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Re: LB presents: The Marvel Movie News Thread
Lot of information but JJ Abrams helped out some with this which is interesting.
As the exciting new trailer for Iron Man 3 debuts this morning (check it out below if you haven’t!), I can also reveal some big new details about the film gleaned from a press event IGN attended a few weeks back. We were shown about 20 minutes of the film, which begins about 25-30 minutes into the running time. Suffice to say, notable spoilers for this portion of the film follow – though we were not shown anything beyond that.
The trailers have shown a huge attack on Tony Stark’s Malibu home that results in its utter destruction. We were shown this sequence in its entirety, along with the scenes immediately before and after it. As it turns out, by this point in the film, The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) has taken credit for an assault that has seriously injured Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau). As a result, Tony (Robert Downey Jr.) goes off the rails in a very Tony way, yelling into some news cameras that The Mandarin should come directly for him, and includes his home address in his rant.
The footage we saw began shortly after this, as Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) knocks on Tony’s front door, finding Tony and Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) there. We learn Tony knew Maya years ago, and they have a history. Asks Tony, “Please don’t tell me there’s a 12 year old kid sitting in the car?” Maya deadpans back, “He’s 13.” She’s kidding, but after she and Pepper share some fairly good-natured banter about Tony, they discuss the concern over Tony putting himself in such jeopardy and refusing to go somewhere safer. In the midst of this, we see the ridiculously large stuffed bunny glimpsed in the first Iron Man 3 trailer. It obviously was at the center of some earlier discussion, with Tony proclaiming, “It’s a big bunny! Relax about it!”
As Pepper and Tony argue, Maya glances at a TV and sees news coverage of helicopters ominously approaching Tony’s home - that they are currently standing inside. She yells out to Tony, who looks outside and sees the helicopters coming, just before they open fire. In slow motion, the first missiles hit the home, which is when Tony reaches out his hand, using what looks to be the movie’s version of the Extremis technology from the comics, as he actually summons the Iron Man armor from across the room, sending the various parts flying towards him. Except then Tony moves his hand in a sweep, away from himself, sending the armor towards… Pepper!
And yes, this causes the armor to completely cover Pepper Potts, putting her in inside and in control of Iron Man. Pepper herself looks shocked by all of this, but when a portion of the roof begins to cave in and nearly flattens Tony, Pepper leaps forward, and shields him, with the debris breaking across the armor's back. “I got you,” she says to Tony, who replies, “I got you first.”
Pepper wants to help Tony get out of the rapidly collapsing home, but he insists she get Maya to safety first. Pepper clearly has had no training in the armor and is an amusing mess. Turning on the gauntlet repulsors she accidentally flings herself out of a window at one point. But she manages to get Maya outside and away from the home and Jarvis tells Tony they are safe. Hearing this, Tony puts his hand out again and the armor is pulled off Pepper, back inside the house and onto Tony. Tony tells Jarvis to blow up all of his previous suits of armor, not wanting there to be any chance Mandarin gets them. Jarvis asks if he’s sure and Tony says to do it and one by one each armor blows up, even as more missiles and gunfire batter the house.
At this point, the house completely collapses, falling into the ocean below and Iron Man is dragged underwater, debris trapped around his neck yanking him downward. His armor battered and broken, he’s barely able to get himself free and Tony is barely conscious as he tells Jarvis to get him out of there.
We then cut to somewhere far away. It’s snowing, as Iron Man makes a hard landing into the snow. A disoriented Tony has no idea where he is, as Jarvis tells him they are in Tennessee. The armor has had it and completely shuts down, Jarvis’ voice dying with it, saying, “I think I need to sleep, sir,” as Tony says, “Don’t leave me, buddy.” Tony lays on his back, trapped by the armor's dead weight when he tries to sit up, until he is able to collapse the armor off his body.
In the middle of nowhere, he begins dragging his armor through the snow…
He comes across a home with an adjacent work garage and breaks in, finding a pretty decent group of tools. He places the Iron Man armor down on a couch, where it sits, looking like a passed out man in a suit of armor.
As Tony begins to make himself at home, a young boy enters the room, shocked when he sees the Iron Man armor and realizes who Tony is. What follows is a very funny scene as Tony and the boy bond, with Tony’s humor undercutting any of the, “Aww, Tony makes friends with a kid!” sentimentality. The boy exclaims how amazing it is that Tony created the Iron Man and War Machine armor and Tony corrects him – the latter armor is now called Iron Patriot. The kid says he thinks that's a cooler name and Tony quickly retorts, “No it’s not.” When Tony asks where the boy’s parents are, he says his mom is working a night shift, and that his dad left years ago and never came back. Replies Tony, “Dads leave. No need to be a pussy about it.”
Tony tells the boy he needs some things... including a sandwich. When they conversation turns towards bullies who bother the boy at school, Tony goes to the Iron Man armor and removes a small device. He gives it to the boy and says the next time he is bothered at school, to use the device – it will offer a non-lethal reaction that will stop him from ever being bothered again. Tony then pauses and says, “You know what keeps going through my head? Where’s my sandwich?”
