Mick-Lucifer Wrote:
If you take the magic vs mysticism angle, that's a fine contrast.
I feel like at a time when Tony has just for the first time encountered the existence of aliens and gods and wormholes and is trying to fight off anxiety attacks as a result, suddenly throwing ancient mysticism and sorcerous jewelry at him in his solo movie is not the right way to go. The internal logic would immediately be "oh shit not this again, I better call Fury and Cap and Thor to help out AGAIN"...which is, y'know, not an Iron Man movie. That's an Avengers movie.
Especially since Mandarin's rings are, as I said, ridiculously overpowered for an Iron Man solo foe. There's no logical reason why Tony ever beats a guy who can warp reality with one finger while controlling minds with the other, shooting ice beams with his pinky and opening black holes with his thumb.
Mick-Lucifer Wrote:
If you take the 'this magic is actually tech' angle, it's just clicking things even more into place. If anything, that 'it's actually tech and I'm all about tech' sounds like a pretty stock third act for an Iron Man story.
Again, it's
alien tech. Tech the size of a ring that opens black holes and controls minds. In a universe where the same is true of all things Asgardian, That's a Thor matter, or an Avengers matter, it's just not in Tony Stark's wheelhouse, tech guy though he may be.
You can't use Comic Mandarin for the same reason you wouldn't use an Iron Man movie to introduce Dr. Strange or the Kree or Skrulls.
Spoilers: (Highlight to reveal)
The most comic-accurate a Mandarin anyone could realistically expect in these movies would be the one the trailers implied we'd get, the leader of the Ten Rings, a terrorist with a fondness for jewelry that doesn't actually do anything - or perhaps at best, when the third act rolls around, he puts on gloves that shoot ten lasers out of the knuckles or something like that, or injects himself with Extremis. And that perhaps would have been a fine movie...but the thing is...it's not 2001 anymore, it's 2013. Terrorism, played straight, is getting kinda old hat as a subject of villainy. A guy who fakes terrorism to cover up crimes is just plain a more clever and nuanced story. Killian is not unlike the villains of the first and third Die Hards in that way, and the Grubers were both pretty top-tier badguys in the annals of cinema.
I honestly think the idea of an evil contemporary of Stark's "inventing" a foreign terrorist boogeyman named "the Mandarin" because "Fortune Cookies are American, they just look Chinese" to cover up the truth behind his rich guy superscience shenanigans and to manipulate the war on terror from both sides so he can make war profiteering money coming and going works perfectly for the setting and themes established by the previous solo-Tony movies. Tony's movie villains all follow a nicely consistent pattern: Stane, Hammer, and Killian are all rich guys who profit from government weapons contracts, who all want Tony out of the picture, and who all have someone else do their dirty work or cover their tracks. (Stane pays the Rings to kill Tony in the desert, Hammer hires Whiplash, Killian creates the Mandarin...) And there's the implied possibility they were in it together on this AIM think tank/Ten Rings thing.
And I think more people would also be okay with it if, like I said, "Trevor" hadn't been revealed to be a comedic buffoon. It wasn't the fact of the fake Mandarin that's the problem. It was HOW fake the Mandarin turned out to be, he's introduced with a poop joke for fuck's sake, he nods off or watches soccer in the middle of interrogations at gunpoint, etc. It's the fact that the movie had too much humor, not all of it funny, and not enough genuine threat. The tone of the movie was the same as the tone of the second one, and nobody liked it then, so why did they expect anybody to like it now? And the misleadingly grim trailers certainly didn't help.
