I did NOT like the whole "Dark Knight/Bane is just a henchman" crap they pulled at the end either. That was not cool in the least. Also didn't like how they kinda "forgot" to tie up some of the story arcs, like the whole anxiety attack thing, they never really went into what caused it. I know it has to do with the Avengers, but they don't explain why. Movies these days seem to be doing that a lot and it's really getting tiresome, but overall, I liked it.

Tony had a near-death experience among other things at the end of the Avengers, so it seems to be a form of PTSD. It was one of my favorite aspects of the film, really. Made him more human, not many non-superhero people could get through what he did unscathed.

oh I know, I loved that they worked something in like that and I kinda drew my own conclusion similar to what you just said, but it just bugs me because I know the majority of the audience wouldn't pick up on something like that, especially younger people which is what the target audience has been focused. Even my friend's son asked his dad what was going on and we didn't really have a straight answer to give him because they didn't actually explain it. It might just be a nitpick of mine, but they could have gone a few minutes more in depth with it, especially with the kid that just kept nagging him about it :P

I get your point now *nods* I suppose kids with experience with PTSD in the family would have have an edge over the kids without it. But how would you go about getting the why, what, and how in a two-hour motion picture like Iron Man 3? Though then again, I'd wager there's additional exposition scenes that wound up on the cutting room floor - since it would distract the major point of the movie... Well, maybe when the DVD release comes out. Or Avengers 2 or Iron Man 4 (I know there's nothing on a fourth one just yet, but hey, it's Disney. I just wouldn't be surprised.)

yeah, I'm not really dragging it down just for that, I'm really more upset at what they did with Mandarin, that was so not cool, finally get a true "terrorist" type villain and they turn him into just another henchman... again... getting tired of that and it's only happened twice, grr

Yeah. I was kinda expecting it would be something... Unexpected for the Mandarin, just given US-Chinese relations.

I kept sitting there thinking "ok, he's playing some kind of ruse" and was hoping that by the end he would have been all like "gotcha, I really am the Mandarin" or something like that

I think Marvel itself might be doing something different with the Mandarin as a whole. I recently saw a few comics where the Mandarin was, instead of a character, an implied network of chessmasters. This could carry into the movies as 'the ten rings' have now been used by two separate badguys [Stane, Killian]. It's not the Mandarin we expect, but it's also a Mandarin that can be reused without being entirely exhausted.

yeah, I'm thinking it might be something like that too, at least they worked in the ten rings, very prominent on the opening to the videos when they hijacked the system :D

Who knows, perhaps we'll get someone hammyier than Ben Kingsley to play the face of The Mandarin in a later movie--It could go any way due to the past two composite characters.

to be honest, before the "reveal", I thought he was doing really well, I didn't recognize him until the middle/end :P

Perhaps we'll see him again. Personally, I'd BUY Mandarin speeches on mp3. That shit was hypnotic, I could listen to it for hours.

Considering the storyline is a riff on al-Qaeda/the Taliban, Islamic terrorism and terrorism post-9/11, American military adventurism in the Middle-East, and the consequences thereof....

Maybe I spend too much time with soldiers/sailors/Marines/Airmen, but the whole scars of Afghanistan thing, i.e. PTSD, was pretty obvious to me. The bad guys are basically genetically rehabilitated disabled combat vets with their scars magically fixed. The good guy carries the other half of the scarring and it cannot be magically fixed.

And honestly, this is a movie that doesn't treat the audience like they're completely stupid. Something we don't see very much of. It shouldn't have to explain PTSD. Just as it doesn't explain how the Mandarin and the Ten Rings came to dominate Islamo-facsist terror networks in Central Asia or what role they might be having in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Frankly, if a kid watching it doesn't understand what PTSD is or what's happening to the hero, they should be able to ask their parents. Parents should be able to give a more comprehensive answer than the movie could. (A 30 minute Q&A with mom and dad or slowing the movie down for 20 minutes to explain something in small people talk that most adults don't fully understand, you pick.) Every adult should know what PTSD is, even if they're not familiar with the symptoms. And any adult living in the United States who doesn't know what PTSD is should be bundled up and air-dropped into Afghanistan to learn about it first-hand.

Can't argue with that logic. Overall, for me personally, I'd be giving it an overall 4 out of 5 where it's definitely worthwhile, but at the same time, you kind of have to look back at almost all of the villains in the Iron Man stories. A lot of them just don't hold up as well as the other characters we've seen in the other Marvel stories. Even the Mandarin himself was a bit of an odd character in the original Iron Man comics, so to do what they did, was really a double-edged sword that was funny, but at the same time, I knew quite a bit of people would not be happy about it, so I can't really blame them.

