Iron Man 3 (2013)

[starlady]

I went to see Iron Man 3 with several awesome people last night. Many awesome people have said more interesting things than I have to say about this movie, so the following is mostly a collection of links and a few bullet points of commentary, but it's all going under a spoiler cut all the same.

• I won't believe Maya is dead until and unless I see a body, but I'm also pretty skeptical about the idea of the MCU wanting to use her again, as awesome as she was.
• Tony totally stabilized Extremis in Pepper and then used it to stabilize himself so he could have the shrapnel removed. Also I'm pretty sure he's still a cyborg, what with the microtransmitters, though obviously the arc reactor is a much more iconic representation of that.
• coffeeandink, Iron Man 3 - her commentary on the MCU as the refutation of the solitary hero storyline is gold. This post and Iron Man 3 redux are both gold. Basically: what she said.
• My ¢.02 on the Mandarin, just so that I've said it somewhere and can remember it later--I think what the movie does is the best possible way to use the Mandarin, and I really quite appreciated that Marvel put a critique of the racist fantasy that is the Mandarin in its canonical MCU movie. Eat that, fanboys. It is subversive, and I only wish that it weren't still subversive in 2013. That said, the racist trolling of the marketing is tiresome and terrible, the Chinese version is terrible and I'm sad that Fan Bingbing had her scenes cut in the U.S. version (she's awesome and I have the same Chinese name, okay), and I would have vastly preferred that they not use the Mandarin at all, because I'm not convinced the subversion outweighs the continuing deployment of the trope.
• Rhodey wandering around Pakistan not shooting people is also a really terrible failure at critique of the place of racist fantasies in the war on terror (and you know, the war on terror just doesn't have the resonance it did with IM1, six years later). The sweatshop scene did have an additional frisson of relevance in light of the Bangladesh factory fire that was of course unintended but chilling all the same.
• But Rhodey was great! I particularly appreciated his interactions with Tony, and him saving the president like the BAMF he is.
• That said, does anyone else find it really tiresome that movie presidents are still fleshy gormless white guys? Come on, Hollywood, I remember when Morgan Freeman got to play the president a lot, and that was before we elected Obama! TWICE.
• Pepper was great! Except for all the Pepper in distress scenes, argh. Also, much like Piper Perabo in Looper, I have a hard time believing in Pepper in distress because of Gwyneth Paltrow's abs.
• Speaking of bodies, the ableism of Extremis was super tiresome as well. I think it's possible to take Tony's line about Pepper already being perfect as a critique of Aldridge's internalized ableism, but given everything else, I think that's a really far stretch.

Other posts I have read and thought made worthwhile points, assume spoilers in all of them:
oyceter, Iron Man 3
kate_nepveu, Iron Man 3 (SPOILERS)
eruthros, Pepper Potts and [spoiler]
thingswithwings, Iron Man 3 - I do not even regret paying for that!
crossedwires, go and kill the yellow man
wistfuljane, Unimpressed Jane is unimpressed
marina, Iron Man 3

If they kill Jane Foster in Thor 2 I am going to scream. And there had better be a whole ton of Darcy.

Comments

[coffeeandink]

That said, does anyone else find it really tiresome that movie presidents are still fleshy gormless white guys? Come on, Hollywood, I remember when Morgan Freeman got to play the president a lot, and that was before we elected Obama! TWICE.

I think the president was specifically cast to evoke Bush, because of the references to Roxxon (Exxon/Haliburton) and oil, but yeah, it did raise an eyebrow at first sight.

[melannen]

I think people are really hesitant to cast Black Presidents now (this wasn't the first recent movie where I'd noticed the sudden change of standard casting and been kind of weirded out by it, though I can't remember the others now) because the meaning has changed - ten years ago it meant "this happened in a near-future that may not ever be," but if you cast a Black President now, you'd be unable to escape the weight of him being seen as portraying the only real Black President, and that would warp your story. It stops being an abstract symbol and starts being far-too-heavy political commentary, whether you want it to or not. Old white guys, on the other hand, can still be generic.

(Of course nothing's stopping them from casting a *female* President to symbolise "this happened in a near-future that may not ever be.")

[seekingferret]

I went to see it a second time last night and didn't enjoy it quite as much as the first time. Very few of the punchlines were really great punchlines- they didn't hold up to a second exposure. The final battle is pretty great, though.

The ableism is particularly bothering because in the original comic storyline there's no need for it to only be amputees who take Extremis. Iron Man is a comic about transhumanism- everyone wants to be more than human, not just the handicapped. The Extremis-ed enemy in Ellis's story is just a random soldier who's pissed at the government.