With this long portion of the film finished, we were also shown one other small scene, from another section of the film, teasing the Mandarin and his use of media. In the scene, Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) is on the phone, but cuts off the person he’s talking to, saying Mandarin will be there soon and, “He gets… Well, you know…”
We see a car pull up and Mandarin gets out, wearing a green coat with the hood up, flanked by guards. We hear the instructions given to those in the vicinity: “No talking… No eye contact, unless you want to get shot in the face.”
Two beautiful woman flank Mandarin as he sits down in a chair, a TV camera aimed at him. The woman pulls his hood down for him and he motions for the cameraman to begin.
Overall, the footage looked terrific. Downey, as always, wonderfully embodies Tony, and the addition of Shane Black is obvious via an even more sardonic, quick sense of humor and the clever, well constructed action. The big attack on the house is incredibly exciting, especially seeing Pepper wear the armor, which is a thrilling moment. And, notably, the interaction between Tony and the boy stood out as well. It could easily turn cliché and corny and instead is funny and endearing because Tony refuses to act cutesy with the boy and instead, clearly with affection, remains his usual, unfiltered self.
After seeing the footage, we then had the chance to sit down with Robert Downey Jr. himself and producer Kevin Feige and co-writer/director Shane Black. Downey is of course re-teaming with Black on Iron Man 3, having previously worked with him on Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.
When it came to taking on Iron Man 3, Black admitted, “It was something daunting, but at the same time there was something very challenging about doing a third one. I’m always into the idea of sequels because of the question, 'What stories are there left to tell?' and how do you take something and make it seem like it was meant to be there all along… I mean, if the first one bombed, there wouldn’t be [sequels]. The notion of summing up the genre, trying to incorporate as much Iron Man into one movie, stuff it as full as we possibly could, was very appealing. It also gave me an opportunity to work with Marvel in a situation with a greenlit movie that was going -- because I’m not getting any younger, and I wanted to make a movie, not develop a movie. [Downey] did me a solid there, and I’m happy to have experienced this.”
Feige stressed that Iron Man 3 had a unique tone and that it was all thanks to Black. “This is Marvel Studios’ first part three. We’ve had other Marvel characters that have had part threes that I was around for and may or may not be as good as the part twos or other ones. Frankly, I didn’t want to fall into those traps. When we were going through those other ones -- and I was a part of them -- you don’t necessarily see that you’re falling into those traps, but I want to learn from everything that’s come before us. One of those is, if you look at the most recent, best part three, it would be Toy Story 3. That’s tonally different from the other two. It goes to places you don’t necessarily expect. We were well underway on our part three by the time we saw that movie, but it is to be admired, because it goes to places you wouldn’t necessarily expect. Frankly, you could have only gotten to a place like that in part three. That’s the advantage of a franchise that has more than two parts. You know the characters so well that you feel for them. We’re betting that you’re willing to go on a different and much more off-the-beaten-path journey with him than you have been before.”
There was some criticism that Iron Man 2 had to function too much as set up for The Avengers and Downey noted, “If it was frustrating at all then, it seems kind of liberating now because of the way The Avengers turned out and all that. My big question was, ‘Okay, so we didn’t jump the shark, even though the sky opened up a wormhole in Manhattan?’ They go, ‘Apparently not!’ The rest of the time, everybody kept telling me, “There is nothing you need to set up. This is freedom.” So sometimes you have these restrictions, and you kind of rail against them, but I like that stuff sometimes. I think that limitations, restrictions and challenges actually create a whole new set of neuro-pathways that are, I think, creatively stimulating. Then this time, they’re just kind of like, ‘Nope, why don’t you just get back to old nuts-and-bolts Tony stuff?’ And I was like, ‘Great! But, like... which nuts?’”
When it came to following up The Avengers, Feige said, “In a way, The Avengers liberated us in the development process, because we knew we couldn’t go bigger than Avengers. We didn’t want to go bigger than Avengers. What are you going to do? Crack the Earth in two, and Iron Man’s gonna have to put it together? No, that’s not what it’s about. We were much more inspired by the first half of the first Iron Man film. We said, ‘Let’s put him, metaphorically, back in a cave with a box of scraps and see how he uses his brain to get out of it.’ And that’s very much in Shane’s wheelhouse, taking cinematic tropes and conceits, and spinning them in an unexpected way. He’s done that in this film, not just in Tony’s story but even in the armor - you saw the way he could just toss the armor on another person. And it’s in the books, how individual pieces can come out to him. But with that sort of new conceit of the armor, Shane constructed three unbelievably cool action sequences out of it. That gave us the opportunity to check that box of big, unique action, while at the same time it still being a Tony Stark character story.”
