Iron Man Three

The Avengers (sorry, “Avengers Assemble”) was a great film; don’t tell me otherwise. Not only was it the culmination of one of the most ambitious big-budget cinema experiments of the last decade, bringing together four separate IP’s each with their own film series into one place, but it was a triumph of effective characterisation and of emotional investment with all characters on all sides. Loki was the perfect bad guy, Nick Fury the perfect badass leader-figure, the individual Avengers each played their role fantastically and Agent Coulson was just the icing on the cake. Couple that with a solid, well-written plot and one of the most epic and well-done action sequences I’ve ever seen put to film, and it all became a veritable rollercoaster of a good time. Sometimes, films just aren’t meant to be deep artistic explorations, and are never destined to be Oscar-winners, and Avengers was the best example of that.

However, once the dust had settled some started to voice their concerns as to what the sheer magnitude of the film would mean to the Marvel canon. The film had barely been released when Marvel announced plans for Iron Man 3, Thor 2, another Captain America and, somewhere along the line, an Avengers 2 as well. But… where can you really go from Avengers? How can the world face a bigger threat than Loki (the ‘he escapes’ trick is only going to work once, and you just know there’s going to be an Avengers 3 whilst they still make as much money as they currently do) and a horde of marauding aliens, and how could each individual superhero now start facing up to problems that wouldn’t have a massive ‘oh wait why not call in all my superhero buddies’ plothole running straight through the middle of them.

Iron Man Three (apparently the symbol ‘3’ has gone out of fashion for all non-advertising purposes) is the first Marvel film to have to face up to these challenges, and goes about doing so in two ways. The first is to very explicitly state early on that our chosen bad guy, The Mandarin, is very much the US government’s problem rather than one for the world in general, and Tony Stark gets involved for personal reasons. The other is to redefine Tony Stark’s role as a character. This is, arguably, a relic of Iron Man 2; after handing control of Stark Industries to Pepper Potts, Tony Stark is no longer defined by his company’s achievements and behaviour. In this film, Potts’ romantic influence has led him to abandon the flashy partygoer side to his personality too (although, in a nice twist, it is this very part of his old self that has come back to haunt him here), and all that is left is Tony Stark as Iron Man. But this is an Iron Man with no baddies to fight, who spends his days tinkering with the metal suits that have come to define him as a symbol rather than a person, and who still suffers from flashbacks of the last time he had bad guys to face and ended up falling half-dead through a wormhole in space. Indeed, the incident and the way it has changed the world of the Marvel characters is a key centrepoint of the film, the phrase ‘after New York’ uttered with every inch the gravitas used when discussing events such as 9/11. All three Iron Man films have had to work hard to give the ‘genius billionaire playboy philanthropist’ a challenge to face up to by disabling to some degree, but whilst the first two crushed his physical capabilities Iron Man Three is all about his internal demons- a smart move that works extremely well thanks in equal measure to Robert Downey Jnr.’s abilities as an actor and Shane Black’s directorial skill.

However, what makes Iron Man Three a really good film rather than a mediocre one with an interesting premise is what’s built around this. Take, for instance, The Mandarin; my research tells me that in the comics he was almost a caricature of a James Bond baddie, with various magical laser powers, but Ben Kingsley’s version here is an unnervingly real mix of all America’s post-9/11 fears. A cross between an oriental Osama bin Laden and Batman Begins’ portrayal of Ra’as Al Ghul, he is able to strike anywhere without warning and to devastating effect, frequently taking over American airwaves despite all government attempts to stop him. He feels like a genuine threat, something that no amount of Iron Man firepower can take down, and it is worth noting that in this film more than any other, Tony Stark faces up to his problems outside of the Iron Man suit; another nice touch on the character-building front. I would love to say more about this character and the film’s other bad guy, the smooth, dangerous Aldritch Killian (Guy Pearce- oh come on, like you weren’t going to work out in the first five minutes he was a bad guy), but feel I can’t d so without giving away some major spoilers. Awesome spoilers though they would be, I’m just gonna have to let you enjoy them.

It’s also nice to see Pepper Potts finally start to pay back all the slow building of her character the previous two films have done; Gwyneth Paltrow’s character started off in the first film as little more than a device left in because Comic Said So, but her upgrade to CEO in number two reflected her increasing depth and importance as a character. Now, she is the key driving force of the plot and of Stark’s character development, playing both sides of the ‘damsel in distress’ coin, and even gets a chance towards the end to make her own submission to the film’s badassery meter. Which, by the way, is fantastic; every action sequence is supremely well-paced and directed and made to feel all the more awesome thanks to our emotional investment in those involved. Plus, it’s got Robert Downey Jnr. and Jarvis, so you know you’re gonna get a few good laughs along the way.

