Today’s fantastic feature film takes us to 2013 for Iron Man 3, kicking off Phase Two of the MCU with an old favorite and some new PTSD.
- Where is everybody? In a comic book world, it’s so easy to have characters meet up for an issue or two – you just check with your editor to make sure the character isn’t dead and then draw them in. Cinematically, with budgets and contracts, that’s tougher, so you get a case like Iron Man 3 where the intervention of SHIELD might have been helpful. I understand that the point is that Tony is a loner, and he’s pretty detached from the world for most of the film, but the fact that this issue never pops up in the film feels a bit like a gaping hole.
- Speaking of wormholes... The sense of absent Avengers (Bruce Banner’s post-credits cameo aside) is compounded by the fact that the film very self-consciously lives in the shadow of The Avengers and the Battle of New York. This I very much appreciate – someone as grounded and self-centered as Tony Stark would necessarily be very shaken by a near-death experience battling aliens through a giant wormhole in the sky above New York City. And I can’t help but feel that all the questions Tony fields about New York are some meta-commentary from director Shane Black, who very self-consciously enters into a narrative six films in the making and feels the pressure of everyone asking how he’s going to tie it all together.
- Manda-wrong. It’s been long enough that we can talk about the big Mandarin reveal, right? Namely that Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin is actually a patsy, a persona put on by addict actor Trevor Slattery in service to Aldrich Killian’s master plan. To add insult to injury, the plot twist is accompanied by a few fart jokes. Look, I totally understand why Iron Man 3 goes this way, but I would have much rather seen Iron Man go head-to-head with a terrifying and surprisingly not-racist interpretation of the Mandarin. Instead, the main villain is another well-dressed white guy. (“All Hail the King,” a short on the Thor: The Dark World DVD, suggests that there’s a real Mandarin out there, as well, but the Kingsley interpretation promised so much more than we got.)
- He is Iron Man. I very much enjoyed the film, and it’s because Shane Black makes a film that is very consistent with the tone of the previous films and the MCU as a whole. That’s predicated largely on the performance of Robert Downey Jr., who treats Tony Stark like a comfortable suit. The film’s closing line, “I am Iron Man,” harkens back to the first film, tells us something about the character’s growth beyond reliance on the metal suits, and tells us that this whole franchise succeeds because of the attitude struck by RDJ back in 2008.
- Music to my ears. Longtime readers of the blog know I’m a big fan of musical scores; when done right, like in the Star Wars series, the score becomes a character unto itself (or, in the case of Tomorrowland, does more work than the film itself). For all the connective tissue between the films, musically they’ve been somewhat piecemeal. Iron Man 3 is the fourth film starring Tony Stark, with four different composers along the way. Finally, though, Brian Tyler’s Iron Man theme seems to have stuck (due in no small part to Tyler’s work scoring Age of Ultron). Will we hear it in Civil War as well? I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
1 comment:
Oh, get over it about the Mandarin! Although that does highlight a good point: As much as the Marvel films have set new standards for superhero movies and big connected franchises, with few exceptions (Loki and Bucky), their approach to villains are much the same as in the rest of the genre beforehand and concurrently (each film introduces a new bad guy or two, they're defeated, and then never appear again).
Canon changes and solidifying of the series formula aside, this is the best Iron Man movie, in my opinion
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