A Reply to “Iron Man 3: 10 Reasons to Hate This Terrible Movie”
What’s up, ProFans? Matthew here and I’m not here with a game review. (check back with me in a week or so with a review of Metro: Last Light once I’ve burned through the night with it) No, I’m here to bring you a reply to an article that created quite the rumbling here at Project Fandom.
Nathan Birch from Uproxx wrote a passionate article about how Iron Man 3 sucked as a movie. It was a “hot mess” of a movie to be specific. It lists reasons like Pepper shifting between a damsel in distress to heroine, to the chalk filled references to the Avengers and the events in New York. You can read the article here; but let me tell you why it shouldn’t be taken at all seriously. Now if you haven’t seen Iron Man 3 yet, then stop reading and go see it and then come back and read this.
When I read this article (nicely written but contradicting to say the least) Nathan shoots himself in the foot right away. He hasn’t read more than half a dozen Iron Man comic books, and it wasn’t a nitpicky nerd rant. He’s not that kind of guy. So with that in mind I’d already lost interest in reading it. But like a bad train wreck, I pressed on and came to the following conclusion.
Iron Man 3 kicked ass, took names, and made everyone remember who RDJ is. What Nathan did as most attention trolls do on the internet was bash on something everyone was cheering for so he could get traffic to his article. More readers mean more site traffic and that means a pat on the head and a treat for the author of said article. Although I can’t imagine it was well received by his peers who also loved Iron Man 3.
So he bashed it to bash it. Normally I let that slide because it’s not worth the energy. As a huge nerd for comics and the films that have been coming out lately, it’s been mostly win-win. Certain details and story arcs get rewritten to suit the tastes of the average movie goer. I’ve made peace with the fact that getting a shot-for-shot of every Marvel and DC comic book hero is a rare thing. The only one that’s ever gotten close to page-for-page is Watchmen.
But I digress. My point that I’m trying to make here is that Mr. Birch here went to see Iron Man or at the very least had it told to him by someone who had no idea who Iron Man is. As stated I would let this slide, but only if he had stated actual reasons to get up in arms about it. Most of his reasons if not all of them are clearly contradicted by the film. Pepper Potts may have become sort of a Heroine by the film’s end, but in the beginning-Spoiler Alert!-Tony Stark is saved from rubble that would have killed him by Pepper wearing Tony’s latest armor. That was a weak point to attack because if he was paying attention, Tony was actually commanding the armor to save her from serious injury. She does go on to save Tony from the main bad guy at the end, but I saw that more as a “Behind every strong man stands a stronger woman.” Or at the very least a woman who’s got the Extremis Virus flowing through her.
Another such reason that dies before it makes it out the gate is RDJ’s portrayal of anxiety attacks and PTSD. If you’re as good as my colleague John Elrod II, who scours the internet for any piece of evidence that backs up one claim or the other, you’ll find an article that says those were pretty accurate portrayals of both conditions.[Editor’s note: here is that article.] The list goes on for eight more reasons, each one weaker than the rest.
To me it held no water to bitch about such insignificant details. What that movie did for me was exactly this: made me feel like a fledgling geek seeing one of my favorite comic book heroes come to life. I enjoyed the hell out of it. Yes, they make a great deal of reference to The Avengers, why wouldn’t they? Iron Man 3 is the first movie for Marvel Studios’ Phase 2. So, naturally, because all of the movies after The Avengers are now directly connected and not subtly like we’ve seen in all the post-credits scenes. There is going to be quite a few of those in the movies to come.
I’m not going to say Iron Man 3 deserves all the awards out there. I’m not going to give you ten reasons to loveIron Man 3 as a movie. I’m also not going to give you ten reasons to put Nathan’s article out to grass. Instead, I’d like to say this; it’s one thing to tear down something everyone else loves as so long as you’re stating specific facts that have weight. I could go on and on about how shitty his article was, how he doesn’t know jack, and he’s just a troll. Believe me; I could easily do what he did. But it wouldn’t solve anything. He went in there wanting to hate the movie and found the only things that he himself could hate about it. Which included the kid who I thought was a scene stealer. And his attack on how Stark dealt with his attacks? We all deal with stress and anxiety in our own ways. I am like Tony Stark in the sense I’ll make some comedic remark and punch on.
After all that’s said and done, I wasn’t sold on anything that he had to offer. I’ll go as far as to say it just seemed like utter bullshit. Do yourself a favor: see the movie; decide for yourself. The dissenters are few and far between, and as you can see the ones that seem worth listening to online, don’t know a damned thing about movies these days.
