Iron Man 2 has been released and I checked it out last night. Personally, I enjoyed it, but doubly after having read the Alexander Irvine novelization. Much like with going from the graphic novel of Kick-Ass to the movie Kick-Ass, the transition from a weak telling of a story to a strong telling of a story can make such a difference based purely on the comparison.

I always love doing this little experiment of checking out the novelization of comic book movies, then seeing how the final product compares. I’ve been doing it for the past few years and they’ve always seemed to be based on the full version of the story. The novelization is what the movie is like before the editor cuts off chunks. Sometimes this works out for the better (Incredible Hulk). Sometimes this works out for the worse (Spider-Man 3). There’s even the first Iron Man, where the second act had to be refilmed and edited around just to make the Air Force happy.

Iron Man 2 is a different beast, since it doesn’t appear to be based on the full version of the screenplay, but of an earlier, incomplete version. There are plotholes and loose ends riddling the story that the movie is nice enough to fix. Even better, some of the climactic moments are so ridiculously underwhelming that the final cinematic output is a godsend.

Let’s take a look at what was changed.

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We’re a month away from the release of the two-years-awaited Iron Man 2 and only a week or so ago, the novelization came out. Like with all the other Marvel movies, I picked this one up. Surprisingly, this one isn’t written by Peter David, but by Alexander Irvine. You might recognize the name if you’ve read Daredevil Noir.

So what’s going on in the story? It takes place six months after Iron Man – although Irvine flubs that by referring to it as two years at least once – and sometime before Incredible Hulk. Tony hasn’t done too much in terms of righting wrongs as Iron Man, but he does flaunt it when possible and gets in trouble with the government because of it. They insist he should hand over the tech to them, which he totally disagrees with and points out that the rest of the world is 20 years away from reaching that level anyway. Also, Tony has a couple events marked off on his calendar and every one of them is a backdrop for an action sequence. Really, every action sequence can be summed up with, “I can’t wait for _______! I hope nothing bad happens! Oh, crap! Explosions!”

Let’s go over the characters, starting with our hero.

Tony Stark is getting ready for the Stark Expo (hey, guess what that means?), but at the same time is secretly disturbed by the realization that his arc reactor isn’t so perfect after all and it’s slowly killing him. He and JARVIS have been working on a way to reinvent the arc reactor, but so far nothing’s doing and things look grim. In response, Tony has been acting even more reckless than usual and becomes a grade-A asshole.

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