Iron Man 3by Wolfen MoonsgetReviews may contain information that could be considered 'spoilers'. Readers should proceed at their own risk. Studio
Credits Grade: 9 (In the interest of full disclosure, I must preface this review by stating that both of my parents work for Disney. They were not, however, involved with the making of this film.)The US government, with the help of James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) as Iron Patriot, squares off against a terrorist known as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) wants to bring the man down after someone he cares about is injured in a bombing, but Tony's also dealing with panic attacks stemming from the Avengers' fight against the alien invasion of New York, and the effect the attacks are having on his relationship with Pepper Potts (Gweneth Paltrow). Topping off the problem sundae is the return of Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), who has his sights set on Pepper, and Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), a one-night-stand; both are involved with Extremis, a potentially disastrous project involving recoding DNA. Iron Man 3 is, first and foremost a two-fold story about personal identity and the consequences of one's actions. Full of delicious twists and fun fake-outs, this is also the most intensely action-packed film of the trilogy, yet doesn't sacrifice character interaction to be such. The villains are a little underdeveloped, and I felt the Extremis premise was kind of ridiculous, but ultimately, I don't really mind -- this is Tony's (and Pepper's) story, with the problems there more to give them something to react to than be the central plot. Tony is enough of his own worst enemy to let the film be more a matter of man versus himself than man versus man. Ultimately, the film wraps up the trilogy -- and Tony's hero's journey -- nicely while still leaving room for Tony to appear in other Marvel Cinematic Universe stories (including, possibly, a fourth Iron Man film). I'll add that villain-wise, at first I was extremely disappointed in The Mandarin, a horribly flat and bizarre adversary that was far too disconnected from Tony -- until one of twists happened and turned the whole thing into something I felt was brilliant. While I can see how die-hard comics fans might be immensely upset with his depiction (part of me does laments the lack of a chance to see certain aspects of the character as I remember him from the animated series), I feel that it was probably for the best that it was handled this way for the Cinematic Universe. My other complaint isn't too serious of one: some elements are rather plot-convenient, on the edge of contrived. This is mitigated by the fact that the biggest convenience -- Tony basically being able to summon Iron Man suits and control them without being in them -- is also often inconvenient when the suits either don't function and / or obey as they're supposed to or don't stand up to the enemy as well as he would hope. This serves the "man versus himself" theme well. You may have seen by the promo spots that there's a young boy in this film; I was really worried that the movie would spend a significant amount of time (like two-thirds) showing Tony interaction with the kid, cut off from the rest of his world, in a Real Steel sort of scenario; happily, that's not at all the case. Their time together is just one of many plot points, rather that the plot. I appreciate that, while the film obviously builds on what's come before, in the previous movies (including The Avengers), it doesn't really rehash things, doesn't follow a formula. Tony interacts with his tech in new and creative ways, has new problems, and interacts with the people in his life in some different ways from how he has in the past, his relationships evolving. I also appreciate that Pepper and even Happy (Jon Favreau)get a bit more to do. Happy is in a position of authority now, and gets make his own judgement calls. While Pepper is still a damsel / victim at times, so are some men in the story -- including Happy, Rhodey, and Tony! -- and she and Tony alternately save each other. Pepper even turns the some things used against her to her advantage, playing a major part in the climax. And there are other strong women in the film as well, women who chose their circumstances; Maya creates hers, for the most part. For a die-hard Pepperony shipper (fan of Pepper and Tony in a relationship) like myself, this film was a real treat! It's a rare story that allows the audience to enjoy the hero and heroine as an established couple, dealing with how they keep the relationship together rather than the endlessly aggravating "will they / won't they" dynamic. Frankly, given other storylines and quotes from Marvel works and employees suggesting that "marriage is boring" (okay, so Pepper and Tony aren’t married here, but they may as well be), I'm almost shocked the film went in this direction -- but I'm also beyond thrilled! Now let's get spoilery and sink our teeth into the meaty meta, as well as specific moments I enjoyed -- and problem areas. (If you're avoiding spoilers, note that there is another scene after the credits --a fun one that reveals just who Tony was narrating to at a few points in the film). I originally found Killian's transformation from debilitatingly socially awkward man to sophisticate a bit far-fetched, as it seemed like there were at least some biological reasons for the way he behaved, but it later occurred to me that