Iron Man 3
May. 1st, 2013 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakAnd lo, I managed to watch Iron Man III unspoiled. To allow others that pleasure, I shan't use the icon I sorely want to. Also? Tony Stark managed to break the curse of the comics film trilogies, wherein usually the third installment is the weakest (see: Spider-man, X-Men, Batman). This film rocks, and manages to both form a great conclusion to the solo outings (if Marvel so chooses) and leave Tony & friends available for future Avengers shenanigans.
Now I had tried not to read anything about this film, but even so, I couldn't avoid hearing that Ben Kingsley was cast as the Mandarin. This left me hoping for something like the twist in Iron Man where the Afghan terrorists are actually funded and frontmen for the real villain, Obediah (aka the military industrial complex), but still not exactly glad that they were going to use the Mandarin at all. Well, I needn't have worried, since what the film actually does with the Mandarin is perfect and in retrospect the only thing you can do with a villain created as a Yellow Peril stereotype. To wit, as opposed to Tony's kidnappers in IM I, who were actually Afghans, he's a British actor named Trevor and hired to play a Yellow Peril stereoytpe which in-story was specifically created because that's what a white guy thought American believe a scary terrorist looks like, as a distraction and a trick. Ben Kingsley is visibly having a blast as Trevor the beer guzzling football (soccer for Americans) fan out for actorly glory, and it's probably an in-joke to the fact so many Brits get used to play villains in Hollywood productions that Kingsley gets to use his own accent and wasn't directed to play Trevor as an American.
As for the actual villain: Guy Pearce has also fun being smarmy and smug, no surprise there (and desperate in the introductory sequence). Iron Man II also tried to make both Ivan Vanko and Justin Hammer over the top reflections of different aspects of Tony; I think it works better here with Pearce's character and Maya Hansen, though I regretted that Maya's role wasn't as large as it was in Warren Ellis's Iron Man: Extremis, an obvious influence on this film, where the theme of Maya and Tony as fellow scientists who have in different ways sold out but still long to give their scientific abilities redemptive meaning is a major, not a minor aspect. (Maya's last words to Tony in the book, after he figured out the truth, are something along the lines that he's no better than she is, and Ellis lets Tony reply that no, he isn't, but he tries to be.) Then again, for that to work in a film the whole plot would have had to be different, and I liked this one, small role for Maya not withstanding.
But enough about the villains. What makes the film so hugely enjoyable are how well our heroes are put to use. I had liked Pepper and the fact she hadn't ended up with Tony in Iron Man I, had not liked the romantic turn in IM2, and had been converted to the pairing by Joss Whedon in a few minutes in The Avengers, so I was hopeful, yet also fretting, re: what would IM3 do with Pepper and Tony/Pepper? The banter was good (movieverse Tony and Pepper always were), and when there was mutual saving when the Malibu house was blown up - Tony directing the armor to form around Pepper, Pepper using the armor to shield Tony as well, then get Maya out - I relaxed on that front. So much did I relax, in fact, that I was 90% certain there would be pay off for Pepper getting kidnapped by the bad guy halfway through the film that would not be Tony saving the damsel. And when Pearce's character started to pump her with Extremis I was certain, certain enough not to be distressed by the plunge to supposed doom. That was a Chekovian gun if ever I saw one: it had been established repeatedly that the surviving Extremis candidates could make it out alive of explosions, plus from a Doylist pov there would have been no reason for the villain to use Extremis on Pepper if the film hadn't intended to go somewhere with it. Yes, from a Watsonian pov it was to blackmail Tony into working on stabilizing the Extremis formula, but there had to be a Doylist reason as well. So while I was waiting and hoping for the discovery of Pepper's survival, her getting to be the one to save Tony and defeat and finish the main villain was still a special kick. What had converted me in The Avengers to the relationship was continued and developed further here, that they actually had managed the transition from boss/employee to equal partners. I had a big smile on my face during the Pepper-the-superhero scene.:)
Actually, I smiled a lot in the film, because it remembered that one very enjoyable part in IM1 had been the Tony-builds-experiments-screws-up-then-succeeds sequence, and one reason why one can care about a "billionaire playboy philantropist" is the "genius mechanic" part, that he's really good building and inventing things from scratch. So Tony gets to do a lot of that in this film as well, justified by plot. The interaction with the kid throughout was golden as well, not least because it was funny and occasionally touching without ever veering into sentimentality. (The kid trying to guilt trip Tony and Tony noticing immediately was a case in point.) It also occurs to me that with the boy and with Gary the tattoed fan in the present, we saw a difference between Tony in the past and Tony in the present. Tony in the past doesn't even notice fanboy!Guy Pearce other than as an annoyance to make fun of; Tony in the present is still prone to quips but also doesn't ridicule vulnerable-to-him people like Gary, instead treats him as a human being.
