Hey all, Tim here with a review for you. Iron Man 3 completes the journey Tony Stark started in the first film released in 2008, and takes place after the events of The Avengers (2012). It is a fun adventure, and a good movie. It surpasses the second Iron Man film, but isn't nearly as good as the first.
Now, I need to warn you that I am not familiar with the comics, and thus will only be rating the movie based on how it works as a film by itself and as part of the whole Iron Man trilogy. Let me begin with the story…
Some small spoilers here - you might want to read it after you see the movie.
The movie begins with a very Shane Black (writer and director) style voice-over, which honestly didn't quite fit into the world established in the first two movies. It didn't quite work too well either as it felt like a lazy way to tell exposition instead of showing it. Nonetheless the movie gets moving quickly enough, and it maintains a pretty quick pace for its two hour running time. Although the story tended to feel a little disjointed, it worked.
There were some things that were done well to comedic effect, but likely pissed of fan boys. Guy Pearce worked effectively as the antagonist, and it's in large part because he's such a fantastic actor. Character development wise Tony had better development than the second, but not nearly as good development as the first. However, what they establish as his short-coming at the beginning of the film is overcome by the end.
The performances in the film were top notch. Robert Downey Jr. owns the role of Tony Stark/Iron Man. By now he's got the role down and completely escapes into the character. Gwyneth Paltrow returns as Tony's better half Pepper Potts and gets a lot more screen time this time around. She even gets to don the famous suit! She has great chemistry with both Robert Downey Jr. and Guy Pearce. As stated before Guy Pearce is fantastic in his role as antagonist Aldrich Killian. Ben Kingsley is the second antagonist in the film, and even though he's great in his performance he's under used. Also, from my understanding there's a deterrence from the comics in the way his character, The Mandarin, was written. It worked well enough for the film as a standalone, but still with a performer such as Kingsley the character could have been better developed. Don Cheadle returned in the role of Colonel James Rhodes, as he wasn't replaced like Terrence Howard after one go in the role. He did a fine job in the role again, and got to have equal screen time to what he had in the last. This time it felt like he had more fun with the role. Rebecca Hall and James Badge Dale also round out the rest of the cast in well acted roles.
The stereo 3D conversion on the film was spectacular. Not surprising these days, but still a pleasant thing for the eyes. Although there were a few moments where the 2D cinematography wasn't meant for stereo 3D, it overall worked great. All the digital elements are easily rendered in 3D since they're built that way in the computer. It merits mention however that there was a clever use of 2D and stereo in the film. All of The Mandarin's broadcasts are in 2D. When they fill the whole screen everything plays in 2D, and then when they appear on a screen in a set the set is stereoscopically rich as the broadcast continues to play in 2D. This especially helped emphasis the use of stereoscopic space, and instantly became this reviewers favorite use of 3D in the film. There were plenty of other great stereo moments, especially during the climatic battle. The visual effects were spectacular, as is to be expected, and were as dazzling as ever. Paired with top notch sound effects this film was technically solid.
Overall this film comes in at a 3.5 to 4 out of 5 stars. It's graded down on the story and the small lack of proficient character development. IRON MAN 3 is an enjoyable, fun, and a good film. It's definitely worth seeing in theaters and in stereoscopic 3D. It is this reviewers recommendation that you go see it. IRON MAN 3 is now playing.
IRON MAN 3 Set Location At Wilmington International Airport
Update on Shane Black's IRON MAN 3 now shooting in Wilmington, NC! Our friends over at LatinoReview got the goods on a potential casting scoop that sees Ben Kingsley suiting up as The Mandarin but not as originally suspected. He won't be the main antagonist but merely a distraction and partner to the real villain that Tony Stark must overcome, Guy Pierce's Aldrich Killian. Killian is a scientist who uncovers something called the Extremis Virus (potentially nanobot technology) which he then uses to create an "Extremis army" of superpowered evildoers.
Robert Downey Jr. On IRON MAN 3 Set
That being said, there is another movie site claiming that The Mandarin is the main villain. For a movie that only cameos The Mandarin there is a lot of action going on surrounding his character apparently. What sort of action? Well this came from CBM:"Those that did get a glimpse inside [the Cape Fear Club] reported seeing extras dressed in military uniforms and suits. The extras in suits were described as looking like Secret Service men." The site also claims that a source "involved with the production" reassured them that The Mandarin is "definitely" the villain. He said Mandarin had a set of twins that did most of his dirty work for him. Another source who had visited EUE/Screen Gems Studios told us that the sets they were building included Chinese storefronts."
