Marvel Universe (Thar be spoilers ahead.)

[UnSub]

Also, I enjoyed IM3 for the fact that it's done something new and interesting with the Marvel characters, and that it's a Shane Black film.

Can you expand on this ?

Sure.

In spite of everything said previously here, I thought what they did with the Mandarin was clever. It wasn't something that was seen coming and was a genuine departure from the comics.

That Marvel Studios now wants to walk it back perhaps shouldn't surprise me.

Also, IM3 was the first Marvel film to show a character reacting psychologically to all the superhero-size things that happen in the movies. Stark isn't in control of everything (including himself) in IM3 and is stripped back somewhat, which means he has to be more resourceful.

And as I said, I like Shane Black films. Having Stark banter with goons was something I enjoyed.

It's not a perfect film of course, but narratively it's a long way ahead of pretty much every other Marvel Studios film other than "Captain America: Winter Soldier".

[Soulflame]

If the Mandarin in IM3 wasn't the real Mandarin, it wouldn't surprise me much.  I speculated a bit with my wife at the end of IM3 that he was not, in fact, the real Mandarin.

If I'm not mistaken, the Mandarin is one of IM's primary antagonists.  For them to wrap him up in one movie, as a fake, seems unlikely.  Particularly since there were references to him in the first two movies, where he was the driving force, way in the background, that got things rolling for IM to deal with.

[Raguel]

I guess I'm the only one who's more upset over AIM than Mandarin. HYDRA pretty much has that niche covered in the MCU, so I guess it's not a big deal.

[eldaec]

I gave zero fucks about AIM, Extremis, or the Mandarin, but thought Tony Stark forgetting he had an arc reactor strapped to his chest (despite this being iron man's signature power) was fucking stupid. Also, the 8 year old was fucking stupid. Also, the incompetent bodyguard stark suddenly cares about was fucking stupid. Also, Stark being all screwed up from Avengers despite nothing bad happening to him was fucking stupid. Also, the throw away 'meh, I fixed myself' at the end was unearned and fucking stupid. Also, realising they had forgotten to give the antagonist a plan other than 'be nasty to Tony' then throwing something together with a couple of lines of dialog at the start of the third act was fucking stupid.

But it did have a few good lines.

[Soulflame]

He carried a nuclear weapon out of NYC that was almost a one way trip into some other space where he would have certainly died.  As it was, he just barely made it back through, and the only thing that saved him from certain death was the Hulk catching him.  On top of having his tech and building used to open a hole in time and space that allowed an alien species to shoot the fuck out of NYC.

I think some PTSD is warranted for all of that.

[jgsugden]

IM III starts with Stark having been working on suits for 3 days without sleep according to Jarvis.  When he has his first anxiety attack in the movie, he thinks he is poisoned and runs to Jarvis for a diagnosis.  That shows he had not experienced such an attack prior to the start of the movie - which takes place several months after the events of Avengers.  Yes, the events of the Avengers have messed him up and given him some sleepless nights and bad dreams, but things didn't really peak until the time of IM III and his stupid decison to play with his toys instead of sleeping.

[Maven]

When he has his first anxiety attack in the movie, he thinks he is poisoned and runs to Jarvis for a diagnosis.  That shows he had not experienced such an attack prior to the start of the movie - which takes place several months after the events of Avengers.

I hadn't considered that! Man, I love little insights like that -- it shows a close analysis of small moments can have illuminating information about what's happening. But with the movie going so fast at times, you almost forget about it before we're on to the next scene.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I don't think they did a bad job saying he had some sort of PTSD.  I do think that after getting blown up and becoming a POW, while having dfeadly shrapnel in your chest might be a touch more traumatic than floating in space.  After IM1-2 it just didn't make a whole lot of sense to be that shell shocked.

[jgsugden]

I don't think they did a bad job saying he had some sort of PTSD.  I do think that after getting blown up and becoming a POW, while having dfeadly shrapnel in your chest might be a touch more traumatic than floating in space.  After IM1-2 it just didn't make a whole lot of sense to be that shell shocked.

It is more than floating in space - he grabbed a nuke and drove it through a hole in space.  He also fought aliens, watched thousands die, probably was indirectly responsible for killed hundreds of people (unless you think that a Leviathan crashing into buildings was casualty-free), and he - for the first time in his life - had someone he really cared about and gave his life meaning that he was going to leave behind when he died on the farside of the universe.

