Every week, a group of friends and I are rewatching a Marvel movie in preparation for the Avengers: Endgame. Might as well talk about them on the way, right?
Why does the poster say “From the studio that brought you Avengers Assemble?” Avengers Assemble is a cartoon series that is not part of MCU canon. Ger your shit together, Feige.
I hate this movie. From the opening narration straight out of the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man days to the playing of 1998’s weirdly mesmerizing Blue to the awkward and stilted introduction of characters who will become important later… wait. That all happened in less than two minutes?
Jesus Christ.
Reviews of Iron Man 3 are mixed, and of the 3 it is ranked the lowest by Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. Personally, I’ve only spoken to two people that didn’t hate Iron Man 3, and that conversation always devolves into a contest of whether or not it is worse than Iron Man 2.
Okay okay okay. So, really quick, this movie is jarring, awkward, badly cut, badly paced, badly-a-lot-of-things, but most sinfully: It’s not an Iron Man movie. It’s something else entirely, and it’s not an improvement on the franchise. Shane Black decided to take it into a new direction, and he picked the wrong one. As I’ll discuss later in this series, changing direction isn’t explicitly wrong or bad. It’s just that this particular direction was painful to watch.
Whew. There. Done with the negatives. Unlike Iron Man 2, which I dismissed out of hand, Iron Man 3 posits a few interesting ideas, and I’d rather focus on them in the context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole rather than talk about all the reasons I fucking hate the movie.
Tony Stark has PTSD
Robert Downey, Jr. gives one of the most convincing portrayals of post-traumatic stress disorder I think I’ve ever seen. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve seen PTSD all that much in movies, but BOY OH BOY have I seen it in real life, and it’s horrifying. There’s one scene in particular where Tony is driving, has a panic attack, and pulls over and falls against the car in the road. God damn incredible. It’s unfortunate that his PTSD doesn’t really impact the plot of this movie, or that he can cure a panic attack by saying “I’m an engineer, I’ll build something”, but its presence lays the groundwork for the future of Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
For the record, every panic attack I’ve witnessed lasted longer than a few minutes, and once they were over, the sufferer needed a long time to recover enough to resume normal activity and usually was in a funk for the next couple days. They burn up all your emotional energy. I have never had one, and I hope it stays that way.
Pepper has had it with Tony’s shit
This has been a long time coming, but now that Tony and Pepper are solidly a couple, it turns out he’s still awful to be around. Not just because he’s a ball of panicky stress, but because of his complete failure to communicate. Pepper does not know who or what she’s dealing with, and she’s starting to see he has no concept of reality anymore. She really tries to help him, but ultimately he won’t let her- which is good, because Paltrow doesn’t want anything else to do with these movies. She’s too busy selling snake oil which I just remembered I actually made fun of just over a month ago. They don’t explicitly break up, and the ending has Tony blowing up all of his Iron Man suits in a romantic gesture, but things are bad bad bad for, uh… Tepper? Pony? Iron Potts? Pepper Man? We’ll workshop their ship name later.
The suit keeps changing!
The Iron Man armor changes every movie, and making that an obsession for Tony is really goddamn cool. The Mark 42 mind-controlled armor? Inconceivably awesome. It’s a shame it was revealed so early in the film, rather than having some suspense and build-up. The Mark 42 armor deserves half the movie focused on it, the way we spent a long time getting Tony into the first few suits in Iron Man 1.
Having new suits for every adventure is an obvious cash-grab: Variations on Iron Man armor sell toys. But it’s also good storytelling. An engineer isn’t going to build a tool like that and go “WELP I’M DONE” and sit on it for the next decade. Tony’s gonna tinker and build. Great piece of characterization.
The plane sequence
The whole thing where the not-Iron-Patriot takes over the plane is silly and stupid. BUT! The scene with Tony saving all of the falling passengers? Incredible. It was clever, visually and emotionally engaging, and just well-done all around. He saved everyone! This sequence is one of the finest superhero-saving-civilians moments in the history of the genre and I won’t ever stop praising it.
Parting thoughts
I’m not going to talk about The Mandarin and the, uh… “plot twist”, if you can even call it that. Nor will I discuss all the reasons why having the shrapnel surgically removed from Tony’s chest in a 2-second shot in an ending montage is an insult to the character. I could go on for days about all the reasons this movie doesn’t work, but that’s really not worth my time or yours. I hated Iron Man 3 from start to finish (minus that glorious plane sequence), and that sucks because if you look deeply at it, you will find that there were some great ideas buried inside this trainwreck.
Next week is… god dammit. Thor: The Dark World. Everyone’s favorite, am I right? 🙄