Tenshot: Iron Man Trilogy

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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14 Responses

  1. My response to the second movie was similar. OK, enough of the action. Can we get back to the banter please?Report

  2. Doctor Jay says:

    Iron Man 2 was super disappointing at the time. It felt like a rushed, thrown-together project where a bunch of executives contributed things that they wanted to see in the movie, and told Jon Favreau “Ok, go make a movie out of that”. Don’t get me wrong, I like Favreau.

    When I rewatched it recently, I didn’t hate it as much as I did then. My biggest disappointment with the film was that they embraced the Stark/Potts romance. I wanted Potts to remain his best friend and most loyal ally, but to be too smart to get romantically involved with Tony Stark. Which is how it works in the comics.

    In retrospect, they’ve got some good mileage out of the relationship, so I’m less bothered by it now. The film is kind of how they managed to work in something that works a bit like the Demon In A Bottle storyline in, but only kinda sorta. But it’s a good storyline, and the premise that Stark is dying, he knows it, and he can’t bring himself to tell anyone about it is very solid.

    The villian, on the other hand, is window dressing. The villain is supposed to be Russian. Whose idea was it to cast Mickey Rourke as a Russian? It did not work for me. But that is always the problem with Iron Man, the villains aren’t that great.

    I suppose the name doesn’t mean anything to you, but they also put Larry Ellison (founder and CEO of Oracle) on screen. This happened because Downey spent time with both of them trying to learn more about the world of tech CEOs. I think that time was well spent.

    I have friends that worked for both Musk and Ellison. One friend had an employee number of maybe 20 with Oracle, so he knew Ellison on a first-name basis. I could name drop other tech CEOs you know of that I’ve had conversations with. It’s a small valley.

    That’s why these films work so, so well for me. They just stink of my everyday existence, full of people who are both heroes, villains, and their own worst enemy.

    MrsJay demurs. She likes Don Cheadle a lot more than Terence Howard. I have no idea why they changed.

    And yes, Iron Man 3 was really wonderful. I just love the “You’re a mechanic. Build something.” moment.Report

    • Will Truman in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      I was sort of the opposite. I thought IM2 was okay when I first saw it, but I was really impatient the second time.

      They replaced Howard over a salary dispute. From what I recall Howard wasn’t even asking for that much by Hollywood standards (I think it was $400k or something), but they viewed him as replaceable. Which, from a business and marketing standpoint, I guess he was.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      My former workplace had Jeff Bridges come by and shadow the upper-level executives for a day as research for Obadiah Stane. He definitely paid attention because he was very authentically full of shit in the same way as upper-level executives in the aerospace industry are.

      (The company rag had an article about it, which included a photo of Bridges and the executives all smiling, and included a headshot of Bridges with hair which we all found useful because nobody knew who that bald dude was…)Report

  3. Michael Cain says:

    Re the bonus… My wife complains that it is unfair that men are born with more collagen in their skin, and retain it longer, so that they get a few/several more years before their skin starts to sag to the point that can’t be covered up without looking like plastic surgery or troweled-on makeup.

    On a technical note, I wonder if real-time digital makeup will make the whole thing moot.Report

    • Wait let me get this straight.

      You’re taller, have more muscles, and can pee standing up, and then in addition to that you have more collagen too?

      Damn you, biology!Report

      • George Turner in reply to Kristin Devine says:

        That may have been the case two days ago.

        Discover story

        ****
        In the quest for everlasting youth, many women buy hope in a jar. But despite being a multi-billion dollar industry, many skin creams and serums on the market don’t deliver the age-defying results they promise. But now, scientists say that it may be possible to reverse our skin’s timeline at the cellular level.

        In a new paper published in Nature, a research team found that a collagen protein called COL17A1 plays a key role in maintaining youthful skin. Declining levels of this protein over time cause our skin to develop wrinkles, sag, and lose its elasticity, according to the paper. It’s giving scientists fresh insights into how and why time changes the building blocks of our skin.
        ****Report

      • Pinky in reply to Kristin Devine says:

        The funniest thing we guys ever came up with is taking the most sensitive, self-conscious women in the world, making super high-definition moving images of their faces every year or two, and showing them to the public on large screens. Oh, and archiving them.Report

  4. Jaybird says:

    I felt like Iron Man 2 was two movies. There was the Marvel movie with Robert Downey Jr. and there was the dark and weird movie with Mickey Rourke.

    I would have preferred the movie to have been one of these two rather than being both of them at once.

    I mean, even now, I’d *LOVE* to see the Whiplash film. (The Iron Man film, though, has sort of receded for me… I mean, I haven’t seen a Marvel movie since whatever was the one before Civil War. Which is weird for me because I used to *DEVOUR* those movies.)Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

      I agree with that–like, they were so busy lining things up for The Avengers that they couldn’t tell the Dark Iron Man story they very clearly wanted to tell. I mean, you can do Armor Wars *and* Demon In A Bottle (or, at least, as much of the latter as a PG-13 rating will let you do) and that’s a pretty good story right there, especially if you’re trying to set up Tony Stark as “is he really a hero or is he just in this for himself”, make his story be about learning the difference between narcissism and genuine heroics.Report

  5. Murali says:

    I find that Iron Man 3 is often the most under-rated of the iron-man movies. It’s the movie that manages to display the most character growth for Stark and does so rather brilliantly.

    1. Tony realises that he has been using the suit as an emotional/psychological crutch.

    2. Tony realising and ultimately demonstrating to the audience that what makes him Iron Man is not the suit, but who he is inside.

    This is why I actually think 3 is better than 1.Report

  6. PD Shaw says:

    Didn’t like the bit with Stark getting drunk and essentially driving a motorized vehicle. (Not a fan of the Demon in the Bottle storyline, but this was worse) Also never liked de-uniqifying the armor, but I’m sure it has been good for toy sales. Basically, this is the type of Iron Man story I don’t like, but mainly found Downey too obnoxious and I skipped Iron Man 3.Report

  7. Pinky says:

    I didn’t like the first movie, and haven’t seen the other ones. So the MCU never became must-see for me. I have quite a few complaints about Iron Man I, but the biggest is that I didn’t like Tony Stark. I’m ok with ambiguous heroes; I can even enjoy a villain protagonist. But I didn’t find anything likable about this character. A list of his virtues: he didn’t want to provide weapons systems to terrorists. A review of his arc: he found out he was providing weapons systems to terrorists and got mad. His personal growth: gotcha, that’s a trick question (at least in this movie).Report

  8. Dark Matter says:

    I like how they’ve handled secret identities a LOT.

    Supers are basically A-list celebrities who are also walking nukes. The gov can throw absurd resources at this, it’d take absurd efforts to prevent them from knowing.Report