His reaction did not bother me.  Nor would it have bothered me if he started off IM III without being phased by the events of Avengers. 

However, there is a lot of stuff in IM III that really bothers me.  They didn't seem to have a grasp on whether the arc reactor generated energy or was melely an electro magnet.  They did not understand how long it'd take for his armor to fly from Tennessee to Miami.  His armors were amazingly fragile in the movies - to the point that you wonder why he didn't die a hundred times over in the prior 3 movies. 

When you put the PTSD next to all those problems in IM III, it does not register for me.

[Lakov_Sanite]

When exactly did "thousands die" in the avengers?  There is zero mention of casualties in the movies at ALL.  To the point where it would be ridiculous to assume so many people are dying because we would rightly so, freak the fuck out and after avengers, seems like nothing really changed all that much for regular joe sixpack.

[Maven]

His inductive reasoning must be confusing Metropolis with New York. I'm sure it wasn't causality-free, and the Marvel Universe New York likely has unrealistic evacuation efficiency for moral convenience (Disney, ho!), but the damage and scope of the destruction felt far more contained than in Man of Steel. Dozens of deaths, tops, and, also, unwitnessed by Tony at any point since he was a bit busy the entire sequence.

Getting inside Tony's head for a bit, any inadvertent deaths he might have caused (and the way these movies work, the heroes performing heroics are shielded from the consequences of performing heroics) would have been the cost of doing business -- he tried his best. Losing out on contacting Pepper though? That would have fucked him up good because it was far more personal, and would have motivated the closer ties he developed with Pepper.

He got a second chance, but he's still Tony.

[jgsugden]

They did not show the death up close and personal, but it was obviously there - and it had to rank in the thousands.  Watch that sequence again.  Notice the Leviathan crashing into buildings... the scores - if not hundreds of unchecked aliens... the chaos that people in their attempts to flee would cause...

[Fordel]

There's a few deleted scenes showing the aliens rounding people up to vaporize and shit, then Cap swoops in and manages to save a bunch of people from being vaporized. Not sure if that counts or not, since they were edited out of the movie proper.

[Maven]

They did not show the death up close and personal, but it was obviously there - and it had to rank in the thousands.  Watch that sequence again.  Notice the Leviathan crashing into buildings... the scores - if not hundreds of unchecked aliens... the chaos that people in their attempts to flee would cause...

The logic of the entire situation serves the action set-piece, not real world logistical considerations. Saying "thousands of people would die", absolutely agree with that for any real world equivalent disaster scenario, but we're talking the Marvel movie universe where such tragic concerns exist in the background where they go unacknowledged and do not exist *because they aren't important to the story or the action*. This is fodder for a Cracked article that takes movies too seriously.

That's why I feel Man of Steel's Metropolis destruction was so shocking -- it was just so obvious because of the level of destruction taking place that hand-waved elements of superhero movies such as causalities became apparent and conflicted with that consequence-less innocence of superheroism. Avengers' presentation didn't create moral conflict in its cool superhero fights. Man of Steel's fights felt brutal and visceral.

I think that's one problem with what is being attempted here: lack of recognition that this is a movie -- entertainment. The incidentals are besides the point of the entertainment unless they serve a narrative purpose. The script writer would have attributed Tony's PTSD more to personal circumstances and his own direct actions (Pepper, trauma from nearly dying, realization of intergalatic threats and what's at stake) rather than inductive consequences the audience might not even acknowledge except from Fridge Logic, though that doesn't mean we can't fill the empty space with such theorizing. If a line existed to acknowledge the death toll and a small scene to explore how the characters feel about it, all this would be moot.

I feel like I'm validating the opinion while invalidating it at the same time!

That's why I appreciated the analysis of Tony's first panic attack -- I didn't understand that he hadn't encountered it before (or maybe I did and forgot), but now it totally makes sense based on the lines.

[Lakov_Sanite]

If anyone died during the avengers then the movie itself invalidated their deaths because all the news clips at the end of that movie were "Oh look, stan lee! Superheroes! 'murica!"  They were not "Tragedy struck as we mourn hundreds of deaths, thousands more wounded" 

You can always infer deaths in big action movies.  Some movies will just gloss over it and keep going, some will address it minimally but marvel is very flatly stating "nope, didn't happen"

[jgsugden]

I'm sorry, but - NO.

