Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Iron Thread 3: Out Now! [Iron Man 3] (Use SPOILER Tags!)
Posts
As mentioned elsewhere, they did change his motivations, and used the character's history as a racist caricature to play a clever switcheroo. Beyond that, what I'm saying is the Mandarin is not that great of a character to begin with, and therefore I'm not bothered that they changed him so much. I just don't think there was much worth holding onto about the original version.
Heck, aren't you the one who keeps endorsing the cartoon Mandarin, who was a teenager/Chinese Darth Vader? That guy was almost an entirely different character as well.
Honestly, a lot of these complaints only make sense in the context of someone who just doesn't like action movies. Everyone Else Is Doing It certainly isn't an excuse for using stale tropes, but you have to be willing to grant a little suspension of disbelief, and it seems like some people aren't willing to do that. It's like something happened early on that bugged you, and you went into full-on Find Faults mode.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
They can do more with updating Mandarin than that. What I'm getting at is that they don't need to discard the character entirely like they did. They had the perfect chance and blew it.
Have you watched the cartoon? He has many things in common with the comics Mandarin.
The problem to me isn't any single issue. I can over look a lot of that stuff in action/super hero movies. It's just that it felt like there were so many to me. None of them individually are dealbreakers. It was like they wrote two different movies and then smushed them together a few days before shooting.
You hear that Gibson? It's not the Jews any more!
I like action movies, especially super-hero movies. I'm willing to suspend disbelief but I'm not going to give a movie that lets me fill in the blanks a pass for their stories just for it to make sense. Suspense of disbelief does not mean I should forget about the movie making logical sense in-story. The reason tropes are used is they make sense. Subverting something just for the hell of it isn't insightful, especially when it doesn't account for plot holes, makes characters less complex or ignores world building from previous movies. I'm only taking the movie's flaws to their ultimate conclusion.
They've left it up in the air so the writers have freedom in how to handle her in future movies.
A cool relevelation might have been
Would have been a good explanation, IMO Shame we didn't get anything like that.
IIRC
Extremis goons
Also, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that someone who had wounded limbs healed, given super powers, and was basically made invincible by someone might become a fanatic. Extremis seems to make people more aggressive (see: pepper) so again, I don't think the outcome is unreasonable. Power corrupts, or so they say.
PSN: the-K-flash
so her getting double blasted is just a bit odd.
It's far more likely that the reason is much the same as the reason that Tony Stark in 1990s, after 73 hours without sleep and after a crash and wrapping up the plot look just about the same. The makeup artist didn't read the script.
That isn't unreasonable. The problem is they didn't reveal any motivation for why Savin, Brandt or any other Extremis soldiers joined AIM to be in Killian's personal super-soldier program. Power does corrupt but its useless when it isn't shown or implied it corrupted them. We don't know why Brandt turned from being a semi-normal veteran into a psychotic killer when she personally saw a colleague blow up next to her, either. I can understand the increased aggression having some effect, not that it overwrote her personality completely* into being Killian's personal assassin.
* if it did that they didn't reveal it in the movie. That also is something that'd effect pepper, too. Is Tony going to worry about her becoming a serial killer now she's infected with Extremis if she kept her powers?
And they weren't recruited from the military. The military would have already separated them. People who stay in after losing limbs are the exception, not the rule.
The rest were hunted down by killer robots with no option of surrender. Tony's command didn't allow for any chance of it. Even Pepper was nearly killed by them.
You know what I mean when I said they recruited from wounded veterans. We have no idea how high the proportion was for recruits they got from the Extremis experiments. That'd involve the movie establishing facts, which was sadly not as much of a priority to the film-makers compared to themes.
I'm living in China and there were some scenes added to the film that were completely in Mandarin (the language, not the dude). Can somebody confirm if the following scenes were also in the normal film, and if so, can you make sure I got the translation right? My Chinese isn't perfect, so I mighta flubbed some stuff.
Scene in the middle before Tony's house is blown up, with aforementioned Chinese doctor talking about medical technology from AIM. He was possibly talking about Killian and Extremis, but I don't know the translations for those names.
Scene at the end where Tony goes to the Chinese doctor and gets heart surgery to remove the shrapnel from his ticker. Doctor and assistant (some famous Chinese girl) talk about how the surgery is impossible and every computer model shows 100% failure. Doc is all, Yo, I'm awesome. He fixes Tony.
Final scene of the movie is Tony throwing his now useless chest-piece reactor over the cliff of his ruined mansion, and saying "It doesn't matter about the toys. I know who I am no matter what. I am Ironman."
That last scene is pretty weird, in my opinion. Totally left field, and I question whether or not it's in the Western version because it's so odd and un-Ironmany. Set me straight, peeps.
Oh, and they didn't have the teaser at the end, so I'll have to try and youtube that later.
The end part with Tony going "I am Iron Man" happened. He was basically saying that he was Iron Man, with or without the suits.
Yes.
Thanks guys!
Please forgive me for linking Kotaku.
How about this: During the attack on his mansion, why didn't Tony just say the words 'house party' and activate the 40 suits he had already programmed for exactly this situation? Seriously, why did he spend all that time planning for this EXACT situation (he was powerless and Pepper needed protecting) only to...I dunno...forget to use them? What's more, during the end battle we are shown that Tony can jump in and out of the suits in under a second. So when he put #42 on Pepper...why didn't he just say "Jarvis send me another suit"? The movie showed us that it would have taken about five seconds for Tony to be wearing a fully functional, battle ready suit. Suspending disbelief is one thing but this was just too far for me.
"I've got an idea, we can end the movie with a huge fight scene with a ton of remote-controlled Iron Man suits!"
"Umm, it sounds cool but...wouldn't it kind of...negate the rest of the movie?"
"We'll fix it in post!"
Ohh, and correct me if I'm wrong...but did the movie end with Tony perfecting a drug that could cure any injury? Like, any injury at all as long as the heart/brain survived? Can't wait to see how they handle that in the next movie since the world no longer needs medical professionals.
Not to mention the fact that Tony probably would have kept the space above the vault empty. After all, why would he purposely obstruct the opening where his suits are supposed to fly out from?
Plus 'Prototype renewable energy source that's stuck in my chest' isn't the same as 'Drug that gives Wolverine's Healing Factor to everyone in the world'.
As for Extremis
The one in Stark Tower in the Avengers is said to be a prototype, and it's only supposed to last a year.
In Iron Man 1, Tony said that the arc reactor he build in Afghanistan could generate 3 gigajoules per second for 15 minutes. That's about the average amount of power consumed by 50 American households in a year. And Tony built that arc reactor in a cave. The ones he built afterwards are far more powerful and considering how Vanko was able to build them pretty easily as well, they don't seem to be that hard to make.
Its fairly obvious when you think about it and I am surprised that people keep harping on it as much as they do.
You would think people would accept that occasionally your phone call goes to voice mail.
but vanko was a smart guy using his dad's blueprints.
All is forgiven; this helped fill in my blanks immensely. And, basically, those blanks were filled in with crap. The Chinese-added scenes were indeed glaring. Now I'm gonna be extra vigilant when I go to the movies and check for more wacky product placement and weirdness.