There was a scene during the 1999 flashback where a man tried to talk to Stark about something but Stark blew him off because he was partying. The guy’s name was Dr Wu.
He never appeared in the movie again, although I hear he had another scene in the Chinese edit of the movie.
I don’t follow the comic book. Is there some significance to the character of Dr Wu that a regular fan would recognize? Was this a foreshadowing for the next movie in the series?
One unusual point was that Wu was there with Dr Yinsen, the character from the first Iron Man movie who was there at Iron Man’s origin.
According to this source, he’s supposed to be the future Radioactive Man (an Avengers villain who later partially reformed) although his name in the comic was Chen Lu.
Dr Wu is the one who ends up operating on Stark at the end to fix him (whatever that fix is supposed to entail). In the longer cut, it’s apparently more obvious, but I noticed him in the regular American screening.
I thought that it was meant to be a nice touch for people who remembered from the first film how hard Dr Yinsen worked on Stark at the beginning to keep him alive, that this dude in the same conversation is working on him again to fix it all, and Stark essentially blew them both off way back then because he was an entitled asshole, and has no way of knowing that they’re both going to be his surgeons later.
Pretty sure Dr Yinsen wasn’t one of the surgeons operating on Stark at the end of the movie. Not to spoil the first movie, but there’s a reason his cameo in the third movie took place in a flashback scene.
I’ll admit I hadn’t noticed it was Wu operating on Stark.
The idea of the surgery made sense in the context of the movie. Stark had been injured in the first movie and he had shrapnel in his chest that threatened to kill him. So he developed his chest gizmo that powered his armor and also protected his heart from the shrapnel.
But the point was that he was using his own technology to avoid the problem rather than accepting help from other people to solve the problem. That’s a recurrent theme throughout the series. Stark always felt he had to do things for himself and wouldn’t accept help from anyone else.
The climax of this movie was Stark finally being willing to ask for help - in this specific case, to finally have a surgeon remove the shrapnel so he no longer needed the chest gizmo.
That’s why I said “in the beginning” as in - in the beginning of the trilogy of Iron Man movies. It’s a bookending technique - Dr Yinsen at the very beginning of everything to do with the shrapnel, and Dr Wu marking the end of the shrapnel being a problem.