Aliens come to Earth to kill or enslave all of us.  They pop into our sky through a wormhole with giant monsters, blasters and advanced tech.  Thousands die in minutes... but a plucky band of heroes cuts off their portal and ends the threat?

No, the news would not read, "THOUSANDS DIE IN TRAGEDY!"  It would read, "WORLD SAVED BY HEROES!"  The mourning for those lost would come, but we'd be celebrating that all was not lost before mourning those that were.  Sure, TMZ would have a different angle, but screw them.

As for taking things too seriously - perhaps.  However, there are pretty darn good reasons why people seeing a city destroyed in a movie wouldn't overlook the real death toll that would be involved.  The Avengers might just be a movie, but not everything we've seen in the past 25 years has been 'just a movie'.

[Lakov_Sanite]

 

[Maven]

What are you arguing for? What do you believe is important to relate when telling a story through film?

Is there an Avengers novelization that has the space to get beyond the comic book simplicity of its source material?

Equating Avengers / Marvel films with other movies which have different restrictions and narrative priorities is not a premise I accept. Exploring the consequences of collateral damage isn't what's important to these films unless it becomes a thematic priority to do so.

Bob Iger's acquisition of Marvel is part of his larger strategy to bring compatible intellectual properties into Disney's catalog, a catalog which has as its foundation a certain view of the world that glosses over everyday, realistic things like foul language and cataclysmic death tolls. Disney's world view is a form of escape into a higher, simpler, *appealing* ideal of life.

The Avengers, as a *Disney* film at this point, are going to focus on what we are entertained by and appeal to things like love, family, sentimentality (We'll add 'cool' to that). That is why, *within the context of the film*, it is reasonable to argue that "everything turns out OK! Nobody was hurt!" even though real world logic dictates that this would not be the case based on the available evidence.

Star Wars has the room to be darker, but it is going to be like the destruction of Alderaan -- "This is tragic and horrific!" -- something everyone just *gets*, establishes the stakes, how evil the bad guys are and what they are capable of, and we move on with the plot. There is an emotional simplicity to motivate characters to action and define sides.

[Lakov_Sanite]

The point was that using iron mans PSTD as a plot device in IM3 was stupid because new york wasn't much of a big deal compared to all the other shit he'd already gone through.  Followed by gus filling in holes with fan fiction.

[Maven]

More directed at gus than you Lakov. I disagree on Tony's PTSD, but I'm willing to agree to disagree here.

[DraconianOne]

If anyone died during the avengers then the movie itself invalidated their deaths because all the news clips at the end of that movie were "Oh look, stan lee! Superheroes! 'murica!"  They were not "Tragedy struck as we mourn hundreds of deaths, thousands more wounded" 

You can always infer deaths in big action movies.  Some movies will just gloss over it and keep going, some will address it minimally but marvel is very flatly stating "nope, didn't happen"

They didn't show people being massacred because, you know, comic book film watched by kids - but there were civilians being caught in explosions, Chitauri firing indiscriminately into a packed office building and then later on a couple of them about to drop a grenade into a building full of people (the scene with the waitress just before Capt A. jumped in and saved the day - watch it again; the grenade is armed before CA arrives).  If you can't infer massive casualties from that or the brief glimpse of an entire building collapsing Twin Towers style or the wide shots of fires and explosions all across the city then, well, I don't know what to tell you.

And the newscasts at the end? In between the scenes of people saying "Thanks Avengers" are shots of people at a missing persons wall, candle light vigils, "disaster averted, cleanup begins", senate calling an emergency session, the white house calling the invasion a "global catastrophe". So, yeah, they made out what happened in New York was kind of a big deal and yeah, they inferred the human cost of the event.

Sorry if you actually wanted to see thousands of people being slaughtered and genocide in action - I don't think it was that type of film.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Don't pile on the blinders bandwagon.  Can it be assumed there were casualties? Sure.  Can it be reasonably assumed this was some massive tragedy? Not from any of the evidence presented in avengers or any of the movies following.  Oh, natalie portman slugged loki, wow she must have been pissed but after that it's all good.  Loki, you know, the person who supposedly engineered the slaughter of thousands? 

 It's a comic book, I get it and what that means is the hulk is gonna rampage through downtown and not randomly kill innocent bystanders.  That's what being a comic means, it doesn't mean they don't SHOW the hulk killing people, it means he simply doesn't.   Superman failed by making the disaster so massive you couldn't really handwave it away and say nobody died but you sure as hell can with the avengers.

