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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
I’m also reminded of that book series about Mortal Engines series where the main protagonist Hester has an incredibly gruesome gangrenous facial disfigurement in the books but they toned it down immensely for the movie.
Edited by slimcoder on May 9th 2021 at 5:44:44 AM
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."The first film, oddly, made the exact same metaphor but without running into 9/11 trutherisms, with Obadiah Stane collaborating with Raza, but Raza having his own plans and being very much an actual person rather than a hired actor or somesuch. Stane (the "US industrialist stand-in" of movie 1) is just the much bigger threat and usurps Raza as the main villain, but the point was somewhat made that the US military-industrial complex and foreign despots have a symbiotic relationship, not that one literally invented the other out of whole cloth. To suggest so is to act like the US is the only place in the world that exists.
I wouldn't go this far as to read the "Mandarin" and the twist as allegorical. The whole point is that Killian deliberately exploits the stereotypical images of Bin Laden and Gaddafi and Middle Eastern Terrorists as branding so that the "Mandarin" is immediately read as a threat by association. It's clearly not intended as a commentary on the real figures, and IM3 doesn't provide enough to get that reading unintentionally because the "Mandarin" is never really explored (even when compared to Raza) and the moment he's seen off-camera the jig is up. Once the twist happens everything the "Mandarin" is is for better and for worse complete rubbish.
(To your credit an MCU not!Bin Laden attacking America and Stark for their hypocrisy, either on his own or as an unintentional stooge of BIG OIL, would probably be a more meaningful villain than Killian essentially LARPing. Though at least give me this credit, people don't hate the Mandarin twist because it denies a proper commentary on American interventionism in the Middle East.)
Edited by Watchtower on May 9th 2021 at 10:06:36 AM
It comes off as “Bin Laden was a paid agent” instead of “the fake Mandarin was exploiting Bin Laden’s image” because it’s not until after the reveal that there start to be direct references to Bin Laden. More than a decade after 9/11, film was still at a point where the topic continued to be uneasy to broach and lots of media tended to avoid confirming that 9/11 had happened in their universe. So the initial assumption was that the Not-Mandarin was the MCU equivalent of Bin Laden. That he turns out to be an imitator wasn’t very well explained at first because there’s no mention of “this guy’s just like Bin Laden” until after he turns out to be a fake.
We’re starting to see the same uneasiness with media set during and after COVID.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on May 9th 2021 at 7:20:30 AM
I honestly think that the "We make our own monsters" framing device is the biggest mistake of Killian. I actually like his agenda in Iron Man 3. I prefer villains who just seem to be rolling with the punches over the "Always eighty-five steps ahead, precisely predicting the exact moves of every random occurrence" type of chessmasters.
Killian is a guy in over his head, snared by his own tangled web of consequence evasion. He tried to sell a product and it blew someone up. Whoops. He tried to escape the consequences for that by inventing a terrorist attack. And then more attacks as his product kept blowing people up. Everything past that is just Killian doubling down and escalating for the sake of keeping up appearances.
He didn't set out to invent a fake terrorist, but now he has to assassinate the President because Tony said his fake terrorist has a small penis on live national television. Killian lost control of this whole thing somewhere along the way.
You notice how almost no part of that whatsoever has to do with Killian wanting revenge against Tony? Yeah. That's the problem. The "Make our own monsters" framing device caused pretty much all of this to go unacknowledged by the fandom, who rejected Killian's plan in favor of "He's doing bad things so that he can get revenge against Tony. Somehow. It's all about screwing Tony."
The second people heard that "We make our own monsters" bit, they shut down and refused to engage with Killian as anything more than Stane/Vanko III. Nothing has done more damage to his character than the film's largely unnecessary framing device.
My biggest problem with Iron Man 3 is how much of the action Tony spends out of his suit. They were trying to do the "Who is Superhero: The Man or the Powers?" story for Tony. It's a superhero classic. But the problem is that it's a fuckstupid storyline to do for Iron Man in particular, because Tony's superpowers are a mech suit that he, Tony, designed.
