Tenshot: Iron Man Trilogy
- Iron Man has long been one of my favorite Marvel characters (I’m a DC guy), so it was great to see him elevate from a B-Level to a potentially A-Level. The first movie was the perfect synthesis of actor and material. It would have done okay without Downey, but it wouldn’t have done nearly as well. It will be interesting to see if the character’s popularity outlasts Downey in the role.
- While I was watching the second movie, I blinked and feared that I had missed the only part of the second Iron Man movie that would actually involve Iron man. Fortunately, there was another part later in the movie that did.
- More seriously, I’m working my way through the MCU movies and so far Iron Man 2 is easily the worst. It’s especially disappointing after the first movie was so good and Thor was surprisingly solid. But there was nothing about the movie that was really good except the bickering between Tony and Pepper. The villains were dull and uninteresting. The story meandered. Bo-ring.
- Things picked up for the third movie. The villains were better (though one of the henchman was actually better than the main guy), the story was better, and there was even more Tony/Pepper bickering.
- There’s a phenomenon in superhero movies where actors don’t like to spend their entire time behind masks and so they work it in to their contracts that there will be face time. So masks come off a lot. Iron Man – aside from it being so Stark-centered – by showing his face behind the faceplate.
- I really would have preferred to see Terrance Howard as War Machine.
- Despite being MCEU movies, the Iron Man ones more or less stand on their own as a set. It helps that the first two came before everything crossed over with everything else. It does help if you saw Avengers before the third, but the big thing you need to know (on the heels of a big, traumatizing battle) is reasonably established.
- What a lot of the movies really came down to is that Tony had this absolutely amazing technology that was beautiful and wonderful and just amazing except that a lot of the time was spent trying to get it to work and not to be killing him slowly or blowing up. I found that very relatable.
- I really don’t much enjoy cameos in movies like this. Elon Musk existing in the MCEU just doesn’t work for me. Bill O’Reilly talking about Stark Industries takes me out of it. This is fantasy. We don’t need real people. I was kind of glad to see them establish a fictional president.
- Almost none of the MCEU has secret identities. That kind of bums be out.
BONUS: Robert Downey Jr and Diane Lane were both born in 1965 while Marisa Tomei was born in 1964. Downey plays Iron Man while Lane plays Superman’s Mom and Tomei plays Aunt May.
My response to the second movie was similar. OK, enough of the action. Can we get back to the banter please?Report
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
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
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
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
That may have been the case two days ago.
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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