[Evildrider]

In the Avengers at least they showed them trying to minimize casualties as much as possible and trying to keep the chaos contained to as small an area as possible.

[Margalis]

Sorry if you actually wanted to see thousands of people being slaughtered and genocide in action - I don't think it was that type of film.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

If you can't show anyone dying because it's not that kind of movie then it's not the kind of movie in which people die.

This is similar to the conversation about the Hulk rampaging. Sure, in real life Hulk rampages would kill people. So in The Avengers how many innocent people has Hulk killed? The logical answer has to be in the thousands, right? But the answer in movie logic is "don't worry about it." Logically when GI Joe fights Cobra people would die no? But it's a cartoon, so nobody does.

It wouldn't make sense to have a Very Special Episode of GI Joe where a Cobra guy is like "man, think about the hundreds of Joes we've killed!" because that didn't actually happen. Sure, it should have happened - but it didn't.

If people dying in The Avengers is too much of a downer and can't be shown the implicit message of the movie is that people didn't die, or if they did you're not supposed to worry about it. Given that it doesn't make sense to later go "what a tragedy!" when at the time it was portrayed as a fun romp.

"Remember NY! Remember NY" Remember what? The Avengers kicked some ass, made some jokes and struck some cool poses.

[DraconianOne]

Don't pile on the blinders bandwagon.  Can it be assumed there were casualties? Sure.  Can it be reasonably assumed this was some massive tragedy? Not from any of the evidence presented in avengers or any of the movies following. 

Is a global catastrophe not the same as a massive tragedy then?

[Lakov_Sanite]

Those images are kinda proving my point, all full of thank you letters, captain america stalker montage?  Yeah, real heartache there.    If you wanna nitpick catastrophe you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel because I would think just having aliens invade earth, come down and wreck half the buildings in new york certainly counts as a catastrophe.

It's a comic, people didn't die.  Stop trying to add gritty realness where there is none.

[Lantyssa]

Yeah.  It's not like anyone thanked the rescue workers at the Twin Towers profusely.

It's a super-hero movie.  That don't want to focus on the negative.  That doesn't mean it didn't happen in the background.

[Margalis]

If the death is too much of a downer to include then how can you make another entire movie about it?

"I'm super sad about all those people who died, even though we never showed them dying, never acknowledged them dying, and we wasted time telling corny jokes as they were dying. But still, super broken up about it!"

You can't get PTSD over something jokey that has no emotional impact. That's the problem (or just one problem) with IM3 and with all this "remember NY" shit. Nothing particularly exciting happened in NY for anyone to remember, it was just another jokey super hero escapade. This week aliens invade NY, next week dinosaurs time travel to modern day and attack Berlin.

Now that Thor 2 happened are people also supposed to remember that time some space Elf almost destroyed the universe? "Remember London!" Hey guys, remember how a different set of space aliens almost destroyed the Earth in a different way, and the rest of the Avengers didn't even bother to help because that's actually a completely pedestrian event in comics?

[Velorath]

Sorry if you actually wanted to see thousands of people being slaughtered and genocide in action - I don't think it was that type of film.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

If you can't show anyone dying because it's not that kind of movie then it's not the kind of movie in which people die.

This is similar to the conversation about the Hulk rampaging. Sure, in real life Hulk rampages would kill people. So in The Avengers how many innocent people has Hulk killed? The logical answer has to be in the thousands, right? But the answer in movie logic is "don't worry about it." Logically when GI Joe fights Cobra people would die no? But it's a cartoon, so nobody does.

It wouldn't make sense to have a Very Special Episode of GI Joe where a Cobra guy is like "man, think about the hundreds of Joes we've killed!" because that didn't actually happen. Sure, it should have happened - but it didn't.

If people dying in The Avengers is too much of a downer and can't be shown the implicit message of the movie is that people didn't die, or if they did you're not supposed to worry about it. Given that it doesn't make sense to later go "what a tragedy!" when at the time it was portrayed as a fun romp.

"Remember NY! Remember NY" Remember what? The Avengers kicked some ass, made some jokes and struck some cool poses.

