Iron Man 3 is out! Jonathan and I cleverly arranged our date night to fall last Friday so we could go watch it on opening night. It was the first decent movie to come out pretty much since The Hobbit, so we expected it to be busy, and it was. We had to sit far enough forward that I couldn't actually see the entire screen at one time. But we enjoyed it.
I wouldn't say it was groundbreaking, but they did a very respectable job. We had character growth, an enemy from Stark's past come back to haunt him, a double agent, and some fun interactions between Stark and a kid. The villain had a slightly more fictional superpower than usual, enough that I had to actually suspend disbelief instead of saying what cool technology it was, but it was a superpower calculated to give Iron Man plenty of trouble. The plot was reasonably tight. There were lots of pretty explosions. Also, if your idea of villainous revenge is to give someone your evil superpower, don't be surprised when that doesn't quite work out for you. Please try to think these things through.
Probably the biggest change to the Marvel movie-verse to come out of this movie was the answer to that offhand question of Captain America's from The Avengers: "Take away that suit, and what are you?" Of course Stark had a smart-aleck answer in the moment, but at the end of Iron Man 3 he had a real answer. It turned out to be a pretty good present for Pepper, too.
We didn't stay till the end of the credits. Did we miss a scene, anybody?
Yes, you missed the scene that shows the entire movie is being narrated to Bruce Banner (the Hulk) by Tony Stark. Banner has fallen asleep, to Tony's annoyance.
ReplyDeleteThe things that annoyed me about the movie were, first, the uncoolness of the Mandarin. The trailer set him up as an awesome villain--great costume, great rhetoric, great power--kind of like Iron Man, only evil. Making him a cover for a considerably less cool villain was a bit of a disappointment. That also meant that we have had the same type of villain for three movies running now. Obadiah Stane was an evil defense contractor, Hammer was an evil defense contractor, and Killian is an evil defense contractor. It's starting to get old.
The other problem is the PTSD plot got dropped halfway through. It would have been better if the villain had found out about Tony's problem and used it to try to break him. As it is, Killian comes off as a less-cool version of Syndrome.
Ah, but you're missing the moral of the Iron Man saga. All defense contractors are evil (except the Starks). :P
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