"Who would Tony Stark be without his super suit?" He'd be the guy that built the suit. And he'd build another suit. And then he'd have a suit. What the fuck is this question?
This is like asking "Man or Powers?" for Batman.
Edited by TobiasDrake on May 9th 2021 at 8:16:43 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
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So here's the line just so we're on the same page:
This is a case of Famous, Famous, Fictional: Killian is talking about how he created the Mandarin and invokes two famous then-current "faces of evil" to explain how he made a third. But the thing about Famous, Famous, Fictional is that the Famouses are, well, famous. The movie assumes that you know who Bin Laden and Gaddafi are, and if you know who Bin Laden and Gaddafi are...there's no reason why you should suddenly buy into them secretly being plants for Big Oil. There are ways to word this to make that leap deliberately implied and the movie never goes there. Like, even though the movie involves a grand conspiracy it isn't actually about conspiracies the way Winter Soldier is; as noted, the Vice President being in on Killian's scheme isn't treated with that sort of severity.
So yeah, I dunno, I never took the "Mandarin" as intended to be a No Celebrities Were Harmed Bin Laden and I don't see you how preserve that reading well after the twist unless you either want to buy it or know so little about Bin Laden that you're willing to.
Edited by Watchtower on May 9th 2021 at 11:20:07 AM
He built the suit in a cave with a box of scraps. That is the biggest summation of who Tony is when he is left with next to nothing.
Iron Man 3’s question was already answered right from the beginning of the first film.
Edited by slimcoder on May 9th 2021 at 8:21:37 AM
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."Its funny that the movie that tries to show what Tony can do outside of the suit is also the one that gives him like twenty suits in the final fight.
"Okay, that's enough demonstrating the point. Look at this cool shit Tony prepared ahead of time"
Forever liveblogging the AvengersThis is like asking "Man or Powers?" for Batman.
Oh, I'm SURE there has been a comic where Batman has to survive fighting a supervillain in the wilderness without his gadgets, and they made it a big thing that he has to use a makeshift bow and arrow with a rope tied to the arrow instead of his grappling hook, or something.
And yet it (would have) worked out really well for him; dude not only controlled the most feared "terrorist" of the modern day but almost got control of the White House. Using the Mandarin as an excuse to assassinate the President and put his own guy in the seat was pretty serendipitous for what was originally just sweeping failed experiments under the rug.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!I'm fairly certain the narrative is meant to be allegorical to the War on Terror on some level, you don't make a movie about how Big Oil TM is using a middle eastern terrorism fears to run the country. The movie includes lines such as "I'll own the War on Terror!" (that's a direct quote) as Killian's executing this masterplan to have both Ellis and The Mandarin at his back and call. That line and those stakes only make sense if you take the film's allegory at face-value (i.e there's a chance Killian will, indeed, own the war on terror). It's much like Black Panther, Thor Ragnarok and Winter Soldier in its use of over-the-top fiction to address real world issues (it just botches them entirely unlike the other three). Saying the allegory for Bin Laden isn't an allegory ecause the film acknowledges the existence of Bin Laden briefly is like saying Winter Soldier's allegory isn't an allegory because the movie acknowledges the CIA (the obvious allegory source for SHIELD) exists outside of SHIELD.
In fact, Iron Man 1 is already pletty transparently a War on Terror allegory, with the Ten Rings and Raza standing for "Middle Eastern terror" and Obadiah Stane for the military-industrial complex (Stane makes this obvious pretty much every scene he speaks post The Reveal of his villainy, but particularly on his speech to Stark about the weapons being "in the right hands, our hands"), and the whole conflict being about Stark realizing the military-industrial complex he contributed to and profiteered from is a profoundly morally bankrupt institution and he needs to break away from it, but some (like Obadiah) will try to stop him. It's pretty clear-cut.
