Traditional Christmas Movies: Iron Man 3

It’s Christmas, and suffering from PTSD ever since saving New York from destruction, Tony Stark is more dependent on his Iron Man suits than ever. So much so, it’s affecting every aspect of his life, including his relationship with Pepper Potts. After a new threat reduces his world to rubble, Tony must get back to basics, relying on his instinct and ingenuity in order to protect himself and the people he loves, as the mistakes of his past come back to haunt him.

Christmastime means Christmas films, and here are some of my favorites! While this particular film may be the third one in the Iron Man franchise, it’s the second of three traditional seasonal films appearing on this list that were written by Shane Black, the King of Christmas.

After the previously never before seen cultural, critical, and financial susccess of the first Avengers movie, Iron Man 3 was intended not only to be the third and final film in the Iron Man trilogy, but to act as a kind of launching point for the newly-minted MCU mega-franchise.

So…

Suffering from an increasingly debilitating anxiety disorder, due to the untreated PTSD resulting from his life as Iron Man—a mental illness that only got worse after his near-fatal tangle with a Chitauri wormhole over New York City, and the resulting glimpse of the Mad Titan lurking out there in the darkness, that will eventually drive him to create the killer robot Ultron—Tony spends his time feverishly building Iron Man suits, tinkering, creating new versions, obsessively improving and innovating, desperately trying to plan for any and every eventuality, all while showing the world a brave face. But in reality he is only armoring himself off—physically and emotionally—from not just the world, but from the people who love him, people like the ever-beleagued love of his life, Pepper Potts, and his bestie, Col. James “Rhodey” Rhodes, the armored superhero known as War Machine, who was recently re-branded by the U.S. Government as the red, white, and blue hero, Iron Patriot.

That’s when Adrian Killian shows up, a former sweaty nerd with a disability, he is now handsome and suave and standing tall, with a biological nanotechnology in the pocket of his linen pants that can not only repair damage to the body, but it can super-charge it. It’s called Extremis, and he’s looking to sell it to Stark Industries. But years ago, Tony cruelly brushed Killian off, uninterested in both his experiments and the organization he founded, a group called Advanced Idea Mechanics, or AIM, for short, a group that in the comics dresses like this…

Spoiler… they’re bad guys.

Surprise, surprise, Killian still holds an grudge and actually just wants to destroy Tony, because he’s a jealous bitter little nerd with an ax to grind. But Tony and his friends don’t realize this yet, even though they probably should, since Killian has been known to wear a tiny ponytail at times, and he shows up to his meeting with Pepper wearing loafers without any socks, so…

Also, the world is currently under attack by a very bad man who is known as The Mandarin. A shadowy foreign figure in robes and aviator shades, of a threatening but indeterminate ethnic background, who is prone to interrupting Must See TV with his anti-American Imperialist broadcasts before blowing something up. He is a terrorist warlord at the head of an organization known as the Ten Rings, a group Tony Stark has previously had run-ins with in Iron Man 1 and 2.

So… they’re also bad guys.

Turns out, Adrian, AIM, the Mandarin, and the Ten Rings are in cahoots. Then, it turns out even more that the Mandarin is actually fake, and is being played by a down-on-his-luck junkie actor, a construct created by Killian, who is actually the Mandarin the whole time (although, if we’re being honest here, Killian is actually lying too, and wasn’t the real Mandarin either, but that isn’t cleared up until the movie Shang-Chi). The reason Killian is doing all of this, is to cover up for the fact that his Extremis test subjects, all former soldiers maimed in one of America’s Forever Wars, occasionally go super-nova and sometimes blow up in crowded areas, a truth that would harm his funding opportunities if it were to become public knowledge. Having recently found some sympathetic and interested ears in the U.S. Government, but with his big-time funding threatened now that Tony Stark suddenly decided to get involved in an angry superhero kind of way, Killian makes his big move. He intends to have the Mandarin kill the President on TV, clearing the path to power for his friends in the government, who will then buy Extremis from him for use on U.S. soldiers, and all while laying the blame for the carnage at the sandaled-feet of  “foreign” terrorists, which will not only benefit Killian financially, but also his war-monger buddies in power too.

