A (really late) Iron Man 3 reaction piece
So, I saw Iron Man 3 about a week ago as it was ending its run here in Australia. I really enjoyed it - it was certainly superior to IM2 and at least as good as the first. I don’t have a huge problem with how it ends - it’s not like he'll stop building suits for long, and he drives off into the sunset with Dummy safely in tow. However, it does have a certain rather problematic element to it: the Mandarin.
The character is a long standing and top-tier member of Tony’s comics Rogues Gallery. The animated series Iron Man Armored Adventures with its near-future techno aesthetic managed a clever update of the charater from its roots in the Yellow Peril to a more nuanced and sympathetic contemporary threat in the form of Gene Khan, a young man pursuing his own sense of manifest destiny in the worst of ways for the best of reasons. It proved that its clearly possible to keep the Mandarin’s ethnic identity intact without descent into racial characture.
The movie franchise chose to go in an entirely different direction...
Follow the false-cut as I resurrect an old blog for ruminations that branch into Batman and, unsurprisingly, Star Trek.
The character is a long standing and top-tier member of Tony’s comics Rogues Gallery. The animated series Iron Man Armored Adventures with its near-future techno aesthetic managed a clever update of the charater from its roots in the Yellow Peril to a more nuanced and sympathetic contemporary threat in the form of Gene Khan, a young man pursuing his own sense of manifest destiny in the worst of ways for the best of reasons. It proved that its clearly possible to keep the Mandarin’s ethnic identity intact without descent into racial characture.
The movie franchise chose to go in an entirely different direction...
Follow the false-cut as I resurrect an old blog for ruminations that branch into Batman and, unsurprisingly, Star Trek.