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Iron Thread 3: Out Now! [Iron Man 3] (Use SPOILER Tags!)
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Mandarin's motivations, that he's descended from Genghis Khan and therefore wants to continue the world domination schemes of the Mongols, are lifted wholesale from one of the old Fu Manchu movies. He's never had a ton of personality beyond sneering arrogance. It's worth noting that in recent years there were two very different attempts to reinvigorate that character, one by Daniel Knauf, the other by Matt Fraction. Knauf tries to portray Mandarin as a misguided extremist in the vein of Ra's al Ghul, while Fraction creates a Kim Jong Il pastiche. Neither one of them can seem to decide on who the character is at his core, and compensate by basically making him into a new character, which I don't think is too different from what IM3 did.
That's always been the issue for Mandarin with me. He's what the Venture Bros. would call a dimestore Dr. Doom, just another meglomaniac villain with delusions of world conquest, overshadowed by better known villains with more interesting characterization. It seems like he only became Tony's archnemesis by default, because he was the best option out of a terrible villain lineup. So, really, as far as I'm concerned, the movies can do whatever they like with him.
Just have her running Stark Industries for the beginning and get kidnapped in the parking lot.
They call Tony for a ransom and he just starts laughing on the phone - cut to red-eyed Pepper who demolishes the car.
I dunno, I think it'd be fun.
That would have made sense if he was afraid of going back in to the suit and explain why he can James Bond around with Canadian Tire gadgets without having a panic attack. Or if there was any character growth or resolution.
1)The suit is mostly broken and if he didn't get out of it he'd be stuck in there permanently.
2) He doesn't want to rely on the suits as an emotional crutch anymore. The suits he did make he made autonomous so that they could fly to him whenever he needed them. When his primary suit gets damaged too heavily to use and the other suits get trapped by rubble he is forced to confront his issues head on, without the comfort of his coping mechanisms.
I just saw this movie yesterday. It was pretty wonderful. Probably my favorite superhero flick after TDK. Admittedly it was a very different kind of superhero flick, and saying it was less an Iron Man movie and more a Tony Stark movie is defensible. Still, I loved it. I understand a lot of people not loving it because they wanted an Iron Man movie with lots of Iron Man flying around Iron Manning it up, and that's fine. I don't understand a lot of people not loving it because <insert made up reason> or <insert incredibly minor plot "hole" that is just them being crazy nit-picky or just plain not paying attention>. That Ten Reasons Iron Man 3 Was Terrible article being posted earlier is one of the dumbest things on the internet and the author should be set on fire.
Anyway.
To answer the specific question posed by DanHibiki:
This also ties into the question of who is Iron Man? For most of the film, Stark believes that Iron Man is a suit. That's also part of why he's trying to build remote controlled suits, because now he has effectively infinite Iron Mans! When the Mk42 encases Pepper, Stark sees this as Iron Man, the suit, saving her. Except note that these are not terribly effective Iron Mans. In the final battle, all the prototypes get hammered. It's partly because OMG 3000 Degrees, and it's partly because Shoddy Prototypes, but mostly it's because those are not Iron Man. Tony Stark is Iron Man, which is what he realizes at the end. This is the point of the Adventures of Tony Stark segment that comprises the middle third of the film. He solves problems and kicks ass and breaks into a secure mansion as the man Tony Stark, because that is the real Iron Man. When he defeats Fire-Breathing Guy Pierce at the end, he does it as Tony Stark, Iron Man. He uses his ingenuity and his brain, not just a bunch of tech.
What strikes me about the film is that, beyond being a fun movie that is genuinely funny in parts and has some really good action scenes and quality acting, it has some pretty strong themes that are presented very consistently and coherently. There are competing elements to the thematic throughline of the film and through the character arcs. These are not failings or inconsistencies, they are nuance. Stark is a pretty three-dimensional character in this film, and three-dimensional characters don't have every action dictated by a single factor. It's what makes them three-dimensional in the first place. And what keep getting labeled plot-holes are basically instances of the theme needing to come before the details of the story. Given the choice between adhering to theme or adhering to story detail, a good storyteller will choose theme every single time. See: pretty much every Spielberg movie ever.