Which brings me to another big difference to IM2. Tony there believed he was dying which made for extra appalling behaviour, including towards Rhodey and Pepper. Whereas here, while he's dealing with the after effect of almost having died in The Avengers (which makes for lovely emotional continuity, btw), he doesn't take it out on them. The banter with Rhodey, including his teasing him about the "Iron Patriot" label, is affectionate, and with Happy, too, he comes across as a friend, not a boss. (Btw, Jon Favreau gets more dialogue here than in his own films.) Speaking of Happy, whoever in the scriptwriting team had the idea of making Happy Hogan a Downton Abbey fan (who seems to ship Sibyl/Branson, because of course he does): thank you, that was the kind of detail that makes Happy a real character, not just a cameo gag and nod towards the comics. (Also, since Tony recognizes the show on sight I assume he's been watching as well. My own disenchantment not withstanding: I love that. Can't wait forlikeadeuce to write a "Happy and Tony argue about the third season" meta fic.)
Another sign of Tony being genuinenly changed while maintaining his quintessential Tony-ness: little touches like the fact he tells the mother of the unfortunate Jed Davis her son was no suicidal bomber. Or, of course, the obvious symbolism of HOW he manages to save the people sucked out of the air plane, enabling them to help each other and thus managing to save the lot, not just a few.
And lastly: the obligatory post-credits scene about two thirds of the people in my cinema were patient enough to wait for. Because The Avengers hadn't just provided Tony with a near death experience and alien invasions but also with some new friends. Thus, the revelation that the person whom he was narrating the events of the film to weren't, as I had at different times assumed, Pepper or Happy Hogan, but Bruce Banner, was absolutely perfect. And Bruce's reaction was hilarious. Somewhere in the credits, while waiting, I read "special thanks to Joss Whedon" , and until I hear otherwise I chose to believe Joss wrote that tag scene. Because it's his type of humor and he invented and launched the good ship Science Bros, after all.:)
Now I had tried not to read anything about this film, but even so, I couldn't avoid hearing that Ben Kingsley was cast as the Mandarin. This left me hoping for something like the twist in Iron Man where the Afghan terrorists are actually funded and frontmen for the real villain, Obediah (aka the military industrial complex), but still not exactly glad that they were going to use the Mandarin at all. Well, I needn't have worried, since what the film actually does with the Mandarin is perfect and in retrospect the only thing you can do with a villain created as a Yellow Peril stereotype. To wit, as opposed to Tony's kidnappers in IM I, who were actually Afghans, he's a British actor named Trevor and hired to play a Yellow Peril stereoytpe which in-story was specifically created because that's what a white guy thought American believe a scary terrorist looks like, as a distraction and a trick. Ben Kingsley is visibly having a blast as Trevor the beer guzzling football (soccer for Americans) fan out for actorly glory, and it's probably an in-joke to the fact so many Brits get used to play villains in Hollywood productions that Kingsley gets to use his own accent and wasn't directed to play Trevor as an American.
