Iron Man 2 Reviews (Spoilers)

[DarkSilver]

the Novelization of IM2 involves the 10 Rings heavily in helping Ivan get set up for Manaco, even going so far to mention him meeting with, and gaining the passes for the Pit Crew from "a Mongolian". Also, it was 10 Rings members who helped break Ivan out and deliver him to Hammer.


The Novelization, while not the best....succent...also gave a bit of information reguarding the movie that we just didn't get told.

Such as Spoiler

The element Tony creates in the basement is named Vibranium by himself and Jarvis, and it's Triangular molecular structure is the reason tony creates the new ARC Core in a triangular design - and thus the Mark VI's chest piece.)

Also, it's already been leaked about the Captain America movie, that Howard Stark played a role in the Super Soldier program, and with Captain America himself. So...yeah...expect to see Howard's new actor putzing around "The First Avenger".

[RogueIce]

When, and why, did Tony bother to install a Arc reactor in the silver model suit that Rhodes used? One perfect level of security would be to not do that. If the only powersource in the world for your uber suits is in your chest then no one is going to steadl one are they.

Unless somebody manages to knock out Tony and steal his reactor, as in the first movie.

I really liked this movie. Some of the dialouge was a bit too "rambly" for my taste, but other than that I enjoyed it as a great popcorn flick.

[SAMAS]

The second was him not having any safeguards built into the MkII. I expected him to reboot Rhodey himself. Hammer Software upgrade or not; That's his suit.

That was the first thing he tried when it got highjacked. JARVIS said he couldn't get into it. It was pretty much set up when Hammer said "The first thing I'm gonna do is upgrade your OS."

[Galvatron]

It's a gallery. Last I checked, Tony didn't walk/fly back to the States in the Mk. I.

True, but it was retrieved by Stane and taken back to Stark Industries. It's not a stretch to deduce that Stark found it there and "reconstructed" it for his gallery.

[Nephtys]

I was under the impression that Rhodes or Stark mentioned that Rhodes had 'access' to the Mk2, and hints that Stark has asked him to try it before that he did not take up until the drunken brawl. Which is why Rhodes had the passcode to Stark's basement playground. I took that to also mean that it had some sort of lock or whatever so that he could use it. Not the greatest security in the world, but it's something.

[The Cooler King]

I was under the impression that Rhodes or Stark mentioned that Rhodes had 'access' to the Mk2, and hints that Stark has asked him to try it before that he did not take up until the drunken brawl. Which is why Rhodes had the passcode to Stark's basement playground. I took that to also mean that it had some sort of lock or whatever so that he could use it. Not the greatest security in the world, but it's something.

Black Widow mentions, in the donut shop scene, that there ARE security measures in place to prevent people (including Rhodey) from stealing a suit. She and Fury both say that he could have shut it off at any time (just like he has in the comics, numerous times). To me, Stark's reactions showed that he subconsciously (or maybe even consciously) LET Rhodey take the suit.

[Old Plympto]

It's a gallery. Last I checked, Tony didn't walk/fly back to the States in the Mk. I.

True, but it was retrieved by Stane and taken back to Stark Industries. It's not a stretch to deduce that Stark found it there and "reconstructed" it for his gallery.

I just saw the first movie again. The Mark I was shown in Stane's restricted area during the first movie. Pepper, Coulson and the SHIELD agents came across it when they were looking to arrest Stane. Pepper said, "I thought it'd be bigger."

Then when Stane revealed himself in the Iron Monger suit, one of his first strikes smashed the Mark I into pieces - as well as flung some SHIELD mooks across the room.

I guess after the Arc Reactor explosion, at the very least Tony retrieved the pieces and put it back together again. Or he could have just put a new Mark I suit together with the resources at his disposal.

[Havok]

Couple things.

Tony set up the suit(s) so that Rhodey could use them because he knew he was dying. Iron Man has become essential to the protection and defense capacity of the U.S. so he needed someone he could trust to take over. Same reason he was giving millions of dollars of art to the Boy Scouts and making sure SI Inc had a CEO he could trust an believe in before he died.

As for the reactors in the suits. Makes perfect sense given his condition. He was burning up the palladium cores fairly quickly and the last thing he needed was to have a suit without a power source, so having a ready to go ARC reactor with a nice new palladium core in each suit is good buisness on the off chance he couldn't get a new palladium core into his chest piece in a pinch. Take into account having to fight the Iron Monger with a sub standard reactor in the first movie, the lockouts the suits have and it is a sound move.

All the debris from the final conflict in the first movie was on SI property. That coupled with Stark getting his first lesson in letting his IM tech out of his sight and it is not at all surprising that he gathered up and reassembled and kept the Mk I. I'm sure he has the Iron Monger suit stashed away as well... oooh maybe he will use it as some Hulk Buster prototype.