Also, Killian kidnapped Pepper, so…

Tony Stark needs to get his shit together, reconcile his past mistakes, and embrace his future, so that he can not only rescue the President, his country, and by extension the entire world, but also, the one true love of his life.

Thus saving Christmas…

Good job, Iron Man!

This film set out to dismantle Iron Man’s armor, so to speak, so Tony Stark loses his car, his big signature house, and also, for a sizeable stretch of the movie, the use of his Iron Man suits. Much like how creating the arc reactor in the first film was symbolic of Tony finding his heart, and in the second film, the discovery of the new element he needed in order to stop the reactor from poisoning him was a metaphor for him finally getting his relationship with his deceased Father to a healthy place, being without his armor is a metaphor for his journey of self-discovery, and the vulnerability that comes with such a journey, as for most of the film, he’s on the run, no armor, and suffering from anxiety attacks.

It’s a pretty well-done distillation of the character… y’know, for being a superhero movie… one that also prepares him for his big final arc in the MCU mega-franchise, and all while also being a fun superhero movie. And yes, with the acknowledgement that this film couldn’t exist without the previous Iron Man appearances, it is still the hands down best one.

But, since this film was slightly more contemplative than the average superhero movie, it confused the shit out of a buttload of stupid nerds, who then trampled each other in their rush to announce to the world that they didn’t know what the idiom “a clean slate” means, after Tony invokes the “Clean Slate Protocol” at the end of the movie to detonate all of his feverishly built alternate Iron Man suits. They took this to mean that Iron Man was retired forever, instead of that Tony intended to start fresh. Then, when Iron Man shows up again in the second Avengers movie, they were super butthurt in public about it, saying that it contradicts the point of this movie, because… fandom nerds are generally stupid assholes, so whatever…

Par for the course, I guess.

Anyway, the Mark 42, which is the main Iron Man suit in this film, is by far my favorite Iron Man suit. I really like the way they flipped the traditionally dominant red to dominant gold this time, which acted as a nice visual metaphor for the character’s current state of being.

Plus, it looks snazzy.

The main problem with the Iron Man franchise has always been that none of the villains have been able to hold a candle to Downey’s Tony Stark, not bald Jeff Bridges, or Mickey Rourke with his bird, not even that groovy motherfucker Justin Hammer, played by Sam Rockwell. This is because, before Downey and the MCU came along and turned him into an A-lister, Iron Man was strictly D-tier. Before that, Tony Stark was a one-note character (alcoholic), or a two note character if you count “is a drunk” and “was a drunk” separately. He mostly went by Iron Man too, never Tony, because he otherwise had no personality. For years, the main way of differentiating Tony from Steve Rogers, Hank Pym, and Clint Barton without their masks on was: Steve is the nice one, Clint is the hothead, Hank hit Jan, and Tony has a mustache.

(Singing): “Which of these dudes is not like the other… guess what’s also his whole personality!”

Before Downey, Iron Man was mostly utilized as an ever-present Avenger, just an interesting-looking guy for the line-up, nominally considered to be a drunken ladies man and inventor, or as nerds have always referred to it: “A Howard Hughes type.” This is also part of why Marvel comics briefly replaced Tony with Rhodey in the 80s, because you weren’t losing anything interesting. I only say all this to illustrate why his rogue’s gallery is generally pretty shitty. Thor has Loki. Captain America has the Red Skull. Iron Man’s got no one… except his own demons…

But hey, at least this time out, the bad guy in the film wasn’t just another guy in a metal suit.

