

Because he’s Tony Stark and he still wants what he wants, yet as he continues on, he starts showing shades of not just the Prodigal Son but another son as well.

A Second Son

Through Avengers: Age of Ultron, Stark morphs further and starts wanting to put “a suit of armor around the world.” It’s kind of like this:

“A man had two sons. He came to the first and said, ‘Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.’ He said in reply, ‘I will not,’ but afterwards he changed his mind and went. The man came to the other son and gave the same order. He said in reply, ‘Yes, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did his father’s will?” They answered, “The first.”

The sons in Jesus’s “The Parable of the Two Sons” in chapter 21 of St. Matthew’s Gospel, are both trying to do good i.e. their father’s will. One son says he will do it and does not. That’s like Tony becoming head of Howard Stark’s company but playing all the live-long day instead of actually running it. That carefree attitude is Tony’s in Iron Man 1, 2 and most of The Avengers.

The second son says he will not do his father’s will, yet he thinks on it and goes and does it later.

The second son is like Tony Stark from Age of Ultron all the way up to early on in Endgame.

He wants to do the right thing, which to Stark means protecting the world from greater alien threats, yet he constantly goes about it in the completely wrong way. That is what happens when we try to do things without guidance from God or from anyone but ourselves; we end up making things worse.

It’s Stark’s hidden pride mixed with Wanda Maximoff-enduced fear that is not only almost his own downfall, but almost the downfall of the human race.

In Age of Ultron, Stark is so obsessed with creating something to protect Earth that he creates Ultron, whose artificial intelligence from Hydra’s Baron Wolfgang von Strucker (via help from the Mind Stone which was hidden inside Loki’s scepter from Avengers 1) creates a robot bent on destroying not only the Avengers but all of mankind. Unfortunately, Tony didn’t consort the rest of the team (not once but twice), and tries to rectify the Ultron situation by creating a better/less homicidal robot. This time, with a mix of Jarvis’s AI, part of Ultron’s AI, the Mind Stone and a little electric Thor juice, Vision is created.

Vision, thankfully, is on the side of peace and aligns with the Avengers to stop Ultron, but not without an almost global-level catastrophic event as Ultron sent the city of Sokovia flying up and plummeting back down like a meteor. All of this could have been avoided had Stark sought council with this peers or some higher authority/higher power like, oh I don’t know…God perhaps?

Either way, as Captain America: Civil War rolls around, Tony begins to feel the guilt of his errors after a mother corners him at MIT and guilts him about her son dying in Sokovia during the battle with Ultron while he was volunteering there. Instead of asking for professional help to process the grief, Stark takes General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross’s “invitation” for the Avengers to sign the United Nation’s Sokovia Accords or retire, alleging, “We need to be put in check. Whatever form that takes, I’m game.”

When a subsequent bombing of the U.N. by Helmud Zemo disguised as Bucky “Winter Soldier” Barnes happens, Stark’s guilt-led insistence to bow down vs. Steve Roger’s standing up for his friend with an invisible “Bucky didn’t do it” sign plastered on his back, tears the Avengers team in two. After an amazing airport battle sequence between the two Team Cap vs. Team Iron Man factions, and after most of Team Cap is behind bars, Tony finally learns it actually WASN’T Bucky that bombed the U.N. He goes to help Cap and Bucky put the emo Zemo away, showing up to stop what they thought was going to be a team of even more elite Winter Soldiers, but ends up being a viewing party of Tony Stark’s least favorite home video…his parents’ murder at the hands of then Hydra-brainwashed Bucky. It is then Captain America reveals he knew Bucky was responsible for the Starks’ murder and had been keeping that fact from Tony. As Iron Man, Cap and Bucky fight, Zemo would have almost escaped had it not been for Black Panther. Forgiveness was not something in Tony Stank’s vocabulary at the time.

Fast forward through Avengers: Infinity War and it’s more of the same, with Tony being so self-driven-wedged out of Cap’s life that even with Thanos and the Black Order on the way to destroy the world to get the Infinity stones on Earth, Tony can’t bring himself to call Captain America even at the behest of fellow science bro, a Hulk-lossed Bruce Banner. Stark realizes Thanos is the big bad he had been wanting to protect the planet from, but because of the division between the Avengers, they never get to fight him on a fully united front. Thanos heists the Infinity stones, gets passed the deep-space half/Avengers-Guardians of the Galaxy fight with all but one stone, and goes to Wakanda to pull the final stone out of Vision’s forehead. Then, with a snap of his fingers, Thanos erases half of all life in the universe.

Tony Phase 3: Egomaniacs Can Grow Too

If you’ve seen Avengers: Endgame you know Tony Stark’s story-arc ends very poetically, yet before the time hijinks ensue, he starts off as a slightly better version of his old self.

Floating in space almost like a dejected prophet, “The Futurist” (as Hawkeye coined him in Civil War) eats his last bite of food and is on his last breathes of oxygen in a ship with just him and Nebula, when Tinkerbell, I mean, Captain Marvel somehow finds the ship floating around in the dark void of space. Shortly after she flies the ship back to Earth and safely lands them, an emaciated Tony Stark is still full of gall for Captain America, calling him a liar because of the “you know who murdered my parents but didn’t tell me” thing. What’s left of both teams of the Avengers and Guardians venture to where Nebula knew Thanos would retire after “the Snap.” When they get there, they find that Thanos used the gauntlet to destroy the stone and this time Thor goes for the head.