The Mandarin was considered as the villain in the previous two Iron Man films, but Feige remarked, “It wasn’t until Shane that there was the idea that sort of cracked, that allowed him to be an entity that is recognizable right off the bat and is frightening and fearful in a very ripped-from-the-headlines Osama bin Laden kind of way. At the same time, he spun it in a new way -- and the example that Shane always uses -- that the cinephiles among you will know, is Marlon Brando’s character in Apocalypse Now. Colonel Kurtz was a guy who’s gone off the reservation, who’s incorporating all these different symbols and iconography into his world view.”
Explained Black, “Yeah, [Mandarin] has an intelligence background. His nationality is not even clear because he’s shrouded in secrecy, but at some point this field officer went nuts and became a student of warfare and ancient Chinese symbology and drew from South American insurgency tactics and has created around himself this little world of warfare. The only unifying principal of which seems to be a hatred of the United States. So he represents every terrorist, in a way. But specifically, he’s crafted himself in the manner of the Mandarin, of a warlord. I think that’s great, because you get to do the comic book, but you don’t have to deal with the specifics of Fu Manchu stereotyping. We’re not saying he’s Chinese, we’re saying that he in fact draws a cloak around him of Chinese symbols and dragons because it represents his obsession with Sun Tzu and various ancient arts of warfare that he has studied. So that’s what we like about it.”
When it came to Pepper, Downey said he agreed with Favreau making the first film, who felt that relationship was the heart of the story. Said Downey, “I think, ‘Okay, what do we want Gwyneth to be able to do this time? And how do we have it to where she’s not just going, ‘Tony!’ and in Act III I’m going, ‘Where’s Pepper!?'"
"I think what’s funny is there’s never been a superhero in one of these genre films where the guy is in a committed relationship," Downey continued. "It’s like, 'Oh, no. Don’t do that!' So we thought the strength in that is I think it sends a better message than, 'Don’t you want to be like this guy who dates Kim Basinger one year and Nicole Kidman the next?' Yes you do, but there’s no stability there. I think the whole thing is that it’s such a different time generationally. You definitely don’t want to smoke in movies anymore, no matter how cool it looks. But also, the way you interact with characters and the level of violence you have in a PG-13 movie, now you wonder like, 'My God, if we do that, is someone really gonna do that and we’re gonna have to reshoot it?' To me, it’s a genre that I don’t get bored of because it immediately takes the stink off of, 'We’re going to do an important movie, a serious movie.' But I think what’s important is that there has to be conflict in the relationship, and there has to be resolution that isn’t the same."
Discussing Tony and Pepper, Black said, “They’re on parallel tracks in the movie. You saw him, he’s off by himself and he’s not with her, but we do track her. They’re both forging ahead and doing things, so we get to see her be a little bit more proactive in this. She’ll play an important part by the end of the movie and the resolution of the story. So it’s just giving her something to do besides reacting to him, and I think that’s easy.”
Downey talked about collaborating with Black and Iron Man 3 co-writer Drew Pearce, saying, “By the time all was said and done, a million things had changed, but the essential storyline and arc and what it was about and him kind of on the road and this kid and Pepper’s got her own thing. There were a couple times in Iron Man 3 where our lifeline was we’d call Jon Favreau. 'What do we do?' He’d be like, 'Stick with this. Stick with the love story,' or whatever. Then he’d say, 'Wait, didn’t we used to do this same thing with Shane?' Because we reached out to Shane a bunch, particularly in the first Iron Man, the scene where Tony comes back from captivity and readdresses his public and the press. Shane said it should all be about what his dad would think, and that’s why blah, blah, blah. So there was that. Then I think we reached out to J.J. Abrams at one point when we were really confused in Act III, and he helped us, too. It’s just interesting. Usually you think, in the legacy of filmmakers that come and go, there’s something so evocative about how strange it is that this particular strain of the Marvel universe was so successful, so what are the reasons for that and how do we keep that vital and just have fun?”
Asked to sum up what would make Iron Man 3 the standout movie of the summer, Feige said, “I think it’s about Shane Black, whether you know who Shane Black is or not. They’ll know after this movie. A character as big as Iron Man is -- particularly coming off Avengers a year later -- going on this kind of journey and this kind of fresh take I think is going to be something to behold.”
Said Black, “The love of adventure is what hopefully will do it. We’ve tried not be cynical in this. One of the things Marvel does well is that they didn’t come in with a template based on The Avengers saying, 'Look, with the success we’ve had, please do this again.' They’ve allowed it to have its own breathing space and its own definitive personality. I used to go to the movies and wait two or three hours to see Raiders or something. And you always got into the theater and thought, 'That was worth the wait, and we had a great time.' And I haven’t felt that way for a long time. I’m not saying we’re Raiders of the Lost Ark, but we made every attempt to justify your wait in line. You’ve come to see a summer movie, you’re excited because you want the adventure and the love it. Well, we’re going to try and give you an adventure that’s worth standing in line for. Whether we succeed or not, I don’t know. But every attempt’s been made.”
Lot of information but JJ Abrams helped out some with this which is interesting.
