Spoiler, Spoiler, Spoiler – This is meant for people who saw
Iron Man 3. If you haven’t and want to read this – you are silly.
I need to get this out there now, as within a few weeks no
one will care about the sort of nitpicking that I like to do. I just saw Iron
Man 3 in the IMAX with 3D and I have a lot to say about it. It was not
horrible. I can’t say I hated it, there were a lot of innovative and
interesting things but, man, there were also a lot of things wrong with it. Truth
be told, there is only one film I can compare it to: Spider-man 3. SM3 was a
film where the producers went too far and as a result ruined a good franchise. I
honestly don’t know what Marvel was thinking but they went a little far down that
road and seriously hurt their IM franchise. I will explain.
Now, there are three areas that need to be looked at for
this film and I will do this from the most constructive to the least
constructive. First, geek rage aside, just watching it as a film goer; the kind
of film goer who, let’s say, just saw Avengers and was curious to see what came
next. Second, full geek rage - I have read the better part of the last 7 years
of Iron Man comics and I feel that I am in a position to say something about
it. Third, which is far less constructive, things that I would have liked in it
that weren’t there.
FILM GOER
I like movies, as most of my friends know. I can put aside
most of my personal biases and see a movie for exactly what it is rather than
what I would have wanted it to be. I find it far more enjoyable that way. I can
hate a movie as a geek and love it as a film goer (for instance my love hate
relationship with Casino Royal – James Bond yet not). As this is the third part
of a trilogy, or even fourth if you count the Avengers (which was basically an
Iron Man movie “with friends”), the characters should be rather established in
the viewers’ minds
and little explanation should be needed.
1.
Characters - So little time was spent on
character development altogether in this film that, in many ways, they felt two
dimensional.
a.
I didn’t so much care for the so-called love
story, as in the handful of scenes they were together in, she was usually
bitching at him. And, considering how many times her life was at risk BECAUSE
of Stark’s foolishness, I’m surprised she’s still with him at all, let alone anywhere
within a 5 meter radius.
b.
I didn’t believe in the hate that Tony Stark
suddenly had for the Mandarin just because his friend got hurt. He got rather
personal rather quickly and it really had nothing to do with him in the first
place.
i.
On a side note - threatening a serious terrorist,
telling him your address and then getting into a fight with your girlfriend and
not noticing the attack is rather pathetic. If I threatened the Mandarin I
would have been sitting in my Ironman armor on the couch and told everyone I
cared about to get away from me. And who’s stupid enough to go to the house
anyway knowing the terrorist is going to go after they guy?
c.
Apparently, Tony Stark was having some sort of
dilemma about being Ironman and clearly going through some sort of
post-traumatic stress but the film tried to avoid this topic throughout. And what
was with all those anxiety attacks anyways? It really led to nowhere. I think
they were just trying too hard to connect the Avengers with Iron Man 3. All
this ultimately lead to the nonsensical ending where he destroys his life’s
work. The fact that his life’s work just saved his life and that of the woman
he loves doesn’t seem to cross his mind. Not to mention saving the president. Notwithstanding
the fact that there may be other threats in the future. SO maybe keeping some
reserve suits might be a good idea. Also, the fact that I thought the suits on
display WERE the RESERVES, and the fact that he DID have a platoon of reserves
in his bat cave, ahem, Ironman cave, makes me suspect that he didn’t actually blow
up all his suits. “Operation clean slate?” you’re Tony Stark, and clean slate
has the same amount of syllables as “bullshit”. Coincidence? I think not.
2.
Movie Appeal –
a.
It felt
rather forced that they were clearly appealing to a younger audience by pitching
a preteen boy as Iron Man’s helper. I haven’t seen such a presence of a child
in a huge film since Star Wars Episode I, where the character was and still is
rather annoying. Even the kids from Jurassic park weren’t played up this bad.
b.
This film also suffered from the some of the
same bad ideas as Spiderman 3. Throughout both films, the main character was very rarely seen in his
superhero outfit just so that the producers could show the actor’s face on
screen as much as possible. As a result, he kept getting into and out of
different armours and forgetting to protect his face, especially when shrapnel
was casually flying around him like at the end of the film. He would have been
in a lot better shape had he kept his armor on.
c.
