Tuesday 5 March 2013

Iron Man 3 Trailer

Way back in the Cretaceous Period of 2008, a little film called Iron Man was released, a Marvel film adapting a character I had no particular interest in on the grounds that all the comics of his I'd read he seemed to be a boring industrialist with a stupid mustache who constantly moaned about being rich, desired by women and owning a home made suit of armour that fired magnets and lasers. The film turned out to be a hit and resulted in a series of adaptations of the other of Marvel's lesser used properties, cumulating in the childhood realising masterpiece that was The Avengers.

Three trailers have been released for the third Iron Man film (Or alternately the seventh Avengers film.) and here are my opinions on them.

Firstly, it seems to me that this interpretation of Iron Man villain The Mandarin is taking heavy inspiration from The Dark Knight Rises version of Bane, being a terrorist of deliberately unspecified ethnicity, an unusually captivating voice, and who is vowing to destroy the very ground beneath the feet of the film's incredibly rich hero in the third installment and at some point destroys a passenger plane. If that's the case it seems unusual that Marvel would draw from such a source, because The Dark Knight Rises was a bit of a flop in my opinion and the Iron Man series was always taking its own route from the Dark Knight Saga, being more obviously humorous due to the overpowering charisma of Robert Downey Jr and not nearly as grimly confrontational about moral lessons.

I do like the obvious continuity between this film and the Avengers though, I imagine there'll only be vague references so as not to make the film difficult to watch for the three people that haven't watched The Avengers yet. But I like how they're continuing Tony Stark's slow character arc of overcoming his
war profiteering days and becoming more selfless, in the case of this film, making him lean too far in the other direction as he is seemingly now paranoid that everything is trying to kill him and as a result has started hoarding all of his technology, which is a perfectly reasonable conclusion to come when you've been attacked by terrorists, aliens and Russians with electric whips in the space of two years.

My favorite part of the trailer has to be the very end when it seems as if Stark has managed to animate the spare armoured suits into doing battle alongside him, including what appears to be the Hulkbuster mech bustling through a wall, which will almost certainly seem like an interesting idea until you get confused about which armours are meant to be occupied by the characters and which ones get shot down, and potentially not get utilised by the writers in any meaningful way like the animated suits at the end of Iron Man 2. Though in that case those suits were being built up throughout the film as being made within a week by a guy who reversed engineered the arc reactor in his garage so why would they have been that good?


That's just my hypothesis though, cynicism is a powerful tool when judging a third installment of a film series who's second film has a bit of a downgrade. There's no doubt that I'm still looking forward to this film, but critical caution is always wise when a franchise gets to this size, and the second film, whilst still witty with an interesting story, was a significant downgrade from the previous film, I'm hoping that doesn't remain too constant in this case.

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