And it's known that the next location for the IRON MAN production is China.
So I think it's safe to say that The Mandarin is definitely in IRON MAN 3 but to what extent has not been brought to light. With two different versions of what is going on with the movie I can only go by past performance with regard to sources and that means LatinoReview gets the nod. A limited exposure to The Mandarin, perhaps setting him up for another Marvel universe movie - though I can't see that happening with THE AVENGERS 2 as Thanos is set to reign.
IRON MAN 3 Set, Wilmington, NC
The closest thing we have to a storyline thus far came from producer Kevin Feige when he disclosed: "So Iron Man 3 has been structured specifically to be the antidote to The Avengers... Circumstances in the story separate Tony from having access to anything. We wanted to take Tony back to, metaphorically speaking, the cave from Iron Man, the first half of Iron Man, when he's cut off from the world and needs just focus on his intellects to get himself out of his situation. So he's not calling Thor, he's not calling Captain America, he can't press a special button to have the helicarrier come rescue him, so I think that'll be a nice complement to the team up of Avengers."
I've selected a few shots from the Wilmington, NC sets for you to look at, but feel free to browse all of themright here.
Click here for all of our IRON MAN 3 coverage! IM3 opens on May 3, 2013. Still no official word on whether IM3 will be the first of the franchise and the fourth Marvel movie to be converted to 3D, but it's a safe wager at this point.
Ah yes, the overdue rising star named Guy Pearce! You have to love his short viral marketing piece he did as Peter Weyland for Ridley Scott's PROMETHEUS and if you haven't seen LOCKOUT yet, do it - I had fun.
Pearce is definitely making a solid move into A-list territory and to me he has always been one of my favorite actors since I saw him in THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO.
Now comes word that he is in final talks to star in IRON MAN 3 as the geneticist Aldrich Killian who will supposedly co-create "Extremis" nanotechnology. He may or may not then turn around and sell it to terrorists. Not good. A virus is supposed to be spread via this nanotech.
Ben Kingsley may be joining the cast too and there has been some conjecture about what role he might play. One of the terrorists perhaps? Or the other co-creator (if they decide to make this role a male instead the female Maya Hansen)?
Marvel again seems to be lining up a top flight sequel here.Shane Black is a great choice as director, the casting is bang-on thus far and the story seems quite interesting - apparently it will not only bring in the aforementioned nanotech but will also be very Tony Stark centric, highlighting his intellectual prowess. Love it.
Looks like production starts in May with a slated May 3, 2013 release.Nice job so far Marvel!
Whoa!! I love where this is going! Check out this new clip that Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof dreamed up and shot for the TED conference today.
Note that this scene is NOT from the movie PROMETHEUS, but it does feature one heckuva speech made by Guy Pearce in the character of Peter Weyland! The video is supposed to take place in the future the TED 2023 conference to be precise.
For more information you can go to the new website www.WeylandIndustries.com to keep a watchful eye.
About the video: Peter Weyland has been a magnet for controversy since he announced his intent to build the first convincingly humanoid robotic system by the end of the decade.
Whether challenging the ethical boundaries of medicine with nanotechnology or going toe to toe with the Vatican itself on the issue of gene-therapy sterilization, Sir Peter prides himself on his motto, “If we can, we must.” After a three year media blackout, Weyland has finally emerged to reveal where he’s heading next. Wherever that may be, we will most certainly want to follow.
Conceived and designed by Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof and directed by Luke Scott.
About the speaker: Sir Peter Weyland was born in Mumbai, India at the turn of the Millennium. The progeny of two brilliant parents; His mother, an Oxford Educated Professor of Comparative Mythology, his father, a self-taught software Engineer, it was clear from an early age that Sir Peter’s capabilities would only be eclipsed by his ambition to realize them. By the age of fourteen, he had already registered a dozen patents in a wide range of fields from biotech to robotics, but it would be his dynamic break-throughs in generating synthetic atmosphere above the polar ice cap that gained him worldwide recognition and spawned an empire.
