Iron Man 3

The new Iron Man movie came out, and I saw it with my family. It was pretty good! Both Zen and I agreed that it is the best of the three movies so far, warts and all, although I’ve not yet found many people who agree with me. The film is based in part upon a six-issue storyline called “Extremis” that is not at all as good as the movie, although the art by Adi Granov is pretty good.

IM3

IM3


Iron Man 3 – Friday afternoon a very skinny Iron Man dropped in by the office, recruiting people to watch his film, due to be released that day. Actually… it was a gimmick from my company, we’d booked a theatre to watch the film, and the appearance of a scrawny little Iron Man, alongside some beefy Iron-ettes, was just what we needed! I finished work at 5:45, had my dinner by 6:15, got to the mall where the theatre was at 6:45, waited amongst the crowd for the velvet rope to be raised at 7:05 (nothing like claustrophobia to start your movie experience), the film started at 7:15. Awesome!!

The film was great, probably my favorite Iron Man film so far. There’s very little armour in the film, and when it’s there it’s sort of an afterthought, or parodied and made fun of, or belittled (now there are many suits… but only one Robert Downey Jr). Well! Clearly some decisions were made in production, some negotiations, some deals were met.

Nonetheless, the result is generally satisfactory. The story is generally very good, the villain is also quite all right, and there’s a pretty good plot twist that messes with things. The dialogue doesn’t sizzle like earlier movies (except in parts – the scenes with the interaction between Tony and “the kid” are pretty good, and my son Zen and I had a big laugh at t his many times). I also noticed that the music tie-in songs were really awful this time around – no Black Sabbath (Part 1), not AC/DC (Part 2)… what’s going on? For a big budget production, surely they could have brought in some decent tunes. Did all the music budget get shifted over to Robert Downey Jr?

But these are minor quibbles. There’s plenty that’s right about this movie:

- Robert Downey Jr is just plain funny!!
- Guy Pierce is also very good in this flick.
- the Iron Man world of this film veers quite sharply from the comic book world; this is a good thing
- they introduce the world of AIM, Advanced Idea Mechanics, an evil force, but they forego the usual buckethead clones; great!
- Ben Kingsley as “The Mandarin” is utterly awesome!!!!!

Of course, not everything is great:

- having a white guy play “the Mandarin”
- (barely) introducing the army of super-powered maniacs, one of whom might be Pepper Potts
- ending the series unannounced (the Batman end-of-series was long-projected, this one wasn’t)
- the end-of-credits segment was not worth waiting around for (maybe they’re trying to discourage us from doing this, given the expectation of having this sort of thing come up).

Overall the film is very good. Watch it!!

IME

IME


Iron Man “Extremis”, by Warren Ellis and Adi Granov – This is the tale that inspired the movie, at least the science serum element, which tends to get a bit too silly in the philosophical debate department (takes itself way too seriously). A group of domestic terrorist anti-establishment types, one a survivor of an FBI shoot-out, dose one of their members with the extremis serum, which they got from a disgruntled researcher with compromised principles. Adiran Killian is one of them, but he blows his brains out in despair in the early pages (yes, it’s quite different from the movie, where someone called “Adrian Killian” is a psychopathic maniac-for-hire who also runs a bucket-headed organisation called AIM).

The book gets into Tony Stark’s private life, and we are quite privileged to observe him waking up in the morning (alone), taking a shower, and getting on with his day. There’s a lot of philosophising about using military money to develop technologies that do good, there’s the re-telling of the Iron Man creation, and there’s a lot of people with closed mouths and word balloons indicating that they’re talking (I always hated that). There’s also a scene of a board meeting where they try to convince Tony to step down as CEO and focus on research (borrrrr-ring). One amazing slaughter of a one-man extremis army destroying an FBI centre and burning hundreds of workers alive. Gross. Iron Man takes on the extremis dude, is nearly killed, then doses himself with extremis himself, becomes indestructible, and flattens him before he can take down the White House, before figuring out who the true culprits are. Nice.

Of course Iron Man doesn’t call in the army, SHIELD, the Avengers, or even Stark International to help him out when he’s mortally wounded… he goes to someone he met (and slept with) once a decade before. Nice.

It’s weird to see how much comics have changed – we get to see Iron Man totally murder his adversary – ouch!! Comics weren’t this violent when I was growing up, but I guess we live in a desensitized age. The book comes with tons of bonus material at the end – a series of covers Granov made for other Iron Man issues, sketches, and the script for the fifth installment in the series (not sure why this would be interesting to anybody, but there it is; I didn’t read through it myself).

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