Still, as much as I loved the Mandarin switcheroo, Guy Pearce’s shirtless and lava-glowing Killian, backed by a bunch of similarly lava-glowing people who looked like Private Military Contractors, stuck pretty well with the tradition… he just didn’t cut the mustard. But to be fair, it’s not like a comic book-accurate Mandarin would have worked any better either.

From the start, every comic-head recognized that the Ten Rings was a reference to The Mandarin, and as the MCU went on, and the Ten Rings stuck around, it was clear that at some point, the Mandarin would show up too, because the Mandarin wears ten rings. Besides being super gaudy and ostentatious, each ring has a specific power, as detailed below in this super awesome panel from issue #15 of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Book of Weapons, Hardware, and Paraphernalia from 1983, that I wish I had framed and hanging on my wall...

Love that shit.

And while the general look and shape of the rings, and even their individual names, have changed over the years, they’ve basically stayed the same…

This is also true of the character of The Mandarin, who has only ever been a racist caricature. Common to pulp novels and comics, characters like this are known as The Yellow Peril, or the Yellow Terror, or maybe the Yellow Menace, and occasionally, the Yellow Specter. Yellow is the important part, obviously, as it is a racist color metaphor portraying a type of character that depicts the peoples of East and Southeast Asia as an existential danger to the Western world.

Think Dr. No and Ming the Merciless, even Charlie Chan, and of course… Fu Manchu. Well, the Mandarin is Marvel’s version of that shit.

First appearing in 1963, and now supposedly dead in the current comic continuity—but don’t get too excited about that, as death is something in comics that is always, at best, transitory—he is Iron Man’s Joker. A warlord and criminal mastermind, a skilled martial artist and swordsman, as well as a supposed descendant of Genghis Khan (but hey, who isn’t, right?). He somehow stumbles onto these ten rings (the particulars of that depends on which version you’re reading), whose origins are sometimes mystical, or possibly alien, but either way, they granted him extraordinary powers.

The nerd butthurt over the Mandarin bait and switch in this movie is just another example of the typical bullshit smokescreen that happens whenever fandom is being racist but don’t want to admit to that, which is way too often, like when Miles Morales became Spider-man, or Doctor Who became a woman, or Doctor Who became a black man, or when the Ghostbusters were women, or when a stormtrooper turned out to be black, or a Jedi-hunting Sith was a black woman, or when an asian woman joined the Rebel Alliance, or when they demanded the new Iron Fist be Asian American, because then the story could be him “getting back in touch with his culture’s roots” because all Asians know Kung-fu, and it’s weird to have a martial arts-centered character not be Asian, and also Asian Americans are always Asian first, so the “culture” they get in touch with is never the one they were actually raised in… which is America, right?

On and on and on, over and over again.

Same shitheads, different day.

In this case, the hubbub was meant to obscure the fact that they loved the idea that the Mandarin was being presented as a supervillain Osama bin Laden, because in their minds, that’s who bad guys are supposed to be, and they hated the fact that the bad guy was actually a super rich white guy with friends in the government, because that is who they idolize, and what they dream of becoming, but they don’t want to say any of this out loud, so instead, they claim to be disappointed Mandarin fans.

But that’s the problem, y’see, because there are no Mandarin fans, because the Mandarin has always been a shit character in the service of a third rate hero, and there are no “good” or “classic” Mandarin stories. In fact, it wasn’t until this movie was coming out that Marvel decided to finally and officially tell the Mandarin’s origin story in Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca’s excellent run on The Invincible Iron Man, and even then… it wasn’t that great, because the Mandarin is a shit character.

The reality of the situation is, much like how Man-Ape is only referred to as M’Baku in the Black Panther movies, the comic book-accurate version of the Mandarin is just too racist to put on screen, so they had to change him. And it was a change for the better, because literally any change would have been better.

Although, those power rings are kinda cool… I do miss those.

But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, Iron Man 3 succeeds as a wrap-up for the character’s personal story, that sets the stage for the next era of the MCU, and all while being a good time at the movies.

Good job, Iron Man!