Iron Man 3 (dir. Shane Black, 2013)

I watched this in a cavernous Bournemouth cinema, in the company of my wife and two fidgety kids, whilst suffering from dolorous peridontitis (Nurofen was controlling the pain pretty well at the beginning of the movie, though it was wearing off by the end). Nonetheless I enjoyed it, as my later Twitter summary suggests. Oh, by the way: SPOILERS.

Adam Roberts ‏@arrroberts 5 May
So, "Iron Man Three". Good: some witty dialogue; sprightly pacing; Ben Kingsley. Bad: "1 iron suit is good? 15 must be 15 TIMES BETTER!"

Adam Roberts ‏@arrroberts 5 May
Also [spoiler] Gwyneth Paltrow should have walked into the final scene with clothes and hair all burnt off. Yet, no bald nude Paltrow appeared.

Adam Roberts ‏@arrroberts 5 May
Why was there no orange neon bald nude Paltrow? No reason explains it.

It was fun, too. It was too long (the climactic showdown in particular was over-extended) and too much of the plotting relied on the Narratavized Selective Malfunction of Tony's Magic Villain-Beating Story-Ending Suits. But still. Afterwards, as the glow from the fun fighty-fight and witty dialogue dampened down, I was struck by the thought how silly it all was, magic red-glowing bioengineered superwarriors who could grow back arms, or explode, or die, depending on what the story required at particular moments, all of whom seemed to have had no qualms about transferring their allegiance from the US Military to Insane Ex-Neighbours Evil Supervillain Aldrich 'His Surname Has Kill Literally Inside It' Killian (the subtlest villain name since Nogbad the Bad). But, I told myself: no matter. It's a superhero film, not Heimat. And Tony Stark is to be commended not only on making a metal suit including a fuel reservoir that evidently contains hundreds of thousands of gallons of jet-fuel magically compressed and reduced in weight; but also on having generated some manner of anti-momentum field, the use of which handily prevents the extreme accelerations, decelerations and general bashings-about his suit inflicts upon him from turning his tender body into strawberry jam. Hurrah!

Thinking about it since, though, I'm struck by one thing in particular. The script makes quite a lot out of Stark suffering post-traumatic-stress following the events in the Avengers movie, shorthanded as 'New York'. In this movie an egregiously Bin Ladenesque Mandarin is coordinating a series of attacks on the US. For example, a US military compound containing wives and children is destroyed whilst the troops are 'on manoeuvres'. It's not hard to imagine the sort of outrage such an atrocity would generate in the US is it were ever enacted. There's no Twin Towers analogue in Iron Man 3, but then again that's more or less what 'New York' in Avengers stood for. In that movie 9/11 was replayed as a hyperbolically exaggerated climactic battle, Terror hurtling through the skies out of an incomprehensible alien dimension, huge flying metal dragonworms crashing into NY infrastructure and smashing it up at God knows what cost in dollars or human life (the movie itself goes for the schwarma pay-off, rather than tabulating the damage). The big difference is that Avengers had a Hulk, to punch the in-flying 747 on the nose with his big green fist and so save the day. The climactic attack in Iron Man 3 is a plan to kill the president, which clearly would be a shocking and horrifying thing were it ever &c.; although I wasn't sure it would be more horrifying than murdering scores of women and children whilst their soldier-husbands are out on manoeuvres.

But what really struck me was the way the film played its Osama. viz. for laughs. It's cleverly handled. Ben Kingsley is effectively chilling and sinister as the evil Mandarin, but he's absolutely splendid as klutzish actor Trevor Slattery ('his Lear was the toast of Croydon,' says Killian. 'Wherever that is.' It's WHERE I WAS BORN, PEARCE! THAT'S WHERE!) This shift from broadly-tragic to broadly-comic mode is very deftly handled, although it strains credulity to believe that Slattery (and how delighted must this guy be?) really thought it was 'all green screen trickery' and practical joking (doesn't he read the news? What about when he shot that kidnapped guy in the head? etc). But plausibility isn't so interesting, here, as tone. This is the first big-impact text I can think of that suggests that, just maybe, po-faced solemnity and Complete Tragic Seriousness may not be the only way to relate to 9/11. That suggests that, you know, maybe it's possible to talk about 9/11 with a touch of irony; even of comedy. Of course, Mandarin/Slattery isn't actually behind the various terrorist horrors of the film's first half; it's actually Mike-from-Neighbours. But then it's always been part of American understanding of 9/11 that the perpetrators were not 'behind it'. They were pawns in the hands of Evil, also known as 'Al Quaeda'. The different here is that the man 'behind it' is evil as corporate anonymity. His big monologue is all about how wonderful anonymity is. Indeed, I'm not sure I took away from this film a clear sense of what Guy Pearce hoped to gain from all his many and heinous crimes. But I did take away this sense: that there is something both healthier and stronger in laughing at terrorists than treating them with earnestness, however much the latter attitude is laced with contempt.