Extremis might have helped with those issues, so that's a nit that went away. I had a harder time with him taking his hurt at being tricked by Tony and becoming a murder -- while I appreciate Tony wanting to own up to his ill treatment of the guy, Killian had to be pretty nuts in the first place -- or else Extremis drove him insane. The vagueness on that point made the villain plot seem a bit thrown together, and Killian over-the-top. I liked the suggestion that Tony has known what it's like to be bullied, the sympathy he had for the boy Harley on the issue. I'm thinking that Tony became a bit of a bully as a means of self-defense, as Killian himself arguably did (but took way the hell too far); like in the previous film, Tony and the villain actually had something in common. It makes me wonder if he was, at one time, as painfully awkward as we saw Killian. I wonder if that's part of why Tony seems to have a penchant for ordering his friends around: maybe all his "friends" growing up were servants. Maybe he sees Rhodey as a dear friend because Rhodey stands up to those orders and orders him around in turn. Maybe that's also why Tony fell in love with Pepper. And maybe that's why Happy has evolved from his bodyguard, at his beck and call, to a boss in his own right, and is constantly reminding Tony that the man is no longer his boss even as he tries to help Tony out. Maybe that's why JARVIS is often mouthy to Tony (even borderline disobedient here), Tony's robots are often inept as they act of their own volition, and Tony sometimes struggles to get the suits to obey him. He needs friends, people that care about him and aren’t trying to bring him down, that also aren't sycophants, people who won't let him become an ego-driven bully, either. Of course, his relations with those various tech are pretty complicated. Sometimes they are interchangeable with him, and sometimes they separate entities; often, those lines are fascinatingly blurred. Tony himself sometimes specifically and adamantly refers to the suit(s) and himself as one and the same, and other times refers to the suit as "him," as in a separate being. At one point, Tony says that his best friend is in a coma. At first I thought he meant Rhodey and wondered how he knew the man had been hurt. Then I thought he meant Jarvis, until I realised he had been talking to the AI, so it was no longer down. That's when I realised he meant the suit -- never mind that he has many of them, they are all the same Iron Man in his eyes. (EDIT: A friend pointed out that Tony probably meant Happy when he spoke of his best friend. I guess it didn't occur to me that Happy was a) his best friend -- I figured that was Rhodey, and until this film, Tony treated Happy mostly like an employee, making Happy's puppy-like devotion to his boss seem as one-sided as Happy's affection for Pepper -- or b) that Happy was actually in a coma. The scene was a bit distanced from Happy for it to have occured to me over the more closley placed Rhodey or suit, which he still seemed to treat as a person and was essentially unconscious. My bad.) (This actually brings up another nit: why didn't he call upon one of the other suits sooner?) After Tony's home was attacked, when he woke up near Memphis, it was Jarvis who "was" the suit. Tony might have chosen the flight plan, but it was Jarvis who had chosen when to implement it, getting Tony to safety. When JARVIS started powering down, it was due to a malfunction within the suit -- it was dying, and so was JARVIS. (I have to say, that was one of my fave moments of the entire trilogy; I adore their interactions, and loved seeing Tony worry about JARVIS as one would a living person.) And then we have the fact that the suits could move without Tony inside them, either under his control like a puppet, like when he used it to welcome Pepper home (love how that was like a second gift after the rabbit, and she disliked both) or saved the falling people (that was so cool!), or independently. Typically, I would consider such inconsistency to be scattershot characterisation, but here it works perfectly. It's sweetly ironic that while Tony Stark is an atheist, the existences of Tony, the suits, and JARVIS in relation to each other is somewhat reminiscent of the Christian version of the Holy Trinity: Father (Tony), Son (the Suits), and the Holy Ghost (JARVIS). In this case, the three aspects are interconnected, independent, and singular as-needed -- and sometimes at the same time. This raises some interesting questions when it comes to when the suit threatened Pepper, a rather chilling moment. Was that a case of Tony subconsciously warding off a threat? If yes, was he seeing her as the threat, or did she just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and he was projecting a dreamed threat onto her? Or perhaps it was him wanting to keep her away because he was afraid of her being harmed -- never mind that the suit seemed threatening towards her? Was it perhaps the suit itself being territorial, or even angry with her for insisting Tony spent too much time with the suits and demanding he spend more time with her? When the suit pieces attacked her at the end, was it because it perceived her as an enemy, due to her status as an Extremis recipient (as Tony assumed), or did it simply not like her? It's entirely possible that either situation was a combination of what the suit wanted and what Tony wanted. It's ironic that he makes the suits in the hope of keeping her safe, yet he endangers