I just wanted to pop back in here and say that I love you comic geeks! I’ve just had a huge fight with the friend who got me interested in comics, and I realized he’s not half the guy I thought he was, but the general camaraderie here - even between vastly differing viewpoints - gives me hope. Rock on, Dopers! /hijack
This has a long pedigree in the Marvel Universe.
[spoiler]In the early days of the Fantastic Four, just about every real threat they faced ended with a variation on Reed pulling a scientific thingy out of his hat after the bad guys had pounded them flat. That was Stan’s way of sticking it to DC, where the good guys always pulled themselves together in the end to out-muscle, rather than out-think, the baddies.
Kids today. They ain’t got no sense of history. 
[/spoiler]
Hijack, sorry: I’m actually pretty stoked for the new Hulk film–Edward Norton’s got chops equal to Robert Downey Jr., and it looks like they’re keeping it slim on the bad guys (just the Abomination), sleek on the FX, and heavy on the character development… a lot like Iron Man.
Now, The Love Guru, that makes the Torontonian in me cry tears of blood. 
The Hulk looks like exactly the same plot as IM - conflicted guy battles bigger version of same - without any of the wit, but with a blank-faced lead and stupid cartoon characters in place of a guy with the best toy since the original Batman. No comparison.
When an Adan Sandler trailer looks better than a Mike Myers one… A sign of the apocalypse.
I liked it. Unlike most superhero movies, it wasn’t one of the worst movies ever made. That’s was a refreshing relief.
My favorite part was Tony demonstrating a super weapon that blows up the whole side of mountain, but it was him opening a suitcase from which bottles of chilled champagne rose from dry ice or something that made the Vietnamese audience I was watching with gasp in awe.
Loved it. Even Paltrow wasn’t too bad, and I usually can’t stand her (and her character was pretty pathetic in a movie with few female roles). Some guys I’ve talked to wished there’d been more fight scenes, but I didn’t find it lacking. Of course, I could have been dazed by a sweaty Downey Jr. pounding at steel like a Greek god…
No kidding. Zohan’s trailer alone makes me laugh harder than any other full-length Adam Sandler movie (except maybe Happy Gilmore). The Love Guru would make old-school Robin Williams go “This is just goofy.”
Here endeth the hijack.
“The Elemental Converter! In the hands of a mortal!? Fool! You do not know the power you possess!”
I’d disagree. The sudden switch from a-hole to nice guy seemed a bit sudden even given his inprisonment.
Again, I have to disagree. No particular motivations was even implied at, in particular. “He is a bad person”, and that was about it. But of course he’s a bad person who helped to raise an orphaned kid after his father died. Perhaps he did so for the sake of cashing in, perhaps not, but they never particularly mentioned anything along those lines.
I thought the movie failed, ultimately, because there was no particular emotion between two men who were for all intents and purposes father and son, and no particular reason to boo for or feel pity for the bad guy. It had some cool special effects (though the close ups of 3D holograms and cars and costumes while metal plays loudly was a bit overdrawn versus actual fight scenes and such) and Robert Downey was good enough, but there wasn’t a lot of movie there.
Yeah, that lame attempt at a romantic subplot was useless. I’d’ve preferred something like Potts walking toward Stark, leaning in for dramatic tension…
Potts: My salary just doubled, because you are not paying me nearly enough to deal with a whole new layer of crazy.
Stark: [a bit surprised at thwarted romantic tension] Uhm, uh… really? Because most personal assistants would find this sort of thing fascin-
Potts: Tripled. Or goodbye.
Stark: [cowed] Okay.
Sudden, but not inexplicably so. He was a smug jerk because he was perfectly secure in the knowledge that even though Stark Industries might be a weapons company, they only sold to the US and other peacekeeping forces. That’s why the “Merchant of Death” thing the journalist threw at him didn’t faze him, he figured he had the moral high ground. As soon as he realized that Stark Industries had been selling to terrorists, he lost that high ground and realized he’d been too naive and self-assured. He’d left the running of the company to Stane, figuring Stane was as good a CEO as could be, and reality was a cold bucket of water. Both attitudes, before and after, stem from an overwhelming level of pride in his company.
This was my biggest complaint as well. Bridges was the bad guy more or less because the film needed a bad guy, not for any deeper motivation.
Also, if Stark enterprises is selling weapons to the terrorists, why did the main terrorist baddy kidnap Stark and try and get him to build uber-weapon instead of just shooting him like Bridges character wanted, and then getting Bridges character to give them the uber-missile in return?
I enjoyed the movie a lot but it wasn’t the be-all end-all. I actually liked that it was light on action because the best part for me was the interaction between the actors. I don’t know what it says about the movie that Robert Downey Jr. and Jeff Bridges became less entertaining when they put on giant mech suits and started slugging it out.
