DogLadyHeather

The Heatherest Of Heathers

shitpost doggo extraordinaire

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PLAYING:
Final Fantasy V
Sonic Superstars
Marathon Infinity

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WATCHING:
My Little Pony
Game Of Thrones (rewatch)
Random Horror Films

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LISTENING:
Last.FM Recently Played

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friend to all who find me as a random encounter


im now watching the first Iron Man, as it's been well over a decade since the last viewing and my dad still thinks it's the best movie ever made. he and i regularly checked out each MCU film as a bonding thing (pre-transition if you couldn't guess) with him having fun and me... being glad someone was lmao.

boy this movie's aged like milk. boy was this film uncomfortably informed by a certain contemporary middle-eastern event. holy fuck is it not even slightly subtle with its pro-military angle, nor is the superhero origin effectively separated from it. Iron Man's half-hearted look at tech mogul deweaponization doesn't ring true when the guy's now literally the best weapon alongside the US military, good lord. what a conflict eh? Stark's realization of what his creations have wrought in the opening just leads him to make another, only now it's propped up with shallow personal philosophizing. that's called a satirical swing and a miss, you can't have your cake and eat it too!

eugh. no. not a fan. whatever positives the film has are buried under this distasteful, insidious rubbish. were the other early MCUs like this? no plans to continue but i genuinely don't recall.


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in reply to @DogLadyHeather's post:

And at the time, it was considered a vast improvement on the troubled origin of Iron Man in the comic book.

Which is basically an American defense contractor is blowed-up by the villainous Red Chinese war-lord in Vietnam and forced to make weapons which will make him the equal of Genghis Khan.

Oooh, it gets real racist real fast.

A ton of early Iron Man adventures were basically just Domino Theory: The Comic Book.

It's weird how the movie has a moment of acknowledging that these weapons are instruments of death and Tony Stark is a monster to whomever is on the receiving end, but his long dark night of the soul only results in him making a bigger weapon.

the movie keeps poking fun and satirizing war profiteering, yet has stark kidnapped by the most stereotypical taliban-esque villains and therefore justifies him in building more weapons to fight back. it's lip service of a critique alongside the depiction of its necessity, it's really irritating.

I think it's worse than that. It's the time of Muscular Liberalism where Tony's new role is to be a literal arsenal of democracy as subjugated peoples resist the Talibad. Not to mention the fist in glove co-operation with the Department of Defense on this movie that is all over the MCU.

"shallow personal philosophizing" is referring to Stark's character arc, not any schools of actual philosophy. im critiquing its use of a contemporary political backdrop and how it undermines said arc, which isn't out of thin air, Iron Man very deliberately ties the two together and attempts to satirize the former in several lines and scenes. i didn't write this, they did.

just because a film's meant to be stupid doesn't exempt it from analysis of its narrative choices and what informed them. hell, saying Iron Man's point is "i will use weapon to destroy my weapons" is pretty reductive, i imagine the film's own writers would be annoyed at that description. im not saying its deep but its deeper than that.