her with them as well. But there are incidents when the suits cooperated with and protected her. If the suit was indeed acting independently when it gave her grief, then it was acting as Tony when it saved her during the attack on their home. I kind of like, after how menacing it was to her before, how this later moment could be read as Pepper getting inside Tony, both as a sexual and emotional metaphor. I also like how she was able to make the suit her own, taking what Tony did to save her and turning it around to save Tony (and Maya, although since he ordered her to do it, I'm not sure it counts) -- and then saving Tony and herself with a suit gauntlet on the oil rig. Her actions are especially powerful on the oil rig for two reasons. The first is that, despite his best efforts, Tony was not able to save her there at all. Happily, the moment when it seemed like she'd been tossed in the fridge, so to speak, didn't really do anything to drive Tony's characterization. It gave us a moment of him grieving and being horrified (which was delicious), but he would have had to fight Killian no matter what, so it didn't spur him into action. If anything, her "death" it seemed to drain him of strength. And then, ironically, the very thing Killian expected to kill her with actually saved her life and gave her the strength to fight Killian that Tony, even with his suits, was lacking. The second way that the scene is powerful is in that, after Tony told Rhodey that the new suits would only respond to his (Tony's) commands, Pepper was able to use the gauntlet that initially attacked her against Killian, defeating him. Whether it was her just being super badass or somehow Tony was able to relinquish control to her, she was still the one who delivered the fatal blow. And yet it was a matter of them working together, even if just in that he built the gauntlet. It's a nice mirror to the final battle in the first film, where she was captured but at least was able to help him win; here, she was the active champion, with Tony as her assistance. They seem to have become as interchangeable to each other as he'd become with the suits. Maybe that's part of why he decided he didn't need the suits anymore. I'm quite sad to see them go, and personally think they should have some to more of a compromise, but I can appreciate the metaphor he gave about the suit being a cocoon. Now there's no suit-skin barrier between him and the person he actively evolved to love. So I wonder: the line after the credits where they said "Tony Stark will be back" -- does the fact that it said "Tony Stark" and not "Iron Man" mean that he will not be donning a suit ever again, and will simply be a civilian? Might someone else wear such a suit and still call it Iron Man (never mind that he stated that even without the suit, he's Iron Man)? Keeping with the subject of the suit, let's move on to the film's fun fake-outs and twists. I love how they faked us out twice with the suits! First there was Tony not being inside the suit when Pepper came home, and then there was him not being in the suit when he rescued the people falling from the plane. I was quite knocked for a loop when the suit was hit by that truck -- I didn't know what to think! I was equally thrown by the seeming death of Pepper, until I remembered that she had Extremis in her. I like that it seemed like Killian and Maya were going to be used to form two overlapping love triangles with Tony and Pepper -- and then both scenarios were pretty quickly abandoned in favor of them being villains. I find love triangles to generally be tiring, so it was a relief that they kept it to Happy being afraid for Pepperony in the Killian department, and the Maya thing being more a matter of Tony being worried about Pepper being jealous than her actually being so. Each of them trusted the other to be faithful. Her dumping the suitcases over the balcony was excellent timing -- I loved that it turned out to be her insisting that they leave rather than her being pissed enough about the suit-in-the-bedroom to leave him. They did a great job faking us out with Maya, having her turned out to be a villain. I was starting to actually get annoyed with the sappy talk she had with Pepper, but it was a great way to throw us off the scent before her revelation. Also, I love that she owned up to her bad decisions and was willing to die to atone for them. Even though Killian murdered her (a bit of a shock itself) and therefore destroyed her gambit, she still retained her agency all along. Killian turning out to be the power behind The Mandarin was also quite a welcome reveal, but best of all in the villain-twist department was learning that the face of The Mandarin was a decoy! I loved Trevor! He was a riot, and that twist really drained away the discomfort of his performance of The Mandarin! I'm wondering: with his talk about people not actually having died, does that mean that the man who seemed to have been killed by The Mandarin was actually alive? I liked the twist with the Vice President. Showing his daughter with the missing limb (who therefore would benefit from Extremis) was a nice, subtle way of saying he was a traitor. Other thoughts ... In regards to Extremis, aside from the issue of where the new matter for replaced limbs come from (a lamentably common issue in stories of healing or shape-shifting that involve changes in mass, so it's not just a nit for this film), what was up with the volcanic-like aspect of the bodies? What on earth could