Rusting Armor

            Belated thoughts on Iron Man 3 (heavy spoilers)

BY: Jack Ciolli

            By now, I think enough time has past to discuss the major twist from Iron Man 3.  If you still haven’t seen the movie, then SPOILERS!  I will be talking about spoilers in this article, so stop reading and go check out this week’s other awesome articles, like…well, the only other article also has spoilers, so I guess you’re outta luck.  But, last chance, the following article contains SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. 

            Ok, now that we’ve taken care of that formality, let’s talk about the Mandarin.  In the movie, the Mandarin is played by Ben Kingsley, and it’s revealed about two-thirds into the movie that he has been a drunk, washed up actor, Trevor Slattery, simply hired by Aldrich Killian (Guy Pierce) for the purpose of manipulating the world through false media distribution.  For those of you out there who don’t read comics, that’s a bit of a departure from the Chinese caricature with magical alien rings.

            First and foremost I want to make it abundantly clear that I don’t hate this reimagining outright, I don’t think it’s objectively bad, I’m not offended by it, it’s not that it doesn’t work.  Sure, I felt that way about it immediately after I left the theater, but I’ve had some time to mull it over and I’ve since come to a more reasonable conclusion.  It’s not necessarily bad, I just didn’t, personally, like it. 

            But I think we should talk first about why it works in the movie.  One of the major themes of the film is media manipulation.  Killian uses his false Mandarin to send the world on a wild goose chase while he conducts his plans off of everyone’s radars.  So he constructs this figure of the Mandarin and creates videos through which the Mandarin takes credit for all the things Killian has been up to.  Anyone who followed the marketing for the movie may know where I’m going with this, but one of the impressive things about Marvel’s ability to keep this twist a secret isn’t just that they kept it secret (although that is quite the feat).  The real genius is how that false marketing of painting the Mandarin as the big bad guy fits right along with the theme of the movie that I mentioned above.  That’s pretty cool to see a movie’s marketing campaign factor into what the film itself is trying to say.

            So, in the context of the movie overall, the twist works.  It fits perfectly into their thematic goals, it actually manages to surprise an audience that spends most of its time reading up on spoilers for these movies, and it was a choice that I think I’m not alone in saying was entirely unexpected.  Which is pretty ballsy, on the one hand.

            And now we’ve arrived at the crux of this article.  Why I didn’t like it.  And mostly, it can be summed up by saying that their choice was interesting and new, but in making it, they missed out on a chance to do a lot of cool things that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is uniquely positioned to do.  Mainly, the ability to connect these films to a larger, interconnected universe of characters and themes that can cross over into one another’s franchises.  Let’s get into specifics.

            A friend of mine and I, prior to seeing the movie, discussed a fan theory on the Mandarin that was floating around in some forum somewhere, that basically suggested the possibility that one of his rings had an Infinity Gem on it, which gives him power.  The Infinity Gems are power gems related to the Infinity Gauntlet, which is the weapon of choice for Thanos, the cosmic character hinted at for future Avengers films in the mid-credits scene after The Avengers.  This is something that I think could have been really interesting on a number of levels.  First off, it would bring a bit of the cosmic/alien/magic stuff into Tony’s universe.  I know some people may not like that, preferring instead to leave the magic to Thor and let Tony handle more Earthly, scientific threats.  But one of the things we didn’t get to see in the Avengers due to time constraints was Tony having to come to terms with a world that includes Asgardian Gods and interdimensional aliens.  This is a guy who’s solved all his problems up to this point by building things, using science and engineering.  Forcing him to face off against forces he doesn’t quite understand would be a really interesting way to take the character post-Avengers. 