Stane didn’t tell Raza (the bald terrorist guy) it was Stark they’d be killing. Presumably Stane just told him “A Stark Industries rep will be in the desert at such-and-such a time, take him out.” When Raza learned it was Tony Stark, he was pissed because he hadn’t been paid what the job was worth (“You gave us trinkets to kill a prince”). That’s what the recording with Stark tied up in the chair was about. Raza couldn’t have simply shot Stark at that time, because then he’d have no bargaining power. Stane would have told him to screw off, because he got what he wanted. Rather than try to deal with a powerful executive stationed in the US, Raza instead used Stark, as he was at hand and Raza had more immediate influence over him. It was risky, but he didn’t have many options.
I agree that Stane was never given any explicit motivations for wanting to off Stark; anything I could suggest would be fanwankery. Were I to fanwank, and I were, I’d say that Stark was getting close to the point where he would take over full control of the company, presuming he hadn’t already. The award ceremony at the beginning of the movie wasn’t too clear if it had happened or was going to. If it was going to, it makes some sense that Stane would want to bump Stark off to maintain his control over the company.
It was the Ultimate Nullifier. To be used against Galactus. The Watcher broke his oath never to interfere in the affairs of humans.
Now those were comics!
Some of the best movies are when the plot becomes irrelevant and you can be entertained just by the dialog and charachters. The Big Sleep was like this. The Ocean’s Eleven remake, too; by the end, who cares if they get the money.
It is also confirmation of Robot Arm’s First Law of Superhero Movie Casting; for the lead role, get someone who can play the secret identity. Anybody can put on the suit. Christopher Reeve was a great Clark Kent. Tobey Maguire was a great Peter Parker. Jessica Alba is no astronaut. Cast for the secret identity.
Robert Downey Jr. was great as Tony Stark. He was an asshole, but he was a very entertaining asshole. (“Sorry I’m late, I was doing a piece for Vanity Fair.”) And believable as the obsessed, electronics wunderkind, too.
I have a definite crush on Gwyneth Paltrow. I would love to see her play a character with that kind of backbone, but I’m not sure if she has it in her. There’s the scene where she’s changing his power cell, and getting all squeamish as she has to reach into his chest. Or tiptoeing gingerly across the broken glass to get to the power reactor. I wish I could blame the director, but this is twice that she’s played characters who were tentative when they should have been take-charge. Here it’s a minor flaw, but it absolutely killed Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
It’s not hereditary. Those capable, confident roles were the ones her mother used to knock out of the park.
Yes, indeed. If the whole movie had been that scene repeated over and over I would still have felt that I got my $9 worth.
That being said I thought this was an excellent movie. I generally don’t like comics turned into film (I’m not a big comic fan and couldn’t even be bothered to see Spiderman or the sequels) but this was very well done. A good amount of fighting, a good amount of character development, a good amount of eye candy, and I laughed throughout the whole movie. I loved his relationship with the machines in his home and the one sided conversations between him and his robotics added to his charm.
I thought the motive was pretty clear: money. While Tony was a minor, Stane had control over a multi-billion dollar defence contractor, with a free hand to do what he wanted with the company (such as dealing with both sides of a conflict). Tony got in the way of that, both in terms of direct control, and in jeapordizing his sweet little side-deals with terrorists. This was explicitly set-up in the movie. Hell, it was pretty clearly telegraphed in the first twenty minutes, during the slideshow at the award ceremony that Tony didn’t attend: Newsweek cover with Stane, describing how he now runs Stark Industries, followed by a Time cover with Tony, with Stane literally standing in his shadow. Might as well have had the headline read, “Motivation for Super Villainy.”
Where did you get that Stane raised Tony? There wasn’t anything like that mentioned in the film. Stane ran Stark Industries until Tony was old enough to take over, but he didn’t adopt the kid, and nothing in the first half of the film gave me any sort of a father-son vibe from them. “Favorite uncle,” maybe, but there’s no hint that Tony took Stane as a father-figure or particularly looked up to him. He was an old friend of his father’s, and a trusted business associate, but I don’t think their relationship went any farther than that.
Yeah, Stane wanted to really take the company places and The Poor Little Rich Boy was a pain in the neck prima donna. It was just a hostile takeover, only with terrorists and robot suits. Stark had the company handed to him, Stane had to do all of the grunt work and people-sleazing.
Also, I loved all of the comic-geek details, like Roxxon, Damage Control, and the glimpse of Cap’s shield. Not to mention Nick Fury.
Hell, try Y the Last Man. Heard it’s good. Or Brubaker’s Cap run.
Thanks! I was making it up from patchy memories. But I’m sure there was something called an elemental converter somewhere in the stories.