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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
Antman at least turn is objetive of not sucking hard, other than that....
And I like iron man 3 for two reason: one it manage to take a question Steven ask in avenger(what is tony stark without the suit?) and making him a movie, also I like because is one of the few times the Villian ACTUALLY engage against the hero in a brutal and quite cold manner, you can feel how the mandarin is pushing him over and over and over while most of the time in marvel movie the villian does is own shit unrelated to the hero.
I always feel the movie is undertated because of that.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"We've discussed Iron Man 3 more than we've discussed any other topic, so I'll just quickly summarize my thoughts on it: The interesting psychological ideas are built up but don't have any pay off and are just unceremoniously ditched in the second half, it wastes Ben Kingsley, Killian's the most generic villain of the MCU, and it destroys Iron Man's best Arch-Enemy for the sake of a cheap twist and it has Asian erasure.
For Iron Man 2, I feel Hammer's problem is that he's too silly and wacky for the film he's in. He has literally zero threat value and all he does is sap screentime from the better antagonist (Vanko), and you could almost have the same movie without him or with him in a much more diminished form. The film has this whole idea of Stark's self-destruction and the sins of his fathers coming into form via Ivan Vanko (and the first act, Vanko's finest hour, is the strongest part of the film). Hammer's wacky incompetence just doesn't mesh, particularly when he has way more screentime than the far more compelling Vanko and particularly when the comic book equivalent of Justin Hammer was a Professor Moriarty expy, a shadowy mastermind operating from the centre of a web of industrial espionage and arms dealing.
If I had to change Iron Man 2, I'd make it more clearly a (loose) adaptation of Armor Wars plus Extremis. It'd be something like: Vanko makes him bleed in Monaco, goes to jail, and from jail he finds ways to smuggle out his technical creations to various third parties (or he already smuggled them before being sent to prison), and with this you have some minor Iron Man villains showing up as those third parties (so Firepower, Blizzard, Titanium Man and the Melter to give a nice variety of armor designs and powers), with Stark and Rhodey having to find ways to contain the problem. So Tony and Vanko could have a few chats Silence of the Lambs style, one from each end of a cell, as Tony and Rhodey try to track down all the people he made suits for. So the film would interspeed Tony and Rhodey' scrackdown on the third party suits and Tony and Vanko chatting in prison. I'd keep the Paladium poisoning aspect and have Tony be more upfront with Rhodey about how he's Secretly Dying, making his relationship with Rhodey the emotional core of the film the way the relationship with Pepper was the core of the first (so Rhodey gets the War Machine as a gift from Tony).
In the end, Tony would manage to contain all the third party armors and create the Extremis to save himself from Paladium poisoning, and Vanko (seeing that Tony is no longer dying) would undergo a Villainous Breakdown, break out of prison and go to kill Tony with his own hands and then lose.
You could have a comics accurate The Mandarin as the shadowy mastermind behind the scenes aiding Vanko's schemes, setting up Mandarin serving as a central antagonist in Iron Man 3 and making Tony aware of how extensive the Ten Rings are.
Iron Man 3 I'd make a blend of Demon in a Bottle and Enter the Mandarin, having the story center on Tony's PTSD and obsession with being Iron Man acting as world police using his "bigger stick policy" to solve world conflicts and the movie deconstruct that with the Mandarin. I.e, the bigger stick policy only really works when you have the bigger stick (and the Mandarin is one Hell of a proverbial stick), so you'd have Tony's "world peace" only serving to empower the Mandarin. As Mandarin beats him (figuratively and literally) for all the world to see Stark would have to realize bullying countries into peace doesn't actually solve a damn thing and just encourages a Might Makes Right situation, giving rise to warlords like the Mandarin, and thus Stark would have to rebuild his "world peace" plan via genuine diplomacy (presumably by sharing some of his tech allá the ending of Black Panther).
So in essence it'd be Demon in a Bottle except Tony's addiction here would be to being the Iron Man as of itself, and it'd have the Mandarin vs Iron Man plot of Enter the Mandarin.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."My problem with the politics of the IM 3 twist was that it veers a bit too close to "911 was an inside job" conspiracy theories for my tastes.