Fast forward to five years later (2023?), and Tony and Pepper are finally married and have a daughter named Morgan.

Yes, Tony has become a father, and like most men, fatherhood has changed him for the better, yet again as per his MO, not all the way at first.

The thing that gets Endgame going is the miraculous return of the astonishing interdimensional traveling Ant-Man, who returns from the Quantum Realm he was previously stuck in at the end of Ant-Man & The Wasp. After an assist by a storage facility rat and Ken Jeong’s cameo, Scott Lang (aka: Ant-Man) reunites with part of Team Cap back at the upstate New York Avengers facility. He pitches them the idea of pulling a “time heist,” that is, somehow using the Quantum Realm to go back in time and steal the Infinity stones from certain points in time to bring everyone back that was Snapped to dust by Thanos in Infinity War.  Lang got this idea from knowing that time moves differently in the Quantum Realm.

When this mulligan of a plan is presented to Tony Stark, like the second son in the parable of St. Matthew’s Gospel, his initial reaction is no. He doesn’t want to jeopardize what he has with his new family, stating, “I got my second chance right here” to Cap, holding his daughter Morgan in his arms. Yet, after a chance spray of water makes him reflect on the dusted Peter Parker, he begins working on a way to navigate the Quantum Realm for time travel and he figures it out. He speaks to Pepper about it and she’s the one that convinces him that he wouldn’t be able to rest if he didn’t try and bring everyone back.

In other words, it is Pepper that saw in Tony his protective nature. Even before he became her husband and Morgan’s father, I would wager like St. Joseph, Tony Stark was always a great protector.

As the time heist gets underway and Tony goofs on getting the Tesseract back in 2012’s Battle of New York, a second chance travel to 1970’s military Camp Lehigh enables Tony to come face to face with a younger version of his departed dad Howard Stark, and they muse a bit about marriage and fatherhood.

It is there in talking with his father Howard, in the times with his daughter Morgan, (one could argue back in Avengers 1 in the Battle of New York,) and at the final battle with Thanos and his armies, that Tony Stark finally shows his best and most mature self.

After the Avengers gather all the Infinity stones during the time heist (losing Black Widow for the Soul stone in the process), Professor Hulk snaps his fingers with the Iron Man nano-gauntlet and brings back everyone that was dusted five years ago, while unbeknownst to them, a traitorous past-version of Nebula made her way back from 2014, and brought Thanos and his warship back from the past to combat what was left of the 2023 Avengers.

After an epic MCU Big 3 vs. Thanos battle, the heroes are about to lose when Sam Wilson/The Falcon, the Black Panther and the rest of just about every hero ever in the MCU returns through Dr. Strange and magic company’s portals to squad up vs. Thanos and his various armies of minions.

With a little hint from a newly undusted Dr. Strange, Iron Man realizes that removing the Infinity stones from the gauntlet is easier than removing the gauntlet from Thanos’s hand. In doing this, Stark knows from the discussion they just had where the Hulk was elected to do the initial comeback snap, that any mortal man snapping Infinity stone-studded fingers is a one-way ticket to Gamma radiation+ land.

Even so, great protector that he has become, in a hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye moment, Tony Stark steals the stones right out the larger nano-gauntlet that is attached to Thanos. As the stones slide into place on Tony’s other nano-glove, power emanates from the stones, coursing through Tony’s body as he exclaims prior to the war winning snap: “And I…am…Iron Man.”

So why do I say he has earned himself a St. Joseph-like rank in the annals of the MCU even though it was a Jesus-like sacrifice? Because Tony Stark, as anyone watching the first few movies knows, is no perfect man. Yet, he became a wonderful father.

He liked making things with his hands, always tinkering in his workshop and off-camera in the garage of his newlywed lakeside cabin in Endgame like a carpenter. His daughter Morgan emulated him, first thing she does on screen showing that she likes snooping on his designs in their shed (not a stretch to say that she too will someday be a high-tech builder). Back in Ultron, Stark was given a vision while in a dream-state of a coming threat which made him want to protect all the more; as was St. Joseph given vision in a dream in order to better protect Jesus (the real savior of the universe) and Mary from Herod. Stark’s first instinct was to protect his family by not jeopardizing it with time heists, yet he pushed beyond his fear because he wanted to protect the universe, even with little hope of success.

I say all this to say that, even though he didn’t completely realize it, in protecting everyone the character of Tony Stark – if he/the MCU were real – would have done God’s will. He not only laid down his life for his friends, but he became a bit of a believer in the process as he said himself in his final message to Pepper:

“…who would have thought the epic forces of darkness and light that would have come into play? …what am I trippin’ for? Everything is going to come out exactly the way it’s supposed to…”

And his final motivating factor, contrary to his early, pre-fatherhood self, was not himself.

As illustrated in his final words, it was love.

Love makes a father do what he does for his family. It makes a man stouthearted. It makes him get up and go to work every day, sometimes long hours. It makes him “give the odd pearl” of wisdom, as Tony said of his father Howard. That’s why Tony Stark, in the end, emulated fatherhood.

And I know, at least for me having seen the first Iron Man 11 years ago in a movie theater with my dearly departed dad, I will never forget the times he sacrificed for me.

If you get a chance this Father’s Day, show your dad how much he means to you. I assure you if my dad was still on this Earth, I wouldn’t be the least bit embarrassed to say,

“Dad: ‘I love you 3000.’’