It's definitely a recommended movie, but this is where the knowledge of the comics should be turned off instead of kept on.

The change to the Mandarin may have been to appease the Chinese censors...

Or the Chinese financiers and film-makers.

honestly, I don't see that as a perfect ending.

that is beauty of free will we see things in our own way

I liked it.

My buddy Luni and I had a discussion about this. Matter of fact you can listen to it here! http://www.furaffinity.net/view/10521976/

"I know things aren't the same since that muscle guy with the hammer fell from the sky"

<3 ahhh.
NOVEMBER HERE I COME.
After thor 2, the new avengers.
Cannot wait.

Personally, i loved the movie, but the end sequence seemed..short. it was alright but they could have taken a few more minutes to make it less rushed with him and pepper, you know.

in all honestly when his house went down, the two "handy dandy" bots were trying to help each other, i almost cried ;w; It was like he realized he was loosing all that was close to him.

The newer suits made the iffy parts worth it to me.

I was pretty surprised about that who Mandarin being a fake thing too. Was actually hopping for a more epic final battle between Tony and Mandarin wearing some badass armor or a giant mechanized Fin Fang Foo. But instead we get a bunch of overheated regenerative nobody's and the head guy of AIM VS TOny and all his armors. Which was awesome don't get me wrong, but still it should have ended with Tony kicking the main bad guys ass, not his super powered girlfriend. So that was kind of a bust. But all in all I thought the movie was really good.

I don't Disney had much to do with the way they pulled it. My personal belief was if they kept him as the main villain, it would reduce the whole Extremis storyline to nothing more than a few minutes of the movie. I'm actually kind of glad (disappointed, but glad) they did, so that Extremis could be the focus. What annoyed me was how they changed it up though, since Extremis has been my all time favorite Iron Man storylines, so I was looking forward to seeing how the movie was going to adapt it. After seeing what I did. made me hope Rescue would show up, which of course didn't.

The final battle was meh, passable. Still wonder how the Director of Avengers could say he not sure how to live up to the ending IM3 did compare to what he did with Avengers though. But if he can surpass that, then I'm looking forward to Avengers 2 more than before. :)

As for the movie in general. I liked it. Felt more down to earth since he had to rely on a single suit instead of having all sorts of power houses. Here's hoping we see a new version of the Hulk Buster in the future.

there was so much I hate about this movie I have no idea where to start

My only real nitpick is with Pepper. She went from humble assistant to love interest to CEO to girlfriend to... damsel in distress. Yes she gets the suit in the attack on Stark's house for a couple seconds, and yes, she has the major action sequences at the end and yes, it seems she has more of the control of the company... But it just seems a little forced/cliched. A Disney Princess in need of rescue by her knight in shining armor...

I would have also liked to see more of the Vice President's bit - like just how involved was he? Did he somehow funnel government funds to the project? How did he get involved with AIM in the first place?

A Disney Princess in need of rescue by her knight in shining armor... only... as it turns out, the knight needed her to literally pull his bacon out of the fire.

It was predictable for me, really. A common plot device (someone who is out of the picture suddenly returns to rescue the hero from certain doom).

I'm not arguing that it wasn't predictable.

I'm just sayin' that the princess pulled the knight's bacon out of the fire instead of it being the other way around.

I'll give you that.

I enjoyed the twist.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vid.....er-Iron-Man-3#

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I like the twist.

I mean, at the end of the day, what was Osama but a washed up Saudi, pretending to be a big, tough guy? Without the United States, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban to make that papertiger into a figurehead, nobody would even know his name. Well, at least not better than, say, al-Zarqawi (and I had to look up his name, I had forgotten it).

I enjoyed the movie overall. I would have preferred that the Mandarin be the Chinesey embodiment of a Dungeons & Dragons beholder, but I wasn't burned by the twist.

Personally I didn't mind the bait-and-switch, it screwed with my expectations and there's always a chance he could become the true Mandarin later if a bunch of alien supertech rings happen to come his way, or even that Guy Pierce's character could.

End of the day, they're kind of done Tony Stark vs the Taliban already, and if we're going by the old-school comic version as the desirable end result, that does have some racist caricature baggage that might be hard for mainstream audiences to swallow.

Yeah, they kind of cut the Mandarin's balls off (characteristically speaking) midway through and couched it as some kind of ploy to keep the real villain hidden. The problem is that the real villain is really generic and lame. I've seen Ben Kingsley's movies he can act like crazy. He was a monster in Sexy Beast, so it was really disappointing they threw all that potential out the window.

Bane to me was a side villian. Anyway, I think that Disney is another corrupt corporation in which is a part of the N.W.O., Illuminati and the Bilderbergs.