Iron Man 3 made a deliberate choice to harken back to that note (after movie 2 did end up generally pretty aimless on that theme). They just fucked up the allegory very intensively and ended up crashing on a brick wall of 9/11 trutherism, which is not to say Shane Black (or Drew Pearce, the other screenwriter) is a 9/11 truther (I don't know enough about either of them to make that claim). In fact, I don't think Black (or Pearce) is, I just think they botched the metaphor completely and didn't think through what they were doing. It's the same with the fact the entirety of IM 3's villains are Evil Cripple types compensating for their disabilities with naked violence, which is absurdly ableist, but I think they just did not think that through at all.
The film has good intentions, for sure, with the note about how industrialists/BIG OIL TM uses fears of foreign terror to manipulate the media and the note of Tony's PTSD, it's jus they fuck that up thoroughly. And I think those good intentions got the film a lot of unearned goodwill.
From Tobias, for example, whose interpretation of Killian is better than what the film is actually saying but requires one to ignore the text, like Killian going out of his way to flirt and kidnap Pepper Potts for no actual reason other than to antagonize Stark (in another direct quote of his to Pepper: "Having you here is not just to motivate Tony Stark. It's... well, it's actually more embarrassing than that. You're here as my Trophy."), something made clearer in the original script where Shane Black claims Killian would essentially rape Pepper on national television to get under Stark's skin. Killian verbally acknowledging this entire plan came from Stark humiliating that one night is a line to be taken at face-value: he is in fact all about Stark. His plan just didn't directly involve him at first, just Stark Industries (his first scene in the present is trying to get Stark Industries to join up with AIM and seduce Pepper in the process).
It's just a much dumber movie than people think, by my reckoning.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Yes, and my point is that comes AFTER it turns out his Mandarin is a fake. Prior to that line there was no mention of Bin Laden or Gaddafi in the MCU, to the point that people were wondering if they even existed in the films' setting.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on May 9th 2021 at 9:43:49 AM
I know the conversation's moved on a bit from this, but I remember really liking the Mandarin twist when I first saw the movie, and I still do like it. The major damper is the fact that Killian is a really lame replacement for a villain.
I do wonder what it'd be like if Maya had gotten to be the villain instead. Hopefully her motivation wouldn't have just been a Woman Scorned sort of thing though. :/
When we're done, there won't be anything left.Agreed. In my opinion, had they let Maya be the Big Bad the film as originally intended, the film would probably have turned out much better, Mandarin twist and all.
Edited by AlleyOop on May 9th 2021 at 2:03:31 PM
In the comic Maya's motive was a hidden one. She wanted to limit the spread of the weapons she created... but she also wanted to get in connected with US Defense Department contracts. Consequently she put Extremis in the most rotten person she could get, so that him wreaking havoc would ban the substance, but then the US would hire her for her expertise in creating it (unaware that she unleashed the villain causing destruction with Extremis; they thought Killian, now dead, did that alone.) She had guilt about what she made but not enough to actually break away from weapons manufacturing like Tony did. So she wasn't a Woman Scorned to Tony, just having a limited view that militarization was the only remaining way to fund science now. And she wasn't a physical antagonist. Rather she seemed to be Tony's ally all the way until the end when he Spotted The Thread.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on May 9th 2021 at 11:11:50 AM
Honestly, the main problem I have with the twist is Ben Kingsley just oozing with charisma during his Fake Mandarin lines.
Seriously, this guy had the potential to be iconic on par with Heath Ledger's Joker or Josh Brolin's Thanos.
Instead, it got sacrificed for lame-ass comedy and we got Killian instead, still the most bland and generic Big Bad the MCU has to offer to this day, in my opinion, even more so than Malekith.
Edited by Forenperser on May 10th 2021 at 10:26:32 AM
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% Scandinavian

Thinking of Ready Player One where Art3mis is ashamed of her scar and it's barely distinguishable from a bit of sunburn. My brother watching the movie didn't even notice it the first time.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on May 9th 2021 at 5:42:01 AM