            So, in this version Kingsley’s Mandarin is actually the Mandarin, complete with at least one magic ring.  In the actual movie, the broadcasts show the symbol for the Ten Rings, the same terrorist organization that kidnapped Tony in the first movie.  Not only is this never mentioned, but it’s just another missed opportunity.  Had the Mandarin been in charge of the Ten Rings all along, then his origin in this movie could very well have mirrored his comic origin in an interesting way, while also factoring perfectly into the overall universe.  After the events of the Avengers, he discovers the Infinity Gem and what it can do.  Now suddenly with power, he decides he has the opportunity to take revenge against the man responsible for crippling his organization in the Middle East: Tony Stark. 

            Almost everything else about this movie could have stayed in place.  Tony’s obsession with keeping Pepper safe, his anxiety problems after his experiences with New York, it would all work in context with Mandarin coming after him for revenge.  Overall, it would fit nicer into the larger scheme of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is something I felt this movie lacked.  We got the post-New York Tony, which I enjoyed, but everything else was just namedropping, to an extent.  Having the overall theme of the movie, Tony dealing with a world that includes things he can’t understand with conventional science alone, come from outside Tony’s specific franchise would imply that connectivity without necessitating cameos or empty namedrops. 

            Finally, I want to briefly explore some things about the Mandarin twist that actually did detract from the movie itself.  The main one for me is that the movie rarely felt like the stakes were very high.  The scene of Tony, Pepper, and Maya being attacked at Tony’s house was an exception.  But everything afterwards lacked weight.  Happy didn’t die in the explosion, and the scene in the hospital felt essentially like a promise that he wasn’t going to die there either.  That, in turn, made Pepper falling into the fire ultimately pointless, because the stakes hadn’t been raised to that level, so of course she was going to be fine.  And all of this was compounded 10 fold when the Mandarin was revealed to be Trevor Slattery.  The whole time viewers (or at least this viewer) was wondering how the Mandarin was going to stand up to Iron Man, what powers, what tricks he’d have up his sleeves.  Turns out he had pot smoke and empty beer cans up there.  It let the air out of the balloon.  All tension at that point was basically gone.  So yes, they did a great job exploring their theme of media manipulation, going so far as to manipulate their own marketing.  But in the end, it sucked a bit of the excitement out of the movie.

            I think we can also examine a bit why this choice with the Mandarin is potentially harmful to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole and to future superhero movies in general.  The main issue being that it didn’t feel like an honest attempt at taking such a goofy, comic book concept and reimagining it for today.  They just took the look and the name and applied it like a coat of paint to something else entirely to fit it into their chosen themes.  Which isn’t necessarily bad on its own, but superhero comics are filled with silly characters that are ripe for reinterpretation.  I doubt I’m alone in saying that part of why I love superhero movies is seeing how they take these goofy concepts that work fine in comics and translate them for a movie-going audience.  That’s fun to see, but now I fear future writers and directors have a precedent in Iron Man 3 to follow should they find a character too difficult to reimagine. 

            For the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself, though, this movie fell a little short of the promise we’ve come to expect from Phase 1, which was the movies leading up to and including The Avengers.  That promise being the steady build up towards the team movie and the many subtle references to the other corners of this universe.  We got a bit of that with Killian’s plot and his creation of the Mandarin basically being born out of discovering Thor’s existence, but overall I didn’t feel a sense that we were going towards something bigger.  And that’s not necessarily the fault of the movie itself so much as it is the post-credits scene.  The post-credits scene has become a staple of Marvel movies, and up to this point they’ve consistently been used to allude to what’s happening in other parts of the universe or how these movies are all coming together in the future.  The only other time a post-credits scene has been for the sake of a gag instead of for world-building, it was The Avengers, and it worked because they already gave use the world-building in a mid-credits reveal of Thanos. 

            But when my friends and I stayed after the end of Iron Man 3 to see how they were going to hint at the future of the universe, what we got was just a scene of Tony and Bruce having some bro-time.  It didn’t give us anything, except a chuckle perhaps, and it ended up being just another instance of letting the air out of the balloon.  It was for the Tumblr crowd, that’s it.