Why was this film in 3D? The movie was upconverted,
as the ending credits informed me, and for the most part the 3D was
unnecessary. There was so much they could have done with the 3D in this film
but it wasn’t really used. The only time the 3D really appealed to me was when
we looked inside the brain, or when Tony went all CSI with the projectors in
his workplace. When you’re watching 3D, people must feel part of the movie,
having particles fly towards them and all that. This is further proof that 3D
movies are becoming overrated, and a waste of money.
3.
Plot
a.
What was the villain’s motivation? 13 years
after being stood up by Tony Stark he wanted revenge? Sure, he had some unclear
plot about destroying the president but why did he hate Tony? Tony wasn’t in
his way. The villain came to him.
b.
You would think that the Reactor in Stark’s chest
would power the Iron Man suit as much as he needed. Why were his suits suddenly
running out of power in this film? You would think, as I do with my phone
everyday, that his main concern would be running out of power. Rather than
having 42 suits, I would make a solar-powered cover for my armor or a remote
battery to access somewhere or even engineer a better reserve power system so I
wouldn’t fall out of the sky spontaneously.
c.
What terrorist organisation updates an enemy’s
suit and makes sure to give him access to their secret files? How did Rhodes
not notice them? And how did Tony find them so quickly. Were they in a folder
called “Secret files do not read this is our plot”?
d.
Was Maya the Botanist good? Bad? She seemed good,
then bad, then sort of good again. Then she died. Why did Killian shoot her?
Doesn’t he need an expert on his super solder serum? I think she was
misunderstood. And the fact that she
just changed her mind and threatened to blow herself up, leading to a
one-shot-diva-death was really anticlimactic.
e.
Did Killian secretly love Pepper Potts? At the
beginning of the movie, there WAS a hint that Pepper might even be INTO him. It
looked like he was hitting on her before he tied her up. Why did he inject her
with the same super serum as he had? Did he want her to be his Bridezilla or
did he want to blow her up? Wouldn’t it have been easier to just shoot her? And
if he really was as smart as we think he was, how did he not realize that injecting
the serum into Pepper would make her more of a threat, which ultimately led to his death of course?
f.
Between Tony leaving after his house is
destroyed and him crashing somewhere in the snow, I got bored until he was
Ironman again. I came to see an Ironman movie and most of the movie was Tony
Stark at times using guns rather than one of his 42 suits. Why did he have to
wear specifically the Mach 42? Could he not have installed a remote access
login to another suit? To add to that, when did Tony become and MIF agent performing
“Mission Impossible/Inspector Gadget” stuff - infiltrating a highly secured mansion
and taking out 4-5 (6?) well armed guards?
g.
Don’t you think that Iron Patriot would be coded
so only Rhodes can use it? I think he said something about that in Iron Man 2. So
how did the random henchman get access to the armour? Isn’t that a major security
flaw? And what was with the “Extremis guy grabs your arm and suit malfunctions”?
OK, Extremis guys heat up. But if the suit can survive an explosion, it should
be able to withstand some localized heat for more than 10 seconds?
4.
End credits
a.
The Final scene after the credits did not tease
me with the new films to come or enlighten me with something I didn’t know. I
just got more bromance between Tony and Bruce Banner, which I didn’t need, like
or want that in any way.
So as a film goer, I generally thought the plot was limited
and sort of boring. Robert Downey Jr. was entertaining enough to keep my
interest but between the kid, the fan boy reporter, and the empty love story, I
didn’t really care much. The action was cool at times.
GEEK RAGE
The main issue with the film is how they named things. Many
of the below issues could have been avoided had given things their proper name
instead of calling them something else, which basically screws up the
possibility for really cool future stories.
1.
Extremis - Extremis is a rather new concept from
2005 and in no way a time-honored story of Ironman. Rather than talking about
what it is – which I will save for part 3 – I will tell you what it’s not. It
doesn’t make people explode or turn them into energy weapons. If anything, the Extremis
concept from the movie is more like the first story arc of Matt Fraction’s run
in 2008 where, in “The Five Nightmares”, Ezekiel Stane, the son of
Obadiah, uses a form of Tony’s Iron Man armor to make a weapon. In this story,
you had people exploding because their bodies were super charged and stuff. The
bottom line is that now you can’t do Extremis properly because you already used
the name in this movie. Of course, you could still use the concept, but then
you would have to give it a different name, which just makes everything rather
confusing.
2.