And I've said this before, but if they needed to do a "twist," then Maya being the true mastermind would have made more sense and been far more interesting imo. She was less cartoonishly evil, so it'd have been more of a surprise. Extremis was HER idea initially (then the movie just had Killian kind of hijack it offscreen). They set up a connection to Tony (she showed Extremis to him originally and explained why it wasn't working right). She had a potentially better motivation early on (she wanted to use it to cure disease/illness/make people stronger, etc), only for the film to drop that in favor of "you slept with me and then didn't call me back, I hate you." As an aside, really Shane Black, really? THAT'S what you came up with, seriously?
Oh and she's also the true mastermind in the comic book arc that the film is based on as well.
Maya’s motive in the comic was not that different from Tony’s but may have had some issue with how film-Tony thinks. In the comic, both their motives are “I want to evolve humanity through my technology “, but Maya is more willing to jump to human testing. This doesn’t really seem like film-Tony, who explicitly does not want the general public all getting their own Iron Man.
Comic-Maya also had a less Woman Scorned origin for resenting Tony. Years earlier he was initially interested in her work, but after hiring Maya he forgot all about her and basically left her as a glorified secretary. Hence why she starts experimenting behind his back.
edited 19th Mar '18 11:33:20 AM by Tuckerscreator
Iron Man 2 is better than Iron Man 3. 2 at least has a strong first act and an antagonist that could have worked if not for the subsequent acts muddying everything up with awkward plotting. Iron Man 3, on the other hand...my hatred towards Killian has grown to the point where I'd rate him as about the same level as Malekith in terms of how awful he is and how much a loathe him. I'm frustrated with Vanko because of the film making a promising character and then moving away from him by cluttering the plot, I'm pissed with Killian because the Mandarin twist is shit and they could've gone with the actual comic character in a more modern style, but they wasted it on one of the most boring and pathetic MCU villains. It's wasted potential after wasted potential.
Also, as much a I would've also preferred Maya as the villain, they should've removed the Mandarin completely from the film if they were gonna do that. Or make Maya Asian or something. No whitewashed Mandarin.
edited 19th Mar '18 11:35:58 AM by AdricDePsycho
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?Re Demon in the bottle: Here is the thing: I knew nothing about this comic when I watched Ironman 2 for the first time, and yet I did understand that Tony is a functioning alcoholic about to get off the rail, and that watching his father lose it on screen lead to him reconsidering this habit. Which I honestly liked better than the usual portrayal of alcoholics on screen. Having experienced a few of them myself, THAT is what they actually tend to look like. The Hollywood version, well, I guess it exists too, but the ones I have known were all able to hold down a job and you might not even have gotten the idea that they were alcoholics unless you went into their kitchen. One of them finally managed to drink herself to death last year after decades of heavy alcoholism, and there was nothing anyone could have done about it.
To me the problem of Ironman 2 was there there are two entirely different storylines running beside each other which barely have anything to do with each other. Vanko seems to be only there to provide action scenes and nothing about his story actually makes any sense.
I love how people are acting like having the comic book Mandarin would be some sort of step forward for Asian portrayal in the MCU and are throwing around terms like whitewashing and erasure. He's always been a barely acceptable Fu Manchu knock-off.
All Iron Man 3 did was call that shit out. The Mandarin in that movie is what he always was in the comics in a meta sense - just a foreign boogeyman.
edited 19th Mar '18 12:21:17 PM by Sigilbreaker26
"And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"
Exactly. I mean, they couldn't even come up with a better name than "The Mandarin." It'd be like if Crimson Dynamo was "The Commie."
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The actual name has never made any sense. No Chinese person would ever call themselves that because it's a Sanskrit loanword the Porteguese used to refer to Chinese civil servants, not a Chinese wordnote .
And Mandarin isn't even a civil servant of any kind.
edited 19th Mar '18 12:24:34 PM by Sigilbreaker26
"And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"I never watched it but wasn't there an animated show where the Mandarin became a good guy? That would have been better.
This song needs more love.Iron Man: Armored Adventures is the one you're thinking off. That show had, basically, three Mandarins: the historical original who was basically Genghis Khan (a surprisingly even depiction with him being being a fair, if brutal, anti-hero) who split up the rings centuries ago, and the two successors of varying morality who are trying to collect the rings in the present. The one who eventually wins also eventually turns good, though not after doing some really awful things while pursuing his obsession.
Anywho, comics Mandarin hasn't been a foreign boogeyman in decades, to note. Judging comics characters based solely off of Silver Age depictions and/or reactions to Silver Age depictions is something that Marvel - generally speaking - blissfully avoids while DC continually falls into the mistake, so them doing so with Mandarin was disappointing.