As for the actual villain: Guy Pearce has also fun being smarmy and smug, no surprise there (and desperate in the introductory sequence). Iron Man II also tried to make both Ivan Vanko and Justin Hammer over the top reflections of different aspects of Tony; I think it works better here with Pearce's character and Maya Hansen, though I regretted that Maya's role wasn't as large as it was in Warren Ellis's Iron Man: Extremis, an obvious influence on this film, where the theme of Maya and Tony as fellow scientists who have in different ways sold out but still long to give their scientific abilities redemptive meaning is a major, not a minor aspect. (Maya's last words to Tony in the book, after he figured out the truth, are something along the lines that he's no better than she is, and Ellis lets Tony reply that no, he isn't, but he tries to be.) Then again, for that to work in a film the whole plot would have had to be different, and I liked this one, small role for Maya not withstanding.
But enough about the villains. What makes the film so hugely enjoyable are how well our heroes are put to use. I had liked Pepper and the fact she hadn't ended up with Tony in Iron Man I, had not liked the romantic turn in IM2, and had been converted to the pairing by Joss Whedon in a few minutes in The Avengers, so I was hopeful, yet also fretting, re: what would IM3 do with Pepper and Tony/Pepper? The banter was good (movieverse Tony and Pepper always were), and when there was mutual saving when the Malibu house was blown up - Tony directing the armor to form around Pepper, Pepper using the armor to shield Tony as well, then get Maya out - I relaxed on that front. So much did I relax, in fact, that I was 90% certain there would be pay off for Pepper getting kidnapped by the bad guy halfway through the film that would not be Tony saving the damsel. And when Pearce's character started to pump her with Extremis I was certain, certain enough not to be distressed by the plunge to supposed doom. That was a Chekovian gun if ever I saw one: it had been established repeatedly that the surviving Extremis candidates could make it out alive of explosions, plus from a Doylist pov there would have been no reason for the villain to use Extremis on Pepper if the film hadn't intended to go somewhere with it. Yes, from a Watsonian pov it was to blackmail Tony into working on stabilizing the Extremis formula, but there had to be a Doylist reason as well. So while I was waiting and hoping for the discovery of Pepper's survival, her getting to be the one to save Tony and defeat and finish the main villain was still a special kick. What had converted me in The Avengers to the relationship was continued and developed further here, that they actually had managed the transition from boss/employee to equal partners. I had a big smile on my face during the Pepper-the-superhero scene.:)
Actually, I smiled a lot in the film, because it remembered that one very enjoyable part in IM1 had been the Tony-builds-experiments-screws-up-then-succeeds sequence, and one reason why one can care about a "billionaire playboy philantropist" is the "genius mechanic" part, that he's really good building and inventing things from scratch. So Tony gets to do a lot of that in this film as well, justified by plot. The interaction with the kid throughout was golden as well, not least because it was funny and occasionally touching without ever veering into sentimentality. (The kid trying to guilt trip Tony and Tony noticing immediately was a case in point.) It also occurs to me that with the boy and with Gary the tattoed fan in the present, we saw a difference between Tony in the past and Tony in the present. Tony in the past doesn't even notice fanboy!Guy Pearce other than as an annoyance to make fun of; Tony in the present is still prone to quips but also doesn't ridicule vulnerable-to-him people like Gary, instead treats him as a human being.
Which brings me to another big difference to IM2. Tony there believed he was dying which made for extra appalling behaviour, including towards Rhodey and Pepper. Whereas here, while he's dealing with the after effect of almost having died in The Avengers (which makes for lovely emotional continuity, btw), he doesn't take it out on them. The banter with Rhodey, including his teasing him about the "Iron Patriot" label, is affectionate, and with Happy, too, he comes across as a friend, not a boss. (Btw, Jon Favreau gets more dialogue here than in his own films.) Speaking of Happy, whoever in the scriptwriting team had the idea of making Happy Hogan a Downton Abbey fan (who seems to ship Sibyl/Branson, because of course he does): thank you, that was the kind of detail that makes Happy a real character, not just a cameo gag and nod towards the comics. (Also, since Tony recognizes the show on sight I assume he's been watching as well. My own disenchantment not withstanding: I love that. Can't wait for
likeadeuce to write a "Happy and Tony argue about the third season" meta fic.) Another sign of Tony being genuinenly changed while maintaining his quintessential Tony-ness: little touches like the fact he tells the mother of the unfortunate Jed Davis her son was no suicidal bomber. Or, of course, the obvious symbolism of HOW he manages to save the people sucked out of the air plane, enabling them to help each other and thus managing to save the lot, not just a few.