In less than a decade, Weyland Corporation became a worldwide leader in emerging technologies and launched the first privatized industrial mission to leave the planet Earth. “There are other worlds than this one,” Sir Peter boldly declared, “And if there is no air to breathe, we will simply have to make it.”
Here's a Q&A with PROMETHEUS writer Damon Lindelof about this video: How did you come to the idea of writing a TEDTalk connected to Prometheus? In really, really good science fiction the line between the science and the fiction is blurry. When I started attending TED, that line got even blurrier — I started hearing about ideas that were, in my own imagination, more far out than some of the science fiction I was seeing.
Prometheus takes place in the future, but it’s a movie about ideas, and I just felt like it would be really cool to have one of the characters from the movie give a TEDTalk. Obviously, since the movie is set in the distant future, it would have to be a little more contemporary. But wouldn’t it be cool if it was a TED talk from a decade in the future? And what is a TEDTalk going to look like in 10 years? And what would this guy have to say?
Then I understand you contacted Tom Rielly at TED, and started working together. What was it like working with him to construct a fictional TEDTalk?
My first assumption was that TED was never going to go for it. At the end of the day, it was a cool viral piece. I never thought in my wildest dreams we would get the actual TED branding. I thought we have to end up calling it a NED talk. But Tom is every bit as much a geek as I am, and we sort of subscribe to the same sort of pop-culture influences, and he was already into what Ridley was doing. He just completely sparked the idea.
[Says Tom Rielly: "Damon asked if we wanted to be involved in a Ridley Scott movie, and I thought, 'oh twist my arm'.]
I said, “l’ll write this thing, and we’ll put it in front of you guys, and if you think it’s cool, we would love to platform it at TED, and make it only viewable through TED.” Because I liked the idea of exposing a more general audience to, “Wait a minute, I’ve never heard of this thing. There’s more talks here.” I thought it could be mutually beneficial — as opposed to overtly cram-it-down-your-face viral marketing, which I don’t think anyone wanted to do.
The video has all these wonderful science fiction elements, floating cameras and such — was it different writing for an existing event than writing other scifi?
No, all scifi starts in some kind of grounded reality that seems familiar, and then the tornado comes and take you into Oz. I feel the same way about a TEDTalk. I know there was some discussion about what the scale of this was going to be. I think that it’s probably out there that TEDTalks are going to be happening in arenas and stadiums in 12 years, but we also thought that a guy like Peter Weyland — whose ego is just massive, and the ideas that he’s advancing are nothing short of hubris — that he’d basically say to TED, “If you want me to give a talk, I’m giving it in Wembley Stadium.” So, he could actually bend the idea of what a TEDTalk is to him. Could you get an arena-level crowd to show up and listen to someone talk about ideas? That to me was the cool step outside the realm that we’re all comfortable knowing.
As an aficionado of TED itself and what TED does, I feel the intimacy is very important. I hope that in 2023 it’s still happening in Long Beach on a fairly intimate level, but those talks are available on a widespread basis. But it wouldn’t have been as cool to say, “In 2023, TEDTalks are going to look the same exact way that they do in 2012.”
What’s your favorite TEDTalk?
Ken Robinson on the failure of creativity in education. That was my inaugural TEDTalk, and it completely and totally blew my mind, just in terms of how concise and easily and with humor his ideas were presented, and I was just thinking and thinking about it for days. It’s really impacted the way my wife and I decided to educate our kid.
Obviously JJ’s Mystery Box TEDTalk was a personal favorite. Then, Kevin Slavin who gave talk about algorithms, love that talk. Paul Nicklen, the photographer, showed all the pictures he took up in the Arctic — that was breathtaking. I remember a talk about vertical farming that was like, “What?”
Oh! And the one that was given by Elizabeth Gilbert was fantastic.
As a professional screenwriter, what do you think is it about TEDTalks that makes it work?
I look at myself more as a storyteller than a screenwriter, as pretentious as that may sound, but that’s what really attracts me to TEDTalks. For me the really effective ones are being presented by expert storytellers. I think that people think of a narrative story as something that has a beginning, middle and end — you know, it follows these conventional rules. But that’s not the way that I look at story at all. You can tell a story about the state of education and provide anecdotal evidence, or tell a story about algorithms. That’s what all these things have in common. What’s really great about them is that the person who’s telling the story is the hero of the story. They’re advancing sometimes a very small experience that might have big, far-reaching implications. Or they might have an idea that is nothing short of mythic — like having laptops at every single desk in a third-world country.