The Mandarin - why would you make the Mandarin
an actor? He is Tony Stark’s main rival in the comic books, like Joker is to
Batman. People have been excited for Mandarin since Iron Man 1 and now you
basically ruined the character making it impossible to approach him in the
future. And for what? What did this Mandarin character bring to the film? A new
character would have done the trick.
3.
Iron Patriot – Again, War Machine never gets a
paint job to become Iron Patriot. Iron Patriot is an evil Iron Man, per se, and by using him in this film so
wrongly you removed the possibility of using him in the future. And again, why?
What was wrong with War Machine?
4.
Hulk Buster Armour – You had it in the movie for
45sec when you could have had it fighting the Hulk!!! And then you destroyed
it? Why?? This could have been a tantalizing glimpse of something that will be
used in future Avengers movies, but now he would have to rebuild it again, once
again making things unnecessarily complicated.
5.
Using all the Armours and then destroying them.
Between last year’s Avengers and this year, Tony built 35 new Armours. That’s
like 3 a month! This scene would have been fantastic at the end of Avengers 2
or something like that. Here you had an army of Iron Men fighting an “army” of
7 thugs with movie Extremis.
6.
AIM is not a rival to Stark Industries and is not
correctly portrayed in the film. What we saw in this film looked more like
HAMMER industries, which is a rival to Stark Industries. AIM is another of
those concepts that could have been used for future films, and maybe also tied
in with Avengers.
7.
Aldrich Killian is not a big business man and
the head of AIM but a scientist who helped to develop Extremis (the original
version, not the movie one).
Overall, I’m not sure what they were trying to do here. Name
drop elements from the Marvel U to please geeks? OK, but then quote them
properly or geeks will not be happy! It feels like they had the Cliff Notes to
all the Iron Man comics that were accidentally shredded and put back together
wrong, or that some uninterested exec picked out a couple of words and told the
writers to put them in the film without actually explaining what they were
about.
WHAT I WANTED
The reason why I called this less constructive is because saying
what I wanted in the movie could range from small things that make sense to
having Batman appear in it; because we all know everything becomes better if it
has Batman in it.
1.
Extremis – First of all Extremis in the comic
was put into TONY not an army of other guys. Extremis affected Tony Stark
mentally, allowing him to process information at light speed, on a subconscious
level, to help him better cope with the direct technological link he now
possessed to his armor. It is because of this that he could directly control
his armour with his mind and thus break it up into parts. It seems that at
first they were trying to do Extremis properly in the script phase and it got
changed to this mess. Prior to this it was, I think, always a suit that he had
to put on manually. They used this plotline but avoided his mental upgrade that
he got with the Extremis – connecting him to all the technology around him.
2.
Mandarin – The Mandarin had 10 super rings that give
him magical powers. What makes him compelling is that he is not technological
and, as such, you can always upgrade Iron Man and have the Mandarin be a
threat. Magic vs. Technology. Maybe that had no place in this film but then
they shouldn’t have used the Mandarin.
3.
AIM is is an organization of brilliant scientists and their hirelings dedicated
to the acquisition of power and the overthrow of all government by technological
means. It is connected to Hydra, which would have allowed the filmmakers to
connect the concept with the wider Marvel U, maybe setting something up for
future Avengers films (especially since it created the Cosmic Cube) It is
eventually led by a M.O.D.O.K. (Mental Organism
Designed Only for Killing),an artificially
mutated human being with an enormous head and a stunted body possessing
superhuman intelligence and the ability to generate mental energy bolts and force
fields that AIM originally created. It’s a terrorist organisation!
4.
The final scene in the movie after the credits should
have had something to do with Thor, as his movie comes out in November.
In the end, what upsets me is the same thing that upset me
with Spider-man 3. They watched themselves make it with the guys who came up
with this stuff in the first place and were released it with pride. Yes it will
make a lot of money but in time you may get a confession, like the one Sam
Raimi made about Spider-man 3, that they could have done better. And they could
have. That’s the saddest thing. It’s the ruined potential and the cramming of
too much into a short amount of time - badly.
I’m not too keen with what Disney has done with the Marvel
comics (Marvel Now). This is the first movie, I think, where Disney had its
control of the pie and I’m not too keen on it either.
All this makes me very worried about the future of StarWars.
Thanks for reading and Thank you to my friend Suthai for
commenting on and adding to this rant!
