Technical assessment: 3.5
Moral assessment: 2.5
CINEMA rating:
V 14
MTRCB rating:
GP (for all ages)
The opening flashes
back to the time that brash and brilliant billionaire Tony Stark/Iron Man
(Robert Downey, Jr.) was a boozing playboy who chased skirts but shirked commitment. Until his assistant Virginia “Pepper”
Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) captured his heart. Since then Stark and Potts have been an exclusive pair and Iron Man 3 shows them living together
like man and wife without the blessing of either Church or State. Stark now must face a pair of villains:
The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), a menacing cross between Fu Manchu and Bin Laden
who is after the US president’s neck, and Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) a
nerd-turned-dashing-debonair-chemist who has created Extremis, a serum that
converts ordinary mortals into living humans bombs. The Mandarin attacks
Stark’s plush Malibu lab-and-lair, turning it to flaming tatters, endangering
Potts, and leaving Stark, alone and far away, to survive on his own devices.
Iron Man 3 is some sort of a record
breaker—at least in the Philippines, when on opening day the long-awaited
sequel was shown in all theaters across the land. CINEMA gives it an above-average technical score, and a huge
part of that is due to its almost flawless CGI footages. The story, too, is different in that it
projects a vulnerable Stark, even helpless in the face of such an unbelievably
powerful and deathless villain in Killian. The cast includes newbie Rebecca Hall as Maya Hansen, a bio
chemist who happens to have had a one-night stand with Stark in pre-Potts days,
and Ty Simpkins as Harley, a bullied schoolboy living with his mother. Only one unsolicited comment for
director Shane Black: in that final chase to put down the villain, we were
gung-ho about Stark finishing him off.
We knew he’d die, anyway, so finish him off sooner—you’ve made your
point, spare our ears from the prolonged boom-bang-clang-clanging of iron suits
and gadgetry.
Plenty
of ethical issues here. Is Iron Man 3 a fight about good and
evil? Whose good? Is all that destruction worth the
fight? Is the life saved worth all
the lives ended? Is Stark’s
commitment to Potts for life? Oh,
but it’s sci-fi fantasy, anything goes, anything to entertain. Yeah, but with very young children in
the audience unable to distinguish fact from fantasy, isn’t some kind of
explanation in order? Paging all
parents! Life is not a video game,
hello! The civilized world resorts
to such thing as “dialogue”, and the future of the world is not determined by
the fight between a superhero and a supervillain.
CINEMA
would like to magnify, however, the soft-spoken message of Iron Man 3. The story
is a love triangle: Stark, Potts, and the iron suits—or more precisely, Stark’s
obsession with his iron suits. It
is a transformed Stark we see here, coming to confront his weakness, denouncing
it, and thus acquiring the strength to go on. He parts with the chest gadget that embodies his addiction
to power, and tells himself that even without it, he is still Iron Man. A wise decision from CINEMA’s point of
view—iron gets corrupted by rust, man does not. Iron Man 3, the
movie, has soul.