There’s the storytelling aspect of the format, and the limitations of having to fit it within this timeframe — that 18 minutes is not just about appealing to people with short attention spans. It’s really stating the same thing as Twitter does: “If you can’t say it within 140 characters, then it probably isn’t worth saying.”
You’re known for telling stories that are infused with really big ideas. Is there a special challenge in making a story that doesn’t have a tidy end, or doesn’t close in all the normal ways, but maybe does get at a much bigger idea?
Yeah. I believe that this idea of story or myth or this thing that Joseph Campbell writes about is sort of an inter-connective spiritual force — like The Force in Star Wars — where it doesn’t matter where you were raised, or what your background is, there are certain elements of story that totally appeal to you.
When the blanks aren’t filled in for you, your own imagination tends to fill them in. That’s the storytelling that I’ve always been interested in. I certainly have suffered the slings and arrows of criticism for being too vague at times, but I always give much more credit to this sort of collective consciousness and imagination of the audience watching my story than on my own imagination.
And so there’s that idea of leaving some things up for grabs, so that you can personalize the story in your own way. There’s certainly a road that I want you to go down in my storytelling, but if you choose not to go down it, that’s very exciting for me. I feel like great TEDTalks are ones that are a little bit subject to interpretation, that do provoke further conversation — and potentially controversy. They’re the talks that, when you walk out of them, you need to instantly seek out somebody else who heard it to talk more about it, without the presence of the person who presented the idea. At that point, you’re now grafting the idea to your own psychological framework, and that’s what really great story does.
It looks like Prometheus is much more idea-driven than other movies in this genre, and that there are some enormous ideas coming. Was it a challenge to weave that into an existing mythos?
Look, Ridley Scott birthed this universe over two decades ago. My job was to sit and listen and to channel, in the same way that a medium does. This was about the ideas that he wanted to convey, and he did not want to come back and do science fiction again unless there was some kind of a philosophical construct to it. That’s why Blade Runner, which didn’t really enjoy commercial success when it first came out, is viewed as a classic, and is still being discussed and dissected: there are these fundamental ideas about humanity, our relationship with technology, the presence of a soul — those are all the things that drive Blade Runner. Ridley was reaching for the fruit on the tree of knowledge in the ideas that he was having about this movie.
At the same time, there is a line where a movie becomes overtly pretentious. We wanted to stay on the right side of it, because once you cross it, there’s no going back. There had to be a version of this movie that presented big ideas, but didn’t really wallow around and spend all it’s time basking in the glory of it’s own intelligence. We wanted to make an entertaining movie at the same time. Hopefully, it’s a hybrid in tone between the original Alien and Blade Runner. I mean, Inception is a wonderful movie and I love it, but I also love that people are shooting guns at each other and buildings are exploding.
You talked about how, when you listen to a good TEDTalk you want to go in another room and talk to someone about it, and I think a lot of that comes from the fact that you relate to the speaker and sympathize with them. Was it a challenge writing a talk for a speaker who is very unlikable in a lot of ways?
No. First off, Guy Pearce is a brilliant actor — you basically just write the words and let the actor do what they’re going to do with the words. And Peter Weyland’s role is still a toss-up for the audience. They don’t know what he’s going to be in the movie, or how this talk relates to the movie. I do think that, if someone is going to be saying the things that this guy is saying, then there is a god complex inherent in the speech. Guy Pearce took that and ran with it, and I feel like that gives it a certain degree of entertaining power.
What would your TEDTalk be about?
Ha! I couldn’t even begin to fathom it. I would think that the obvious route would be to talk about storytelling, but I wouldn’t be able to go where everybody would expect me to go. I would delve into a slightly more surprising terrain, although I have no idea what that means. If I were to do a TEDTalk, I would challenge myself to make people gasp.
As if I couldn't get any more amped about a movie - along comes a stellar piece of marketing focusing on one, just one character and blows it completely out of the water! Pearce NAILS this. The movie... will be AN EVENT like we haven't seen since AVATAR.
Hey all, Tim here with a review for you. Iron Man 3 completes the journey Tony Stark started in the first film released in 2008, and takes place after the events of The Avengers (2012). It is a fun adventure, and a good movie. It surpasses the second Iron Man film, but isn't nearly as good as the first.
