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| Three of the best gens out there. |
Odds are that if there is a
superhero movie you’ve seen in the last few years it is Iron man. As such, I’m
going to combine the summary and the Doing It Better. Better to not waste time
talking about something everyone knows.
Genius, drunken, billionaire, playboy,
weapons manufacturer Tony Stark, played by our universes Tony Stark: Robert
Downey Jr., presents an advanced missile defense system to perspective buyers
in a secluded mountain range in the Middle East. The Jericho Missile system
destroys a large chunk of said mountain range. On the drive back his convoy is
attacked by the terrorist organization The Ten Rings who are using Stark
Weapons. Tony gets a chest full of shrapnel and is taken prisoner.
Barely surviving thanks to a
makeshift electromagnet keeping the shrapnel from reaching his heart, Tony and
fellow prisoner Yinsen are forced to build a copy of the Jericho missile for
the Ten Rings. Instead, using a crazy amount of scraps, Tony builds a battle
suit and a miniature ARC reactor to power it. He escapes but Yinsen dies in the
escape.
Vowing to stop the wholesale
slaughter being committed by the weapons he designed on the soldiers he wants
to protect, Tony goes about perfecting his Armor’s design and saving the world
as the Invincible Armored Iron man.
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| We asked him to be Tony Stark. He refuses to stop. |
Good things about it; Robert Downey
Jr. If there has only ever been one perfectly cast character in all of Cinema
it is this man as Tony Stark. Funny yet serious, carefree but still hounded by
inner demons, this guy does it all. Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges as Pepper
Potts and Obadiah Stane were very good too. The weakest link was Terrence
Howard’s as Tony’s best friend and military liaison James “Rhodey” Rhodes but
he wasn’t that bad.
The bad leads me into the Doing It
Better portion of this post.
Honestly, I can think of few things
to make Iron man better. Overall it is a very good superhero movie that catches
the spirit of the character without ALL of his problems. I’ll take an
irresponsible party boy Tony Stark over the alcoholic possible drug addict. A
big part of this is due to Robert Downey Jr. As I said before the man is basically our universes
Tony Stark. Despite near perfect casting, and an overall strong script, it does
have things that could have improved upon.
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| A photo like this on a wall, that's all I ask. |
The changes I propose would be
small. The changes would be more focused on connecting the movie to the greater
movie-verse. For example, when the Vanity Fair reporter snoops around Tony’s
house after their fling, we’d see old pictures like Captain America with a
young Howard Stark, Tony’s father. Maybe name drop HYDRA alongside a number of
America’s enemies of the past.
That is kind of a problem with the
current Marvel cinematic universe. Aside from the Avengers, and some tiny parts
in later films, each movie is kind of self-contained. Even when other heroes
and characters are established, they are in their own personal bubbles. They
may make offhanded comments but come on, Tony Stark flying around in Thor or
Hulk would have been awesome. And you can’t have the little bubble-verses if you want to make a big
connected movie universe. They are obviously getting better over time, heck,
Thor 2 had Chris Evans doing a one minute cameo as Loki disguised as the good ol’
Cap.
It could have started out stronger
is all I’m saying. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and it’s easy for me to make my
perfected universe work because I have the existing movies to base my ideas off
of. But come on, this was the first Marvel movie (second in my universe) they
could have had so much more fun with this. The flipside of the argument is, I
am an inexperienced writer but I have ideas, some good some bad but they are
still bigger than what was given to us in this and other films. You’d think
film/screenwriters with some experience should have the brain power and
backbone to go as big as they can with these films and the larger universe they
are creating.
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| Just a few fewer clues that he's the bad guy. |
Now a slightly bigger change would
have been making Obadiah Stane a bit more subtle. I mean he is subtle for a
while but part way through the film after the Stark Benefit gala he just drops
the evilness bomb. I’d have him in the dark for as much as possible, acting
through proxies or something. His reveal would be just as he is ripping out
Tony’s super-pacemaker. Sure, anyone who
has seen any Iron man related product will know that Stane is the Iron Monger
and thus the villain. But come on, just because a percentage of the people
know the reveal doesn’t mean you should be upfront about everything.
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| My feelings illustrated. |
Also, one nitpicky detail. The
movie includes a scene where Pepper Potts, Tony’s assistant/love interest,
sneaks into Stane’s office and hack into his computer for incriminating files.
She breaks into the computer in moments, downloads said files, and escapes
after distracting Stane for a few moments. Here’s the thing. Hacking is hard.
Really, really hard. It takes practice, and quite a bit of time. Lots, and lots
of time. I have no personal experience, but two close family members do. One
makes a living off of it, and he assures me that hacking any system in any
amount of time under an hour is nigh impossible. And that’s high balling it.
There is absolutely no way that
Pepper Potts could hack into Stane’s computer in the time allotted to her. It’s
one thing for Tony Stark to do something faster than normal, he’s a mega-level
does-not-exist-in-real-life kind of genius. But Pepper, as presented in the
film, is not extraordinarily talented in computers. Nothing we are shown before
the scene in Stane’s office suggests that she is anything other than a loyal
employee/somewhat obvious romantic interest. I’m not saying she’s untalented,
obviously she has a skill set otherwise she wouldn't be the assistant to one of
the most powerful men in the world. It’d be one thing if we established she had
computer skills, or, in a more believable plot line, that the flash drive that
Tony gives her is some sort of encryption decoding device. That would work
better with the time allotted, at least for me.
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| First time I saw this it gave me chills. |
For me, Iron man is as close to a
perfect Marvel film that they’ve created. A+ all around. The changes I suggest
are minor, because while close to perfect the movie does need a few tweaks. The
aim is to make the movie less of a self-contained story and more of a continuation
of a multilayered universe. Which is always much cooler than just a movie being
its own self-contained stories. Within reason, the Hobbit could have remained
one movie and been fine, and no movie doing the “last book as 2” has had the
content for it since Harry Potter 7 & 8. Rant finished, have a pleasant
day.
http://screencrush.com/iron-man-facts/
http://www.hypable.com/2014/04/05/robert-downey-jr-birthday-captain-america/
http://marvel-movies.wikia.com/wiki/Howard_Stark
http://ironman.wikia.com/wiki/File:MarkIII1.jpg
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