Iron Man 3

First impressions:

I came into this one with a little trepidation and a lot of curiosity. New writer and director, the controversy over an English actor (even if it is Ben Kingsley) playing the Mandarin, the way that the film universe has changed so much since Iron Man 2...

So many things could have gone so very wrong.

In the end though, I really enjoyed it. What I liked most of all was the idea that the events of the Avengers had impacted Stark way more than was immediately apparent in that last movie. I liked that for all his confidence and snark, his encounter with gods and monsters and aliens deeply freaked him out. I liked that flying through a hole in the sky to confront a whole fucking armada of spaceships in deep space (while holding a nuclear missile was giving him nightmares. I liked that ultimately, Steve Rogers' accusation that he was nothing without the suit actually hit home.

I'm extremely curious about where they will go with this now. Stark no longer needs to be in the suit for Iron Man to operate. He no longer needs to put himself in physical danger. He has remote controlled drones now. He no longer has the shrapnel, so he is no longer a walking metaphor. In many ways, he seems poised to become the Reed Richards of this modified Marvel Universe.

They did interesting things with his fame in this. He put himself out there as Iron Man, but up until now he's been in complete control of that celebrity. Putting him among the people who are getting Tony Stark tattoos and kids with Iron Man toys was a really nice way of grounding him, especially as he's unraveling and unprepared to deal with the attention. Marvel's always been good at continuity, and keeping those last moments of the Avengers in mind was a very nice touch.

Let's talk about Pepper for a moment. To a certain extent, she was still the damsel in distress, but in each film they've given her more and more to do. First she's the one who actually pushes the button that finishes off the bad guy. Second she's the CEO who puts the actual finger on Hammer and sends him off to the cops. Now she's briefly in the suit and then given super powers and once again deals the coup de grace to the main villain. It's a really interesting take on the old cliche. The damsel in distress who strikes the final blow. I don't know that it's ever been done before. I also liked that this Iron Man actually passed the Bechdel test, with that lovely scene between Pots and the "botanist."

Rhodey got more to do as well. He doesn't get to do much in the suit, but gets to display some impressive bad assery on his own. I quite like that Rhodey is actually a little diminished inside the War Machine armor, and is much more impressive on his own. He really doesn't need the suit to be awesome. The suit hinders his effectiveness more than anything else, turning him into a PR device more than anything else.

Ok, the Mandarin. I was a little concerned at first that the Mandarin was just this vague threat... almost a Batman villain, really. All psychopathic behavior, but nothing underneath. The big reveal on the character worked really well for me, but ultimately resulted in him feeling even more like a Batman (film) villain. He suddenly became Rhas Al Gul. That the Mandarin was a front for someone else... it would have been so much more impressive before the Christopher Nolan Batman films. It was done with much more humor here, but it didn't feel nearly as innovative as it could have been. Still Kingsley was absolutely golden in the role, switching back and forth from dramatic and menacing to pathetic and comic without making it seem at all false.

It does put the first film into an interesting perspective. AIM was the funding source behind the group that kidnapped Stark in the first place. This means that AIM was building up terrorism or the express purpose of driving up a need which they could then fill. The old con game of inventing a need while being the one person in a position to meet that need that you just created. Deleted scenes indicate that the shadowy agent who gave Vanko his fake passports at the beginning of IM2 was part of the Ten Rings, so Killian has been coming at Stark for a while now.... so why the direct route now?

The answer seems to be that up until now AIM couldn't move into the void left by Stark and then Hammer, because the government wasn't willing to look into their methods... but with the return to Cap, and the alien invasion.... ethics are going out the window. All scruples are being discarded in the name of safety. This is addressed directly at the end of the film. We start off pure, but then we look up and we've wandered so very far from our intentions.

I really hope that they can maintain this. I want to see how Captain America deals with a government that was prepared to embrace AIM. I want to see Rhodey and the Captain. I want to continue to see how this world continues to reel and react to the events of the Avengers and the continually changing reality of the super-humans. I want to see how the SHIELD series ties into all this.

Yeah, I'd say that the film succeeded.