The one thing I do find somewhat strange about the film is the way it ended. The last scene wrapped up plenty of loose ends and seemed to show Tony Stark at peace with himself, providing a lovely sense of closure to the whole thing. Except that this isn’t going to be an end; we already know there’s an Avengers 2 coming along, and these things are making too much money for this to be the last Iron Man (unless Marvel show a surprising degree of artistic integrity). Whilst the closure felt lovely, whoever has to direct the next one is going to have an awful job trying to write Iron Man out of this hole in a way that doesn’t feel horribly clichéd or just plain weird. Still, that’s for another time; for now, just go and see this film, and have a great time doing so.

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The Dark Knight Rises

OK, I’m going to take a bit of a risk on this one- I’m going to dip back into the world of film reviewing. I’ve tried this once before over the course of this blog (about The Hunger Games) and it went about as well as a booze-up in a monastery (although it did get me my first ever comment!). However, never one to shirk from a challenge I thought I might try again, this time with something I’m a little more overall familiar with: Christopher Nolan’s conclusion to his Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises.

Ahem

Christopher Nolan has never been one to make his plots simple and straightforward (he did do Inception after all), but most of his previous efforts have at least tried to focus on only one or two things at a time. In Dark Knight Rises however, he has gone ambitious, trying to weave no less than 6 different storylines into one film. Not only that, but 4 of those are trying to explore entirely new characters and a fifth pretty much does the whole ‘road to Batman’ origins story that was done in Batman Begins. That places the onus of the film firmly on its characters and their development, and trying to do that properly to so many new faces was always going to push everyone for space, even in a film that’s nearly 3 hours long.

So, did it work? Well… kind of. Some characters seem real and compelling pretty much from the off, in the same way that Joker did in The Dark Knight- Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle (not once referred to as Catwoman in the entire film) is a little bland here and there and we don’t get to see much of the emotion that supposedly drives her, but she is (like everyone else) superbly acted and does the ‘femme fakickass’ thing brilliantly, whilst Joseph Gordon Levitt’s young cop John Blake (who gets a wonderful twist to his character right at the end) is probably the most- and best-developed character of the film, adding some genuine emotional depth. Michael Caine is typically brilliant as Alfred, this time adding his own kick to the ‘origins’ plot line, and Christian Bale finally gets to do what no other Batman film has done before- make Batman/Bruce Wayne the most interesting part of the film.

However, whilst the main good guys’ story arcs are unique among Batman films by being the best parts of the film, some of the other elements don’t work as well. For someone who is meant to be a really key part of the story, Marion Cotillard’s Miranda Tate gets nothing that gives her character real depth- lots of narration and exposition, but we see next to none of her for huge chunks of the film and she just never feels like she matters very much. Tom Hardy as Bane suffers from a similar problem- he was clearly designed in the mould of Ducard (Liam Neeson) in Begins, acting as an overbearing figure of control and power that Batman simply doesn’t have (rather than the pure terror of Joker’s madness), but his actual actions never present him as anything other just a device to try and give the rest of the film a reason to happen, and he never appears to have any genuinely emotional investment or motivation in anything he’s doing. Part of the problem is his mask- whilst clearly a key feature of his character, it makes it impossible to see his mouth and bunches up his cheeks into an immovable pair of blobs beneath his eyes, meaning there is nothing visible for him to express feeling with, effectively turning him into a blunt machine rather than a believable bad guy. There’s also an entire arc concerning Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and his guilt over letting Batman take the blame for Harvey Dent’s death that is barely explored at all, but thankfully it’s so irrelevant to the overall plot that it might as well not be there at all.

It is, in many ways, a crying shame, because there are so many things the film does so, so right. The actual plot is a rollercoaster of an experience, pushing the stakes high and the action (in typical Nolan fashion) through the roof. The cinematography is great, every actor does a brilliant job in their respective roles and a lot of the little details- the pit & its leap to freedom, the ‘death by exile’ sequence and the undiluted awesome that is The Bat- are truly superb. In fact if Nolan had just decided on a core storyline and focus and then stuck with it as a solid structure, then I would probably still not have managed to wipe the inane grin off my face. But by being as ambitious as he has done, he has just squeezed screen time away from where it really needed to be, and turned the whole thing into a structural mess that doesn’t really know where it’s going at times. It’s a tribute to how good the good parts are that the whole experience is still such good fun, but it’s such a shame to see a near-perfect film let down so badly.

The final thing I have to say about the film is simply: go and see it. Seriously, however bad you think this review portrays it as, if you haven’t seen the film yet and you at all liked the other two (or any other major action blockbuster with half a brain), then get down to your nearest cinema and give it a watch. I can’t guarantee that you’ll have your greatest ever filmgoing experience there, but I can guarantee that it’ll be a really entertaining way to spend a few hours, and you certainly won’t regret having seen it.