The GI Joe comparisons are't exactly accurate because people do die in Marvel movies (you could make a good-sized list) they just don't show civilians dying during large scale battle scenes. For all the destruction in this year's Godzilla movie, I don't really remember seeing too many explicit civilian deaths either (again, aside from the ones that impacted the story). I would guess that this is more for the purposes of not getting an R-rating and not making children terrified rather than to imply that nobody was killed.

[Margalis]

For all the destruction in this year's Godzilla movie, I don't really remember seeing too many explicit civilian deaths either (again, aside from the ones that impacted the story). I would guess that this is more for the purposes of not getting an R-rating and not making children terrified rather than to imply that nobody was killed.

It's less about showing people dying and more about the tone just not jiving with the idea that a bunch of people died.

The final battle in The Avengers is largely played for laughs. The way Loki is treated afterwards it's less like he tried to take over the Earth and kill and bunch of people and more like he stole a cookie from a cookie jar. The movie doesn't take itself particularly seriously, which is not a bad thing, but then it doesn't make sense to retroactively pretend that these were emotionally-scarring events.

[Velorath]

No denying that. Thor's "He's adopted" line for instance was in direct response to Black Widow pointing out that Loki had killed 80 people in two days. The tone does intentionally soften the seriousness of the events. Of course we're talking about this in regards to Stark's PTSD in IM3 which also isn't always taken entirely seriously so I'm not sure that what IM3 was going for was a big tonal change from Avengers.

[jgsugden]

... Can it be assumed there were casualties? Sure.  Can it be reasonably assumed this was some massive tragedy? Not from any of the evidence presented in ...

Where have I heard words like these before?

[Tannhauser]

Of all the Avengers, Stark is the only one without combat training.  Maybe that pushed his PTSD along.  Maybe his snark during the Avengers hid his terror, remember this guy, until recently, drank, whored and invented, he didn't get his hands dirty.  Then he has to fly thru a space-rift alone, knowing he's going to die and he can't even call his girlfriend.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Of all the Avengers, Stark is the only one without combat training.  Maybe that pushed his PTSD along.  Maybe his snark during the Avengers hid his terror, remember this guy, until recently, drank, whored and invented, he didn't get his hands dirty. 

Sure that's pretty reasonable, if you ignore iron man one and two.

[SurfD]

Of all the Avengers, Stark is the only one without combat training.  Maybe that pushed his PTSD along.  Maybe his snark during the Avengers hid his terror, remember this guy, until recently, drank, whored and invented, he didn't get his hands dirty.  

Sure that's pretty reasonable, if you ignore iron man one and two.

Except that in both IM 1 and 2 Stark spends pretty much the entirety of both movies operating largely under the delusion that he is pretty much invincible, which is re-inforced by the fact that he never really runs into a truely "serious" threat in either of them.

In 1, other then the brief bit at the very beginning where he is completely at the mercy of the terrorists, it is pretty painfully obvious that he completely outclasses any threat posed to him.  For all intents and purposes he is a tin-god playing at combat for kicks, like in the scene where he goes back to the middle east for payback and basicly mops the floor with an entire enemy company effortlessly.    That was all the suit at work. Tony was pretty much just along for the ride, flying high on the confidence that his technology was so superior to anything else that danger was a non issue.   Even the Ironmonger fight at the end of the movie was more of a barroom brawl then an actual "combat" situation.

Much the same with IM 2.  Stark relies pretty heavily on the knowledge that he has the superior tech to carry him through stuff.

Also, both of the first two movies are more of a "personal" thing then a "global" one.   His capture and escape are personal developments leading to his new outlook for Stark Industries, and his conflict with Stain over controll of the company is basicly entirely personal as well.   IM 2 is much the same way.   His conflict with Vanko is pretty much completely over personal matters, same with Justin Hammer, only its more "business personal" then "personal personal" with Hammer.

Then you hit Avengers, where Stark is slapped in the face with things like Thor and Loki, guys in goofy looking Medieval armor who can fight toe to toe with his current top of the line tech without effort, and things like there being Alien Armadas from other galaxies with Tech that likely WAY outclasses anything he has, and that is likely to come as a pretty big shock to the guy who previously stood on the pinnacle of the Tech Totem Pole on earth.   Add in to that a full blown alien invasion over Newyork putting Stark in a stiuation that makes the Drone Armor Fight from IM 2 look like a video game shooting galllery, and I think Stark might have some valid reasons for having a bit of PTSD in IM 3.