For decades, Star Trek fans have tried to lead the march of scientific progress. That’s why we’re all using little handheld communicators and teleporters these days. The problem with Star Trek, though, is that it’s super boring. Flying through space and learning about how to coexist with alien creatures? The world has had enough of that. We’re more into The Avengers these days.
In fact, the U.S. military is so into The Avengers that it’s trying to build its own Iron Man suit, which would be perfect for wearing to comic book conventions and/or killing people in those foreign countries that Star Trek tried to metaphorically teach us to be nice to. This comes from The Wall Street Journal (via The Verge), which reports that the suit is expected to have “a weapon, provide bullet protection, monitor vitals, and give its wearer superhuman strength and perception.” So while it may seem like an easy hook to compare this suit—known as TALOS—to the one from Iron Man, that is absolutely what the military is hoping it will be.
The bulk of the work on TALOS is coming from companies that already have experience making things that kill people, like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. Now, though, the military is turning to Hollywood special effects studios like Legacy Effects to give the project that extra little bit of superhero pizzazz. Legacy Effects, after all, is the company that designed the suit from the Iron Man movies, so it has some experience doing literally this exact thing. The only difference is that this is real life, so it’ll be like that scene in the first Iron Man when Tony Stark drops into that village and single-handedly kills a bunch of people, but now the people will be killed for real. Fun, right?
The only problem with TALOS so far is that nobody can figure out how to power it, but c’mon. Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps! Surely the smartest minds in the military-industrial complex can find a way to make this work. Also, we feel it’s important to point out that the government trying to build its own legion of Iron Man suits is exactly the sort of scheme that Iron Man himself would do everything he could to stop. This is a bit like using Batman-related imagery to promote gun violence, but whatever.