The Hidden Benefits

Corporations are having a rather rough time of it at the minute in the PR department. This is only to be expected given the current economic climate, and given the fact that almost exactly the same feelings of annoyance and distrust were expressed during the other two major economic downturns of the last 100 years. Big business has always been the all-pervasive face of ‘the man’, and when said man has let us down (either during a downturn or at any point in history when somebody is holding a guitar), they tend to be (often justifiably) the main victims of hatred. In essence, they are ‘the bad guys’.

However, no matter how cynical you are, there are a couple of glaring inconsistencies in this concept- things that can either (depending on your perspective) make the bad guys seem nice, make nice things seem secretly evil, or just make you go “WTF?”. Here we can find the proverbial shades of grey.

Let us consider, for instance, tourism. Nobody who lives anywhere even remotely pretty or interesting likes tourists, and some of the local nicknames for them, especially in coastal areas for some reason, are simultaneously interesting, hilarious and bizarre. They are an annoying bunch of people, seeming always to be asking dumb questions and trailing around places like flocks of lost sheep, and with roughly the same mental agility- although since the rest of us all act exactly the same when we are on holiday, then it’s probably better to tolerate them a little. Then there is the damage they can do to a local area, ranging from footpath erosion and littering to the case o the planet Bethselamin, “which is now so worried about the cumulative erosion of 10 billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave- so every time you go to the lavatory there it is vitally important to get a receipt” (Douglas Adams again). The tourism industry is often accused of stifling local economies in places like Yorkshire or the Lake District, where entire towns can consist of nothing but second homes (sending the local housing market haywire), tea shops and B&B’s, with seemingly no way out of a spiral of dependence upon it.

However, what if I was to tell you that tourism is possibly the single most powerful force acting towards the preservation of biodiversity and the combating of climate change? You might think me mad, but consider this- why is there still Amazonian rainforest left? Why are there vast tracks of national path all over southern Africa? We might (and in fact should) be able to think of dozens of very good reasons for preserving these habitats, not least the benefits to making sure that all of our great planet’s inhabitants are allowed to survive without being crushed under the proverbial bulldozer that is civilisation, and the value to the environment of the carbon sink of the rainforests. But, unfortunately, when viewed from a purely clinical standpoint these arguments do not stand up. Consider the rainforest- depending on your perspective this is either a natural resource that is useful for all sorts of namby-pamby reasons like ensuring the planet doesn’t suffocate, or a source of a potentially huge amount of money. Timber is valuable stuff, especially given the types (such as mahogany) and sizes of trees one gets in the Amazon delta. Factor in that gain with the fact that many of the countries who own such rainforest are desperately poor and badly need the cash, and suddenly the plight of the Lesser Purple-Crested Cockroach seems less important.

And here tourists come to the rescue, for they are the sole financial justification for the preservation  of the rainforests. The idea of keeping all this natural biodiversity for people to have is all well and good, but this idea backed up by the prospect of people paying large sums of money to come and see it becomes doubly attractive, interesting governments in potential long-term financial gain rather than the quick buck that is to be gained from just using up their various natural resources from a purely industrial point of view.

Tourism is not the only industry that props up an entire section of life that we all know and love. Let me throw some names at you: Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Twitter. What do all of those (and many other besides) have in common? Firstly, that all are based on the internet, and secondly that the services offered by all three are entirely free. Contrast that against similarity three, that all are multi-billion dollar companies. How does this work? Answer, similarity 4: all gain their income from the advertising industry.

Advertising and marketing is another sect of modern business that we all hate, as adverts are always annoying by their presence, and can be downright offensively horrible in some cases. Aggressive marketing is basically the reason we can’t have nice things generally, and there is something particularly soulless about an industry whose sole purpose is to sell you things based on what they say, rather than what’s good about whatever they’re selling. They are perhaps the personification of the evils of big business, and yet without it, huge tracts of the internet, the home of the rebellion against modern consumer culture, would simply not be able to exist. Without advertising, the information Facebook has on its hundreds of millions of users would be financially useless, let alone the users themselves, and thus it would not be able to exist as a company or, probably, an entity at all, let alone one that has just completed one of the highest-value stock market flotations in commercial history. Google would exist perhaps merely as a neat idea, something a geek might have thought of in college and never been able to turn into a huge business that deals with a gigantic stake in web traffic as well as running its own social network, email service and even the web browser I am typing this on.

This doesn’t make advertisers and tourism companies suddenly all angels in the light of the world, and they are probably just as deserving of all the cynicism they get (equally deserving, probably, are Facebook and Google, but this would ruin my argument). But it’s worth thinking that, no matter how pushy or annoying they start to get, it may be a small price to pay for the benefits their very existence lends to us.