Posts tagged Iron Man 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6Olpjl_IrE

So last week I was checking out Twitter when I saw Jon Faverau talking about the new posted Iron Man 2 trailer. like every other comic book fan who loved Iron Man, I jumped on the computer, downloaded the trailer in HD, sat back and enjoyed.

My initial reaction to this trailer was, not bad. It was oddly paced, and all over the place; funny, serious, “tense,” big, loud, but not in the right sequence. It didn’t get me really excited to see the movie, I was already excited to begin with, but there is a lot of small stuff to extract from this teaser.

the trailer opens up with one of the effects from Tony Stark’s admission to being Iron Man. The government is after Stark Iron Man armour, calling it a weapon, but Tony won’t give it to him. Tony looks to be under the impression that he is out of the weapons game and that the Iron Man armour isn’t a weapon. We are also introduced to Stark’s humour quite a bit in the the first few seconds. I’m wondering if they are going to rely on the humour too much in this movie, amping up what was in the first movie. More on this later. 

Next we get into the essence of what Iron Man is. We see Pepper and Tony in the back of a plane, Tony suited up as Iron Man, sans helmet. When Pepper playfully tosses Tony’s helmet off the back of the plane, he makes a witty comment and jumps off to retrieve his helmet all to the soundtrack of AC/DC’s Shoot to Thrill. we see Iron Man fly down towards a building, through a opening roof and onto a stage with girls dancing, and fireworks exploding. Tony has his suit taken off to revel him in a tux, and we see that he is at Stark Expo. What I call the essence here of Iron Man is the soundtrack used and what it’s used against. I love me some AC/DC. It’s good music to get you pumped up, and its good party music if you are looking for a good time. Faverau used Back in Black in the first movie, during the opening scene, and it makes sense to use it here. AC/DC doesn’t write great ballads of love, use impressive lyrics to make you think, or create music that’s political in nature, they just rock, and they rock hard. And that seems to be the purpose of Iron Man, to rock hard. But, I’d like to think these films can be a bit more than that, and that the AC/DC is used to set up the good time the audience is going to have. 

With Tony landing at Stark Expo, he seems to be bringing back an event his father attempted, also dubbed Stark Expo. This may be the 1994 version of Woodstock though. This scene then leads to a series of montages, set to more rock but something a bit sombre in tone, little more drawing out, that shows one of the films villains, Mickey Rourke’s Ivan Vanko, A.K.A. Whiplash, building a miniature arc just as tony did in the first film. This is dubbed over with Vanko’s monologue on the atrocities that the Stark family has caused. One of the themes or plots of the film is Tony looking into the past to find a secret of his fathers from the Stark Expo. Now maybe Faverau is trying to point this out in the trailer, but I doubt it. I don’t think you could make this connection without knowing this information ahead of time. This is one part of why I think this trailer is paced wrong. The trailer here is making a story, a quick plot synopsis if you will, and demonstrating to the viewers what this film will be about. This is good, but only for a bit. More on this in a second.

One neat image within this montage of Vanko creating and Tony looking worried and scared is a shot of Tony pulling his shirt aside so we, I presume he, can see what is happening to his body. What we see is a series of circuit like veins spreading out from the arc that is keeping him alive. I have heard a couple theories on this: his body is rejecting the arc technology, possibly making him sick, or the arc isn’t doing its job at keeping those nasty filaments out that almost killed him in the first film. There is a story line that Warren Ellis worked on entitled Extremist where Tony injects a techno-organic virus into his body, which then works with his nervous system. Read this wikipedia entry for more info on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man#Powers under the power section. Maybe we see this here, though I don’t think Faverau and company would just up and give Stark a power. I think they would rather keep him as a guy in a suit.

We also get different shots of different characters who are going to appear throughout the film. There are some quick shots of Sam Rockwell’s Tony Stark like weapons creator Justin Hammer, Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury, the new Rhodey, Don Cheadle, who is standing over a new Iron Man armour, and a couple action shots with Stark’s new assistant and Russian spy/ SHIELD agent (you can see the SHIELD symbol on her shoulder as the guys at IGN pointed out) Natasha Rominov, A.K.A The Balck Widow.

The montage scene ends with Vanko using his newly built arc, which powers some fancy looking whips that slice through anything, on Tony’s Formula One car, causing it to crash. We get a shot of Tony beaten and bleeding on the track as Vanko approaches him whipping and slashing his lightsaber-esque whis around. This is where the trailer bothers me. This is a perfect spot to roll the Iron Man 2 logo and date, and the trailer would work and be good, but what we get is something else. We see some action shots of Iron Man, being chased by a bunch of robots, or theory states, guys in other Iron Man suits. The credits then Roll with Sabbath’s Iron Man opening. But don’t worry, there’s more here. After the credits we have a shot of Don Cheadle and Tony Stark, both suited up in armour, Cheadle’s is gray and he cares a bevy of weapons from machine guns and a mounted gatlin gun, and he goes by the name War Machine in the comics, as the both flip their masks down and then get down to business taking on the robots, or other Iron Men that are surrounding them. A couple things to note here. the War Machine armour and the other Iron Men could be created by other film baddie Justin Hammer. Hammer could be working with the government to create the weapons that could help win war. If that’s the case, I’m going to go with the Iron Men being AI instead of soldiers, and there AI goes crazy. This whole scene, well awesome, doesn’t fit well with the trailer, and it looks like they added this and the chase scene some more action to the trailer, action that was said to be missing from the first, which i didn’t think was missing at all.

The other thing I want to point out here is Stark is wearing new armour. Gone is the circular blue light of the arc from the previous armour and now appears a blue upside down triangle. In the comics, that light source was actually shaped very similar to Superman’s logo, just with no S. I heard that they didn’t use it either because they wanted to distance him from Supes, or they didn’t want to get into trouble using a similar logo for a superhero. Why is this upside down triangle used now? could be Superman’s legal woes, or fan service. Also, Iron Man’s legs are more gold than before. It looks very similar to his older costume with the gold legs and red boots. it will be interesting to see how these changes come about.

That’s it for the trailer. Tell me what you thought of the it and what you think is going to happen in the film, or hey, just let me know what I missed.