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Sep. 13th, 2013 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficOkay. Iron Man 3. Liked it a lot. One thing bothered me. They change the Mandarin from a Chinese supervillain to a Middle-Eastern supervillain who is really just a patsy for a white guy in what has to be one of the most labyrinthine attempts to avoid offending anyone yet. But alright, fine. It's still closer to canon than the Joker killing Batman's parents, and they don't want people to watch the movie and think "hey, all Middle-Eastern people are terrorists! I should vote Republican!"
Can you guess what my issue is going to be?
So it then turns out that all of the villains except for Guy Pearce are disabled military veterans who have undergone Extremis experiments to become supervillans. That's like the next Spider-Man movie making the Sinister Six a bunch of bullied gay teens in terms of kicking a population segment while they're done. They're not being mind-controlled or anything, they're just evil dicks. Not just dicks who want to rob a bank or smuggle cocaine or anything vaguely understandable like that. No, the Mandarin organization is introduced having specifically targeted a military base full of only the families of the armed forces who weren't even there.
Alright now, for a thought experiment, I want you to picture the most corrupt cop realistically imaginable. Y'know, does drugs, molests people, hits African-Americans, maybe even carries out Mob hits. Imagine some evil genius gets fifty of these guys together and says "Alright, I've got an evil plan that'll make us all rich. First, we go to this police department barbecue and slaughter all the women and kids." Now, how many of these police scumbags do you think are going to sign up for this and how many do you think are going to shove this guy's dick up is ass sideways? Because even in the annals of evil dickdom, there's gonna be some standards. You don't just Anakin Skywalker into killing the young children of your old buddies for no reason.
Worse, we're not even given a motivation for any of these sociopaths who have chosen to gruesomely betray everything they once believed in. I could buy some throwaway explanation like oh, they're bad apples, Abu Gharib rapist types who got thrown out of the military with dishonorable discharges, now they want revenge, fuck 'em. Or you could go a bit of a sympathetic route and say hey, these disabled vets, they got screwed by the system, they don't have good healthcare, but this guy Killian is taking care of him and so they're signing to get revenge on a society that turned its back on them. I would've bought that, and either way you could've given the audience something to think about.
And I'm sure there's a backstory like that in, y'know, the writer's four-hour version of the movie that would've cost five hundred million dollars, but it was cut for time. My point is this: the makers of Iron Man 3 trusted the audience would see a movie full of military veterans (disabled military veterans) committing atrocities and then say "it's only a movie" and not treat any vets they met negatively because of it.
So why can't we trust that same audience to see a movie with a Middle-Eastern or Chinese villain and say "it's only a movie, there are good Chinese people and bad Chinese people, I'm going to be nice to the next Chinese person I see, hugs not drugs"?
Can you guess what my issue is going to be?
So it then turns out that all of the villains except for Guy Pearce are disabled military veterans who have undergone Extremis experiments to become supervillans. That's like the next Spider-Man movie making the Sinister Six a bunch of bullied gay teens in terms of kicking a population segment while they're done. They're not being mind-controlled or anything, they're just evil dicks. Not just dicks who want to rob a bank or smuggle cocaine or anything vaguely understandable like that. No, the Mandarin organization is introduced having specifically targeted a military base full of only the families of the armed forces who weren't even there.
Alright now, for a thought experiment, I want you to picture the most corrupt cop realistically imaginable. Y'know, does drugs, molests people, hits African-Americans, maybe even carries out Mob hits. Imagine some evil genius gets fifty of these guys together and says "Alright, I've got an evil plan that'll make us all rich. First, we go to this police department barbecue and slaughter all the women and kids." Now, how many of these police scumbags do you think are going to sign up for this and how many do you think are going to shove this guy's dick up is ass sideways? Because even in the annals of evil dickdom, there's gonna be some standards. You don't just Anakin Skywalker into killing the young children of your old buddies for no reason.
Worse, we're not even given a motivation for any of these sociopaths who have chosen to gruesomely betray everything they once believed in. I could buy some throwaway explanation like oh, they're bad apples, Abu Gharib rapist types who got thrown out of the military with dishonorable discharges, now they want revenge, fuck 'em. Or you could go a bit of a sympathetic route and say hey, these disabled vets, they got screwed by the system, they don't have good healthcare, but this guy Killian is taking care of him and so they're signing to get revenge on a society that turned its back on them. I would've bought that, and either way you could've given the audience something to think about.
And I'm sure there's a backstory like that in, y'know, the writer's four-hour version of the movie that would've cost five hundred million dollars, but it was cut for time. My point is this: the makers of Iron Man 3 trusted the audience would see a movie full of military veterans (disabled military veterans) committing atrocities and then say "it's only a movie" and not treat any vets they met negatively because of it.
So why can't we trust that same audience to see a movie with a Middle-Eastern or Chinese villain and say "it's only a movie, there are good Chinese people and bad Chinese people, I'm going to be nice to the next Chinese person I see, hugs not drugs"?
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Date: 2013-09-13 06:35 pm (UTC)I thought it was an interested twist, but the execution -- like you said -- was really kind of piss poor. If they had taken that time to give us more backstory, and if they had taken the time to weave that in more, it could have truly been a subtle discussion or acknowledgement on what these wars can do to veterans when they come back to this country and realize it's more full of shitheads than they remembered -- both inside the system that said it would watch out for them and out in the real world, which they were told was what they're fighting for.
Anyway. Agree 100%.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-13 11:08 pm (UTC)I've also heard tales that a certain demographic of the US population thought torture worked from watching the TV show 24, but that's more than likely bullshit. But I know nothing about the military and less about disabled veterans so feel free to ignore me.
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Date: 2013-09-18 11:40 am (UTC)It's also implied that Extremis is actually addictive, not just empowering. Like glowing cocaine. Combine that with soldiers who, like you said, had been screwed over by the government (and were doubtless profiled down to their hat size before AIM approached them) and you've got loyal mooks. It's implicit, not explicit. AIM gave them their lives and purpose back. And imagine if someone told you you could save untold numbers of your brothers and sisters in arms if you just did a few shady things. And Davis died specifically when he tried to walk away and, presumably, be without the dosage.
Heck, the Miami incident may well have been the first "field test" of them. We only see a few trusted ones doing anything significant prior to that.