Especially since it's Marvel's most blatant example of their "this is a difficult racial situation, despite being one of our few nonwhite characters atm, so let's not do the legwork and just make him white instead" policy - the one which Black Panther thankfully avoids.
edited 19th Mar '18 12:35:46 PM by KnownUnknown
Yeah, nowadays he's just a representation of Chinese industry via corporate espionage. And the "legwork" would have involved:
- Changing the name because it is completely nonsensical as said above
- Completely changing the powers aside from his magic martial arts because ten completely seperate ring based superpowers cannot fly in a movie
- Having a third villain based around "stealing Tony's technology" which... well, that wouldn't have changed Iron Man 3 much, would it, actually.
Either way, a lot of these internet complaints sprang up after the twist but not after they made him basically Bin Laden but with an inexplicable name (since that was apparent in the trailers) - even though the latter is also abandoning his Asian identity. Actually, the movie makes that less problematic because in the movie all the contradictions are the result of him being a focus-tested terrorist.
edited 19th Mar '18 12:39:32 PM by Sigilbreaker26
"And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"And gives us yet another generic "rival businessman/scientist with a grudge" instead. Honestly the "mish-mash of different warrior cultures" would have worked better, if it WEREN'T a twist. If he had been what he appeared to be, then THAT would have been more interesting.
Also my problem with the political statement is that it's peddling an inaccurate narrative. The whole idea of "what if Bin Laden was just a puppet for some white dude in a business suit." Here's the problem with that, HE WASN'T!! And we know that he wasn't. He WAS dangerous, he and his followers DID pull off these attacks, and he believed his own ideology.
The whole "statement" is basically a conspiracy theory and nothing more. Also Black didn't bother to do his research either. Mandarin hasn't been a "racist caricature" in a long time now, and his rings aren't "magic." They're alien tech,
Since when?
Keep in mind that Iron Man himself is already a superpower kitchen sink.
And we have a movie coming up with several dozen characters all of whom have very wildly different powers, and whom are fighting over an artifact that itself gives the wearer six vaguely defined powers which, themselves, include a wide array of individual sub-powers.
Why exactly would he have to be that way?
Keep also in mind that Killian's motivation in the film is completely different from his comics motivation anyway. So was Whiplash's, come to think of it. Changing the motivations and goals of characters - especially villains - when adapted to film is something of a necessity, often because comic villains need to be condensed and distilled anyway.
edited 19th Mar '18 12:54:55 PM by KnownUnknown
I think the Mandarin could have worked if they built up to him over the course of the three movies. I think Iron Man Armored Adventures did this by making him Tony's friend Eugene Khan. Unfortunately I can see why they didn't go that route. Iron Man was the first MCU movie. I doubt they wanted to set up something like that when there might not even be a payoff.
YMMV on that one. They've toned down the Yellow Peril elements considerably (he no longer dresses like a Chinese warlord) but there are still overtones there. And ironically, the attempt at reimagining him as a less offensive character was what you basically just described as another evil businessman.
They were basically in a lose-lose situation on this one, as we've established before that Marvel has a crazy huge boner for the Chinese box office right now. I'm not sure there was any scenario where a comic-accurate Mandarin was going to fly with the Chinese censors. They even freaked out over the minor character Lau in The Dark Knight.
As someone else suggested, really the best case scenario would've been trying to add in some heroic Chinese characters to try and offset the Mandarin, but I'm not sure even that would've helped.
edited 19th Mar '18 1:14:01 PM by comicwriter
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Those powers all fulfill a theme (like, for example, Thor is strong, and his hammer gives him flight, lightning and can't be lifted by the unworthy). Of those powers three of them basically fall into "god of lightning" and the fourth was a plot point.
Iron Man's suit can do a lot of stuff, sure, but it's more like it's a big wearable utility belt. It has missles, lasers etc but we understand missles lasers etc.
But Mandarin? He has ten rings each of which do something completely different. You can't say "but infinity guantlet" because each of the stones has been in a movie outlining more or less what they can do so far, some of them in multiple films.
edited 19th Mar '18 1:16:04 PM by Sigilbreaker26
"And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"

Killian's plot is almost worthy of a Fawlty Towers episode.
With explosions and superheroes and criticism of the military industrial complex.
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