And lastly: the obligatory post-credits scene about two thirds of the people in my cinema were patient enough to wait for. Because The Avengers hadn't just provided Tony with a near death experience and alien invasions but also with some new friends. Thus, the revelation that the person whom he was narrating the events of the film to weren't, as I had at different times assumed, Pepper or Happy Hogan, but Bruce Banner, was absolutely perfect. And Bruce's reaction was hilarious. Somewhere in the credits, while waiting, I read "special thanks to Joss Whedon" , and until I hear otherwise I chose to believe Joss wrote that tag scene. Because it's his type of humor and he invented and launched the good ship Science Bros, after all.:)
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Date: 2013-05-01 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-01 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-01 01:50 pm (UTC)I'm intrigued though! And encouraged people are being generally positive about the movie.
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Date: 2013-05-01 02:02 pm (UTC)Trevor is the best Mandarin ever. (Not that there is a whole lot of competition, but I do like Gene Khan from Armored Adventures a lot. Which given that it's a High School AU, just proves that the only thing you can do with the Mandarin is throw the Yellow Peril stereotype out and start again, or actively make fun of it.) Kingsley was obviously having a great time with the role. Stealing scenes away from RDJ is no mean feat.
I also loved Rhodey, Super Pepper and the Science Bros epilogue. And Tony being Tony. It was a great film and a wonderful ending to the trilogy.
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Date: 2013-05-01 02:09 pm (UTC)And now that I've watched the film, I can check whether there is already fanfic. Including one where every Avenger but Thor facepalms when they watch Tony give the Mandarin his adress on the news.
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Date: 2013-05-02 05:09 am (UTC)re: Rhodey, considering his near total absence in Avengers fanfic, I hope IM3 and the fact he has a lot to do there remedies this somewhat!
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Date: 2013-05-06 02:00 pm (UTC)ETA: I am probably in a significant minority here, but I was much more compelled by the villains in Iron Man 2. I mean, I loved what we saw of Maya but as you said her arc was rather truncated. And as much as I dig Guy Pearce, I thought Killian was a bore. I kept vainly hoping Justin Hammer would turn out to be the power behind the throne.
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Date: 2013-05-06 07:05 pm (UTC)You notet "Lear", I note "Croydon", because that's where the Doctor was supposed to drop off Sarah Jane Smith after she finished her original companion stint with him (and managed to get it wrong, leaving the poor woman in Edinburgh instead), and where
re: IM2 villains, I thought Justin Hammer was hilarious, but Ivan Vanko and that whole backstory of his dad and Tony's dad really really didn't work for me. His bird not withstanding. Also, I kept muttering "why make it all about Tony's Howard issues - if you need daddy issues, why not let him deal with the whole Obediah shock from the last film! We actually KNOW Obediah." (This being before Captain America and Howard Stark in same.) IM3 gave too little Maya, and I'm not interested in Killian as a person, but his scheme made more sense to me than Obie's and Vanko's, and making Trevor the Mandarin was such a stroke of genius that I have to give it the laurels on the villain front, too. But, you know, nobody forces you to! I have these experiences, too, where I can't squee about something most of fandom is wild about. *eyes Supernatural, Inception, The Dark Knight*
...I'm going to watch the film again tomorrow, I admit.
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Date: 2013-05-06 07:11 pm (UTC)Re: Vanko, I didn't really care about the Howard issues but things like Tony accidentally giving him the solution out of arrogance -- and the general 'Tony has to deal with him face to face' aspect -- was more compelling to me.