Also, a lot of people have been bitching about the portrayal of Stark's panic disorder, and how it should be more crippling or omnipresent or yadda yadda. No, sorry, you lose, Mr. Armchair Shrink. A panic attack can be completely debilitating. It can be a more minor thing that you can talk yourself down from. It can be lots of things, and it can vary from occurrence to occurrence within the same person. For a superhero movie that is not just trying to be a sober portrayal of a normal person with panic disorder, Iron Man 3 did a pretty good job of conveying it, which I say as a guy married to a woman with panic disorder.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
He didn't not use a suit because he didn't want it to be a crutch, he didn't use it because it wasn't immediately available to him to be a crutch. He abandons his PTSD on a whim not because he overcomes any emotional hurdles, he just decides "I'm no longer afraid for some reason" and went off to fight bad guys using farming equipment and the spirit of christmas.
On the other hand if he had a fear of being Iron Man again, it would have made sense and the story would have worked both logically and thematically better.
Lastly, Bullshit: Hulk buster and a suit designed specifically for digging were not trapped under a bit of rubble.
edit: so a theater decided it was a good idea to hire some people to dress up at a theater to promote Iron Man:
See: My earlier comments regarding the importance of adhering to theme over adhering to plot details. In a perfect world, maybe there could've been iron-clad adherence to both. If Black had to pick one over the other, though, he made the right choice.
Honestly, if you were on-board with the rest of the movie, a scene like this wouldn't have bothered you at all. You can argue that the film failed earlier and as such you'd already lost interest which made you more susceptible to minor plot quibbles, and maybe you can make a good case from that. But in and of itself, the above item is not a thing that would pull you out of the film unless you were trying to find flaws. Just like the obvious spatial issues pertaining to the T-Rex pen in Jurassic Park are not going to bother you unless the film had already lost you to the point where you were sitting around playing Pick the Nit.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
It was not delivered well, and the problem was not addressed or explored(like you know, the obvious Tony Stark alcoholism problem) mostly because he was out of the Iron man suit for the majority of the movie for no good reason.
Outside of the pub his freakouts weren't even taken seriously, it was played off for jokes and was resolved with equally weak brush off.
In fact, most of it felt like the writer got a great idea, started writing it then got bored ten minutes in and got another great idea and started writing it and then got tired of that an so on until the end credits.
Hell, the violence in TDKR was way more sanitized than this. All those people shooting guns and you never see any blood.
i think the big "exception" here is that
I wonder if it's because of the huge number of effects studios working on it. Must be hard to tone down so many scenes when they're all in different countries and all under development for years.
No? I mean it's down to the MPAA ultimately, but it's also on the director and the studio suits overseeing the film that put in and allowed that stuff to go forward to the MPAA in the first place.
Worse than that for me was that I just did not give a shit about the villain. Either of them. His motivations to me made no sense. I didn't really get why he wanted to replace the president with a puppet. His reason given in the movie was he wanted to control both sides of the war on terror. But to what end? Power? Money? He has these things in spades already. It was villainy for the sake of villainy. It could have worked as a revenge movie I guess, but then I suspect he would have gone to further lengths to hurt Tony like killing Happy in hospital, or murdering Rhodes, or killing pepper instead of injecting her with the immortality super-serum. I didn't get why he had an army of extremis men willing to fight to the death for him. Those were the actions of fanatics, when they were revealed earlier to simply be amputees who were given an untested 'cure'. It was almost as if they wrote in the mandarin twist after writing in everything else. I didn't get simple things, like why they knocked out Rhodes, but this organization filled with fanatic murderers just left him there and didn't kill him. I didn't get how they could broadcast the mandarin's image to the whole world and no one recognized him as an actor.
I liked the kid and his interactions with Tony a lot. RDJ was fantastic as always. I liked the Pepper saves the day ending because it was a bit of an unconventional twist of damsel-in-distress. But there was just too much in the movie that left me shaking my head. It felt just sloppy, or hastily re-written with the hopes the audience wouldn't notice. The audience was left to fill in the gaps too many times.
Just my two cents on it. Overall I found the action to be fun, and the acting to be good, but the weak story and all the minor faults really took away from what could have been a great flick.
PSN: the-K-flash
If they're all Mercs then wouldn't they be a tad hesitant to start using a drug that you're dependent on for the rest of your life and one that has a one in four chances of blowing you up?
For the same reason, why did the main villain take it?
If they were all War Vets then how do you get them all to go along with a clearly evil scheme of global terrorists? These guys fought and nearly died for their country, you expect them to all just go "oh yeah, sure I'll go along with a plan to kill American soldiers and innocent civilians if you give me a good retirement package". That's just insulting.
If they were being used and held hostage by the fact that they needed the drug then that seems much worse, since they were just victims of this crazy guy that Tony goes and kills.
