Last night Scott and I went to see Iron Man 3. The movie was a nice summer movie that came out too early. It should have been released in June or July. Generally the best part of the movie was the time spent in the dialogue between Tony Stark and the kid was the best section of that movie.
The movie was okay, it wasn’t as good as the first two movies and it squandered the Mandarin character. Sir Ben Kingsley was pretty much wasted in the role of the Mandarin, and casting the Mandarin as a shill ruins the central tale behind Iron Man. Tony’s primary battles are alcoholism, his relationship with his father, Pepper Potts, and on a grand scale the battle between Technology and Magic. The Mandarin is supposed to be in command of supernatural powers provided to him by the Rings of Makulan. Tony is the expression of humanity wielding Technology and the central story is this battle between the supernatural and the technological. This movie also trots out Extremis. The comic books and the Iron Man Anime forged a canon that Extremis was a tool for Tony to use to bridge the gap between the organic and inorganic so that Tony could be on-par with his technology as much as the Mandarin is on-par with his magic.
The movie pretty much squashed Extremis as a sideline curiosity, elevated AIM to primary villain status and squandered the Mandarin. In the comics AIM was always the bumbling army of grunting henchmen, they weren’t clever or particularly villainous, they were principally retarded thieves. But the movie pretty much just shat all over all of it.
Marvel’s excuse that they trot out to calm the criticisms down is that the movies exist in a parallel universe called the ‘cinematic universe’ so these issues don’t matter. That feint gives them an out to write whatever they want, essentially giving a pass to all this character mangling.
I would not see this movie again, once is enough, and due to a rather prolonged free fall scene I would definitely not see this movie in IMAX. The content is okay, but not worth 3D or DBOX prices. I would give it 7/10 stars. It is qualitatively worse than the previous movies.