I like the idea of Trevor the actor but something about the whole setup felt predictable to me -- I called it as soon as we saw Killian's people setting up for 'the Master''s arrival -- and honestly I kept thinking of Hans Gruber in Die Hard posing as a political terrorist when he just wanted to rob a bank. Not that a plot's necessarily bad because you see it coming but a lot of people seem more impressed with it as a 'twist' than I was. (Granted, I had already been spoiled on some general things, such as that the Mandarin trope was subverted and that Pepper and Rhodey would both survive, so that probably helped me see some of the twists coming).
But yeah, I'm happy to see the general enthusiasm/yours in particular, but the whole thing wasn't so much my cuppa. I'm thinking about that stage acting fic, though.
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Date: 2013-06-17 01:25 am (UTC)I saw it coming when at that exact moment, too, but that didn't make me dislike the twist, on the contrary. There are two ways to guess a plot twist: when you guess it and think "this is so silly and predictable" and when you think "this makes perfect sense and would make this story so much better; please let it be the case, please let it be!" For me, this was the latter; I was hoping that the Mandarin would turn out to be an actor.
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Date: 2013-06-17 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2013-06-17 01:47 am (UTC)I loved the way that the movie played with stereotypes, from the way Pepper Potts was used, to the Mandarin reveal, which I saw coming pretty early on, but it was one of these cases when this is not a bad thing: I was hoping that the Mandarin would be revealed to be a an actor posing as a terrorist, because it made such perfect sense and would make the story better and smarter. So when it was revealed, it was a "YES!" moment for me. I'm not familiar with the Iron Man comics, but in the movie, he was set up as a stereotypical Middle-Eastern villain, an Osama Bin Laden type. (It is also smart that they have updated a racist Yellow Peril stereotype into another racist stereotype that's far more topical nowadays.) I was already used to this franchise being smarter than that and I expected better than overdone cliches; besides, there was something off about Ben Kingsley's Mandarin from the start - probably his strange unidentifiable accent (at moments it seemed like someone trying to sound "exotic", at moments I heard hints of a British accent) combined with his over-theatrical intonation.
Although, I must admit that what gave me the idea may have been the fact that I remember an off-hand joke made in an episode of The Lone Rangers, the X-Files spinoff, where a character claimed that Saddam Hussein was really a small time US actor who "does good ethnics".
I loved the scene where Tony saves the people from the plane. I also liked that the movie completely ignored the "oh, who shall I save?" dilemma that Rhodes' line had set up and that would no doubt be milked for its worth in some other superhero movie. We can't save them both? Sure we can! And in the meantime, Tony will first save the people who are in most immediate danger of dying a horrible death.
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Date: 2013-06-18 09:18 pm (UTC)Yes, indeed. And hey, who knows, maybe the two scriptwriters watched The Lone Gunmen as well!
I also liked that the movie completely ignored the "oh, who shall I save?" dilemma that Rhodes' line had set up and that would no doubt be milked for its worth in some other superhero movie. We can't save them both? Sure we can! And in the meantime, Tony will first save the people who are in most immediate danger of dying a horrible death.
One thing most of the Marvel films are good at, and this one is REALLY good at, is emphasizing the value of people working together. And that's another thing that makes it fit so well into post Avengers continuity. Tony knows that working together means more lives saved (and Rhodey has always known that). And he uses his ability to think outside the box, which as an engineer he always had but pre-Afghanistan didn't apply to goals that weren't for his own amusement, for the most dire emergency. Which, again, depends on people working together even while their lives are threatened, that they grasp what he's getting at and help each other so they can all make it out alive. It's such a great non-patronising way to use the superhero concept - these people need Tony in some dire situations, but they're not passive tokens to be saved, they're people with their own minds, he knows that and is counting on it, and the film knows and honors it, too.
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Date: 2013-06-18 10:03 pm (UTC)Indeed, and this is a pleasant change from The Dark Knight Rises, where the people of Gotham seemed completely to disappear during the siege (except as extras in the Kangaroo court) and only Batman, his friends and the cops were able to do anything at all. Which was one of the things that irked me the most about that movie. Nolan wasn't always making that mistake with his Batman - The Dark Knight, which I loved, had that huge moment with the people of Gotham proving the Joker wrong - so I don't know why this turned out the way it did.