Re: Tony and the suit
Plot-wise, the reason was because his army of suits was buried under rubble and the one suit that wasn't buried was an unreliable prototype with power supply issues. Character-wise, he was out of the suit because he needed to learn to cope with his anxiety without the crutch of his fancy tech and limitless finances. Thematically, he was out of the suit because he needed to rediscover that it's not the suit that's Iron Man, it's the man Tony Stark who is Iron Man.
It seemed to be covered from pretty much every angle.
Re: Tony and anxiety
Generally speaking, the story was a little manic and fairly kinetic. Sort of like the character of Tony Stark. I could say this was a further example of excellent thematic consistency, but more likely it's a happy accident resulting from Shane Black's writing style. Which is fine with me, because I dig Shane Black's writing style.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
Re: resolution of Stark's character arc:
The scene with Kid Whose Name I Don't Remember was a callback to the origin of Iron Man in the first movie (whether intentional or not; I tend to think it was). Tony Stark, absent his wealth and awesome prototyping lab, built a fucking robot suit out of scrap metal. He took what he had available, and made something awesome in very little time with very limited resources. That is the essence of his character - focused ingenuity towards very specific purpose. It's what makes him exceptional. And he was forced to revisit this after his suits were taken away. The Kid told him to build something, and he did, in the focused and awesome way that only Tony Stark can.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
Kind of doesn't matter since Tony doesn't even try to call them or any of the other suits that might still be working, he just concedes to stick with gardening tools. Hell he could have just as easily waited a few hours for the suit to charge up (off the battery for some reason rather then his Arc Reactor) in the trunk of his car then he could have called it at any time. Instead it was played off as a goofy last minute surprise.
edit: also the current theory is that he couldn't get them before Jarvis could defrag his Ram Drives or some other BS. Which of course can only be done if the movie is at it's climax.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
Maybe it doesn't make sense that he wouldn't at least leave a backup option to quickly charge off his arc, but eh - all his new suits seemed fairly half assed, it's reasonable for him to not consider that he'll be stranded without his workshop to properly charge the new suit up.
They can update his motivation, you know. Who cares if writers can't decide which version to pick from? That isn't isolated to Mandarin it happens to plenty of characters when writers write them differently. With a media adaption all they need to do is pick the best aspects from the comics (and other media depictions), add elements to make their take unique and dump the rest.
Re: the Extremis guys
Remember Savin asking guy at the Chinese Theater, "Can you regulate?" He was asking "If I give this to you, you can keep from exploding, right?"
The entire reason for Killian creating the character of "The Mandarin" was so that he could cover his ass with an imaginary scapegoat for these accidents. It's a gamble to prevent anyone from doing any serious investigating, because if someone found out about the very serious ethical concerns of Extremis it would mean a whole lot of trouble for him
Up until that they were all desperate to have limbs given back to them from a procedure I doubt any of them new much about and found themselves at the top of food chain afterward.
One injection and they go from American veterans that were willing to lay down their lives to protect their country to members of Al Qaeda 2.0?
and it's not like Killian had a great plan, all it was was:
1. create the Mandarin
2. ?
3. profit!
These guys just seem like victims of mind control that got gunned down by Tony Stark.
1) Develop Extremis
2) Sell Extremis
3) Profit
Now, Extremis was pretty unstable and caused people to explode while he was working in the development phase. This required him to alter his plan slightly.
Phase 2 of the plan then became:
1) Create Mandarin persona
2) Use Mandarin to take responsibility for any Extremis-related explosions that occur, keeping focus off of AIM
3) Sell Extremis to both terrorists (through the Mandarin) and governments (through AIM)
4) Profit
2. Killian gave them what the government couldn't and what quite a few probably rightfully blamed the government for taking away for no good reason.
Being a wounded veteran doesn't make someone inherently good or even patriotic. Depending on the circumstances it can have literally the opposite effect.
The process seemed volatile enough that they wouldn't want to burn bridges with the people who created it.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
2. Possible, but that's speculation. We don't know what any of them thought of the government.
Its true that being a veteran doesn't make a person good or evil but people react differently. We don't know any circumstances that they came from other than they were from the military and they were maimed on duty. You'd think a few would be freaking out about seeing one of their own blown up during the experimenting phase. If they didn't like what the government did to them after being maimed why would they join a psycho who blew up their colleagues like a mad scientist? Did AIM murder any who tried to leak what happened to the government? Was it fear or blackmail to keep getting injections to keep them stable into keeping their mouths shut? There were numerous directions to take with that and Black did nothing.