When Hollywood and the Pentagon are one

an array of mostly communist enemies.

Director Jon Favreau's witty blockbuster has cleverly given Lee's character a twist, in the new era of robots, unmanned missiles and high-tech gadgetry of the 21st century's terror wars. Kidnapped in Afghanistan by psychotic terrorists, Stark escapes with his armour and battery-charged heart, stricken by conscience about the weapons made by his company.

On the surface, the film critiques the military-industrial complex that Iron Man once embodied in his original Cold Warrior incarnation. But the continuities are as striking as the differences. Stark begins the film as an amoral war profiteer and becomes a humane superhero who uses his technical mastery to defend Afghan refugees from terrorists and works alongside the Homeland Security agency SHIELD. In doing so, he symbolises what Noam Chomsky once called "the new military humanism".

At the same time, Iron Man encapsulates a fantasy that has remained essentially unchanged since his first creation - of a benevolent US hegemony sustained by absolute technological mastery, against an evil enemy that lurks in caves.