Cultural Crossovers #7: Iron Man 3

Don’t really have to say anything at this point, do I?

  • Nice “you know who I am” badge.
  • Ooh, nanoficus.
  • Less cool: exploding ficus.
  • JARVIS continues to be best house brain.
  • Your R&D process really looks unnecessarily painful.
  • See, now folks like this asshole is why the King of All Known Space sometimes orders the King’s New Glass Marina.
  • (Also, War Machine was so much better as a name.)
  • Post-traumatic stress sucks; and while the audience recognizes it, they’re from a culture that is very predisposed to repress the hell out of it. (Which is why the Imperial Military Service spends so much time and effort watching for, guarding against, and dealing with it.) ((And as honers of the will to a razor edge, those cases that do show up are exactly this bad.))
  • And for the record, both they and I think it was handled very well.
  • Nice holoballs. (“Conversation balls”, as we call ’em.)
  • The empty slots in the brain really sound different to a species that actually was designed.
  • Well, someone’s not solved the nanocyborg waste heat problem. (To reference a recent discussion: catching fire and then exploding is exactly what happens to people who get overenthusiastic about the extrinsic power sources. If you want high energy, go metal.)
  • Damn, that’s some degree of control. (Also, no anti-air defenses, Tony? We would have thought that you’d have thought of that.)
  • …they killed Dummy and Butterfingers? Someones need to die. A lot.
  • (And we really hope Jarvis is a fully distributed system.)
  • We applaud you, kid. You have… potential.
  • Dear media networks: your security systems are a giant ball of suck. I mean, seriously. Kids with a My First Firewall kit could follow this act.
  • Yeah, that is a terrible password. It’s also fairly terrible to be using a password.
  • Ease back there, fanboy. A little dignity, please.
  • IN A HARDWARE STORE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!
  • … well, of course they have a decoy schmuck.
  • Killian, your personnel policies are all kinds of terrible.
  • Pretty sure a flamethrower – even an implanted flamethrower – is better than the potential of, y’know, exploding.
  • Ah, the Vice-President has a sympathetic motivation. Which, in Imperial terms, means he’s earned a pistol with one shot left overnight in his cell in between arraignment and trial for treason.
  • Now that’s a rescue back in the proper form!
  • Autonomous mode for the win.
  • You gave them all individual names? Awww.
  • Oh, shit.
  • …but best not-actually-resurrection ever. Damn, Pepper. Nicely done.
  • And the audience delivers multiple standing ovations for that series of endings, which cap things off exquisitely.
  • (Especially the salvaged robot arms.)

Yeah. Just… yeah. Works perfectly. Both on its own merits, and because, in a different way to Captain America, Iron Man is exactly the kind of hero they write stories about.

 

Cultural Crossovers: Iron Man 2

Wow, our watching cycle is short these days. Maybe I’ll start dribbling these out, oh, once a month or so, so they don’t eat the blog.

Once again, I live-blog in-culture:

  • Oh, yeah. Tony’s entrance to the Expo is exactly how they do it in Mer Covales. The audience loves it.
  • (Of course, I’ve mentioned before how I based the second movement of the Empire’s anthem on Make Way For Tomorrow, Today.)
  • Also, he just won all the points with the audience for shutting down and openly mocking Senator Thieving Assclown.
  • The audience that saw the first movie is undoubtedly cheering on his choice in successor, too.
  • (To step out-culture for a moment, I personally love the Elon Musk cameo.)
  • Kudos to Vanko for coming up with a functional equivalent of the mollywhip which isn’t suicidal to use. (This falls under “acceptable breaks from reality”.) Still not a very practical weapon, but it is showy as hell.
  • Man, the “suit-case” is some awesome tech-porn.
  • Vanko’s not wrong about what happens when the illusion of invulnerability is broken. The military guys nod along. (Remember, one of the key doctrines in their way of war is “shock and awesome”.)
  • Man, mortality sucks and makes folks crazy. Still, hell of a way to end a party.
  • And yeah, an intervention probably was called for…
  • …WHICH STILL DOES NOT MAKE TAKING THAT SUIT OKAY, RHODEY.
  • (Even if Tony did set it up.)
  • SHIELD has some… interesting ethics. (Especially if they knew what they were hanging onto all these years.) Of course, they are more or less this universe’s version of the Fifth Directorate, complete with the awesome-mixed-with-squick sensations.
  • The public safety people just cringed at the thought of all the folk about to go out and build particle accelerators in their basements.
  • Oh, God, Hammer, you are such an asshat. Also, an idiot. Also, a walking cliché of everything a businesssoph shouldn’t be or do.
  • On the other hand, it’s a pleasure to watch Black Widow work. And without benefit of PK-fu, even.
  • I could have said this at any number of moments through the movie, but Pepper is definitely one of the best executors to have ever executored.

In general: yeah, as I said regarding the previous one, with minor cultural fluency tweaks, that’ll play just fine.

(Oh, and regarding the stinger: well, that’s a funny-looking KEW.)

 

Cultural Crossovers: Iron Man

So here’s a question I was asked recently:

In the vein of questions about media, let’s throw at the Eldrae the 70mm IMAX versions of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe (note, entirely cinematic, nothing from TV) with enough cultural footnotes to understand the context. Assuming all movies are available up to the end of Phase Three, what would the Eldrae opinions be on each of the movies and if they wouldn’t work in the Eldrae market, what sort of revisions/alterations would make them work?

…this may take some time to answer as a whole, ’cause I’m going to have to rewatch the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe to really give it a fair shot, so I guess I’m turning it into a post series. You see the terrible, terrible burdens I’m prepared to undertake for you, gentle readers?

Anyway. Starting with the first – well, with Iron Man, we have a really easy one to do, because there’s very little you would have to do to make this fit perfectly into their extremely popular “Awesome People Being Awesome” genre.

The only things you might want to tweak a little would involve cover minor cultural fluency issues, like explaining to the audience why people disapprove of the size of Tony Stark’s ego, rather than that being somewhere between normal and appropriate; explaining some banter in terms compatible with the local sense of humor; and explaining why anyone might want to cover up the existence/identity/activities of Iron Man in the first place. But those are relatively small deals and optional tweaks: the fundamentals of the movie would work perfectly in the Imperial market.