you programme into DNA that not only would make one fireproof, but actually make one's body create fire, yet survive it? When I saw the treated soldiers in the trailer, I thought they were minions of The Mandarin! If they had kept the ten rings as part of the story, the whole fiery-people thing would have been easier for me to swallow. (At least they made a nod to the rings by making that the name of The Mandarin's organisation -- which was also the name of the terrorist group in the first film, although I don't know if they are meant to be the same.) I like that Killian's dragon tattoo, coupled with his power, made him a nod to Fin Fang Foom -- although I wish they'd used the actual dragon as a character! I loved the intense action of the scenes where Tony's house was destroyed and the entire oil rig sequence. I loved Tony telling the nurse to leave Downtown Abbey on for Happy -- especially as that show (or specifically, Thomas Barrow) is one of my big obsessions right now! And they even made a second reference to it! (I wondered at the time if we were supposed to take the fact that the screen showed Sybil and Tom as some sort of foreshadowing ....) (EDIT: Favreau has confrmed that the scenes chosen were was a nod to Happy, a former chauffer, being in love with Pepper, a woman he wouldn't think he could have. My issue with this is that Tom did believe he could be with Sybil ....) I liked how Tony related to the boy, Harley, how it reflected on Tony as a person. Tony is rather childish himself in some respects, so it only makes sense that he would talk to the kid as an equal -- especially since the boy was also something of an inventor and lost his father at a young age. While Tony could be kind of mean and bossy to Harley at times, in a way, that's Tony showing the kid respect: not treating him with pity or kid-gloves, and trusting the boy to handle important things. I love how he chastised the boy for pointing out how he'd saved Tony first, when the boy's behavior was similar to how Tony pointed out to Pepper how he'd saved her first. A small nit-pick: Tony calling the kid a pussy bugged me. I've already ranted on the subject in my review of Wreck-It Ralph, so I won't go into it again here. Regardless of my personal issue with it, Tony is a jerk at times, so it actually fits as being one of his less-than-stellar moments. (Or he might actually know the likely real origin of the word and use it in that context, rather than the meaning it's taken on.) I was baffled by Tony's line about wanting a sandwich, wondering if it was an expansion on the "pussy" line, suggesting that the kid was a woman who needed to get in the kitchen. Then I realised that Subway is the fast-food tie-in for this film, the way Burger King was for the first film; I assume the line was a nod to that. I loved the little chat where Jarvis explained the problem with his speech program, and then Tony chalked up the revelation of Miami being the place the Mandarin was broadcasting from as being due JARVIS' end-of-sentence glitch rather than the real location. Fans of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, another collaboration between Robert Downey, Jr. and director Shane Black, might note a similar vibe between the two films, especially in the scenes where Tony and Rhodey are together but suit-less, and when Tony is invading the house in Miami. I loved Tony making what to him were essentially toys for the Miami break-in effort. I loved the scene where Tony was trying to call the suit to him, when he was chained up, and his captors just thought he was bluffing. I loved how that other bad guy surrendered, saying the people he worked for were weirdos, and Tony let him go unscathed. And I loved getting to see Rhodey in all his military action without the suit, reminding us of just how capable he is. The hurt-comfort fiend in me loved Tony's panic attacks, especially his first attack, in front of Rhodey, as well as when he was crying in his sleep and when he confessed to the problem to Pepper. I liked the idea of him using the suit as a sort of mobile medical assessment center. I loved that, as the house was being destroyed, we saw one of the robots mourning over the other (I like to think it was You mourning Dummy). And I'm thrilled that Tony "rescued" them at the end. I loved the image of Tony putting the heart necklace around Pepper's neck; they looked like a contented couple, accentuating the notion that he's finally at peace with himself. I was puzzled at first as to why he didn't have the arc reactor removed sooner, if it was actually possible at all (the first two films seemed to suggest it wasn't) -- it looked like pretty simple surgery. All I can figure is that either it was so simple, it never occurred to him, or he (probably subconsciously) didn't want to lose that connection to the suit, and the ability to use himself to power it. Without the suit, there's no need for it anymore. I loved that the person Tony was talking to as he narrated turned out to be Bruce Banner -- and that Banner fell asleep! I was glad we got a little more of their friendship, rather than it (or the events of New York) being ignored. The very fact that Tony was looking to have Bruce act in the capacity of a psychiatrist for him suggests that perhaps Tony isn't so at ease now after all -- I wonder what that will mean for future installments! Perhaps his destroying the suits was a fake-out as well! Written: May 5, 2013
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