What is "Iron Man 3" about? How to evaluate?

As a purely commercial film, this film can be rated at least eight points. There is no peeling in the whole film. The plot is compact, unfolding at every turn, the action scenes are exciting, and the characters are deeply explored. It is called It is no exaggeration to say that this movie is the best of the Iron Man trilogy.

However, if you ask me to praise it as a good Iron Man movie, I can't. During the whole process of watching the movie, although the scenes were so exciting and the plot was so twists and turns, I felt inexplicably getting more and more depressed the more I watched, felt something was wrong, and felt like something was blocked in my chest and I couldn't breathe - this kind of discomfort made Tony explode. It hit its peak when all the armor was taken off and the reactor was thrown away: I felt like, it wasn't an Iron Man movie anymore.

There are many reasons why fans of the original work are angry about it: for example, Tony's mortal enemy the Mandarin was actually portrayed as a clown, such as the Chinese version of the emergency room story that was abruptly inserted, such as the use of desperate situations, etc. wait. But if you think about it carefully, these are not the deep-seated reasons that make fans of the original feel unhappy. In the final analysis, these are minor issues.

What really makes me feel "off" is that this film deviates from the theme of Iron Man in terms of characterization and theme.

After watching the movie, I wrote in a short review that the psychological context of Tony's "anxiety disorder" that Steel 3 wanted to show was his tangled relationship with the armor: New York made him truly realize it for the first time. He is only a mortal, so he is locked in the laboratory with great anxiety and keeps building armor. He relies on the armor to gain a sense of security. The armor has become his prison. In the end, he blew up all the armor, symbolizing that he was finally freed from this mentality. However, the movie failed to sort out this clue clearly, which made me feel unsatisfied. But after discussing it with my friends, I began to find that regardless of the technical errors of this clue, even the arrangement of the psychological secret line itself was not right. What kind of person is Tony Stark?

In "Fear Itself", seeing the Lord Skyhammer under Orochi wreaking havoc on the earth, Tony, desperate and angry, found Odin and asked him to give humans a chance to fight back. He said to Odin: "Do you know what I did before the war? I made weapons. Very awesome weapons."

This is Tony Stark, he is a creator, an innovator Explorer, explorer of technological boundaries. He is by no means a repairman. He also doesn't know how to engage in fertilizer bombs, secret infiltration, or gun battles. These are very cheap for Tony Stark. Facing an opponent more powerful than him, Tony's attitude has always been "I'm not afraid of being defeated by your technology, because I can always create something more powerful than you to defeat you." Therefore, when the operating room scene appeared in the trailer, people were eagerly anticipating that Tony would bet on his life, make desperate changes for himself, and then surpass his opponents and defeat them - because this is what Tony Stark would do. ! But it turns out that this is still a trailer fraud, similar to the Mandarin fraud. What he relies on to defeat his opponents is not technical superiority, but crowd tactics and cheating.

In my mind, what Tony Stark has always done is to move forward without hesitation, using technology to the extreme, even when facing enemies like Phoenix, Thanos, and the Celestials, Even though he kept making mistakes, he never stopped exploring technology. Even in Iron Man 2, which was criticized very badly, Tony's exploration never stopped, and his identity as an innovator and creator also led the entire story. A friend said that Tony in Iron Man 3 was "at a loss in the face of technological competition."

What is Iron Man?

On closer inspection, the above-mentioned psychological clue of "shaking in front of gods and aliens" has a strange deviation from the main point. One of the main themes of Iron Man is indeed Tony Stark's self-doubt, but what he doubts is always his own moral value and whether his actions are correct. He has always been completely confident in his technical abilities. He has never doubted that he could not create something more powerful, and he has never been afraid that he cannot surpass humans or even gods. What Tony Stark really fears is that he is bound by the armor, that the armor is worth more than himself, that he cannot be a good person, and that his technology is abused by others.

Similarly, another theme of Iron Man is indeed the tangled and complicated relationship between Tony Stark and the armor, but the tangle and complexity are not just about his dependence on the armor. He and the armor are actually two sides of the same coin: Iron Man's armor symbolizes the transcendence of his fragile human self, the transcendence of his merchant of death, his self as a superhero, and the transcendence of Tony Stark himself. But on the other hand, Iron Man's identity and the armor itself isolate him from others. The armor and Iron Man are what he uses to protect himself, but they also make him a man in the shell, an isolated person imprisoned by the armor. Tony Stark and Iron Man have always been fighting each other, reconciling with each other, integrating with each other, and spiraling towards the next stage.

But this movie completely separates Tony Stark from the armor-the armor is regarded as a simple external tool that can relieve the psychological state. Making armor is a kind of The morbid state of fear is a "life stage that can be crossed over and started over", or the material for fireworks. At the end of the film, when Tony blows up the armor and throws away the reactor, his attitude is like "I threw away the pacifier and now I'm an adult"; he's simply abandoning his Iron Man identity instead of coming to terms with it. Although he quickly added the declaration "I am Iron Man" at the end of the film, to fans of the original work, this is just to ask Tony Stark to escape from his other half, which is both unreasonable and annoying. At the same time, by "getting rid of the anxiety of desperately building armor," the film also completely deprived Tony of his identity as a creator and innovator, and replaced him with an inexplicable "repairman" position.

Please, as a genius, like a flood, sweeping everything and destroying everything, is this the bounden duty of Tony Stark who was born into the world as a futurist and repairman? That's Jarvis' job.

I understand very well that including the trailer fraud, the screenwriters and directors want to break through the stereotypes and dig deeper into the characters. However, in the eyes of fans of the original work, this is a direction that makes us feel extremely painful. Mistake - If you want to break through the stereotypes, you subvert the foundation of the world view of the original work and make it a joke; if you want to dig deeper into the characters, you discover RDJ instead of Tony Stark. This movie is as exciting as it is exciting, but in the end it has become RDJ and Black's movie, no longer an Iron Man movie.

I think there will be huge differences in the evaluation of this film between ordinary viewers and fans of the original work. As for me, I now somewhat understand the mentality of Batman fans towards Nolan's trilogy.