Wednesday 20 October 2010

Iron Man - Episode 3 (Dropped)

As episode three of Iron Man begins, we see Tony Stark's lab working on some kind of EMP device, which Mr. Stark complains about because it "looks boring".  Yes, that's right, engineering genius Tony Stark is completely disinterested in this invention because it doesn't look pretty enough.  Maybe he's angling for a job at Apple...


This particular exchange basically sets the tone for this entire episode - that tone being "stupid".  The mainstay of the plot revolves around a number of professors who have been attacked and killed by tornados... not the aircraft, but the weather anomaly.  This makes for an instalment featuring lots of stuff getting blown around and incredibly dull action, while reporter Nanami does her usual thing of investigating a story whilst basically just getting in the way of danger at every possible opportunity - cue a meeting with a friendly professor who later turns out to be bonkers, and who also happens to own a laser gun for absolutely no reason, with a background story that has something to do with creating a system to mess around with the Earth's magnetic fields, but one which the script writers clearly didn't actually give a shit about enough to make it sound either plausible or interesting.

So, come the end of this instalment, I have to say that this was an incredible experience - it's incredible that anyone could have taken a successful, action-packed Hollywood franchise and turned into into such a dreary, unimaginative mess.  This episode in particularly showcases everything that is wrong with the series thus far - just about every character is an asshole (a stupid asshole, more often than not) who probably deserves to be sucked into a tornado before dying horribly, while that whole tornado plot seems like something that probably got rejected by the makers of some crappy Saturday morning cartoon for being too stupid.  There are so many things wrong with the plot and the way it's presented that it's hard to know where to start.... actually, wait, I know exactly where to start - let's just laugh at it for being so pathetic.  I've been patient up to now, but I can be patient no more - Iron Man is just terrible.

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