[Shroom Man 777]

It kinda sucks that Pepper Potts ends up quitting as CEO. Man.

[Havok]

Really, the only difference between the two was experience in using the suit and some back up. Without Rhodey, Ivan beats Stark.

That part was just fucking lame. Oh look its Ivan. The last time I fought him he build a badass weapon that could damage my suit and was absolutely killer if you stand within 10 feet of him.

Look he is back.

Hey Rhodes, lets be a couple of complete fucking douchebags and BOTH stand within 10 feet of him even though we both mouth weapons effective at hundreds of feet so he can grab us with his electric tentacles.

Fucking lame.

Well well while Iron Man does has some range, his weapons are far more effective up close. Especially against a mobile target.

And really, how much damage did Ivan do to Stark the first time? He may have superficially damaged the armor, but he did nothing to the systems as it remained fully functional and remained so throughout the fight.

What bugged me was why Ivan kept taking off his helmet. At least Stane had an excuse in the first movie.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Watch again. Vanko's first strike on Tony takes out a good chunk of armour in a gash on his chest, the second wastes the left hand repulsor, with the third taking out the right hand one. The HUD is already reading "Danger" at this point and it's amazing Tony isn't bisected when the whip is around his neck.

EDIT: In reference to the Monaco Grand Prix fight, that is. The final fight, yeah, it doesn't show much damage, but then the Mk. VI is far sturdier than the Mk. V.

[Havok]

Watch again. Vanko's first strike on Tony takes out a good chunk of armour in a gash on his chest, the second wastes the left hand repulsor, with the third taking out the right hand one. The HUD is already reading "Danger" at this point and it's amazing Tony isn't bisected when the whip is around his neck.

EDIT: In reference to the Monaco Grand Prix fight, that is. The final fight, yeah, it doesn't show much damage, but then the Mk. VI is far sturdier than the Mk. V.

Which is the point. The weaker suit is still functional even though it suffered a pretty good whipin'. Tony doesn't really have much to fear from Ivan.

[Havok]

You know one minor complaint I had was that I was expecting Tony to, you know, be a genius. Two examples were I kinda expected him to be ahead of the game: 1) Black Widow. A superhot chick that can beat the shit out of your boxer champion Chauffeur just happens to show up for your PA job? I was expecting him to need to contact Fury as some point and just casually turn to 'Natalie' and say 'by the way, I need to see your boss."

Well for one, she didn't show up for the PA job. She was the notary from legal.

Secondly, she was planted because Fury knew she would appeal to Stark, and seeing beyond 'OMG I want to fuck!' is not Tony's strong point.

Happy, is clearly not a 'boxer champion', but beyond that, Bruce Lee whooping Tyson's ass really wouldn't be all that surprising. Just impressive.

All that added into the state of mind Tony was in and it is perfectly acceptable that Tony would have no clue about Natasha.

The second was him not having any safeguards built into the MkII. I expected him to reboot Rhodey himself. Hammer Software upgrade or not; That's his suit.

He did. He purposely gave access to Rhodey, but then Hammer and Ivan got their hands on it.

[Havok]

Hmmm, that picture of the suits on display... the Mk I reads 'reconstruction' under it. I wonder if that means he recreated it or just reassembled the original?

[Zor]

All the debris from the final conflict in the first movie was on SI property. That coupled with Stark getting his first lesson in letting his IM tech out of his sight and it is not at all surprising that he gathered up and reassembled and kept the Mk I. I'm sure he has the Iron Monger suit stashed away as well... oooh maybe he will use it as some Hulk Buster prototype.

As cool as that sounds, considering the Way Ironmonger was destroyed i doubt there are any useful bits left. I would not be surprised if Stark Industries still has the blueprints on hand.

Zor

[Galvatron]

Hmmm, that picture of the suits on display... the Mk I reads 'reconstruction' under it. I wonder if that means he recreated it or just reassembled the original?

Either is possible, but I just had to point out that Tony had access to the original if one prefers to believe that it was salvaged and reassembled.

[Zor]

Another thing to note is where this is going for this avengers world. North Korea and Iran already are developing their own suits and Mecha and i am sure that other nations like China, Russia or the EU have their own programs going. Lets asume that Stark is still able to best them in terms of quality, fair enough, but sooner or latter someone is going to develop a respectable suit that can roll off assembly lines. I would like to see if anything comes of that.

That and i would like to see a few more and clearer images of the Nork's Battlemech.

Zor

[Shroom Man 777]

I loved how that scene was so reminiscent of Robocop... 1 or 2 when they were rolling out all those Robocop prototypes that either fucked up horribly or outright killed themselves.

[Simon_Jester]

There are a couple of things that struck me on first viewing..

First, the whole thing about Howard Stark hiding a "new element" in the goddamn shape of a globe on a model was sorta dumb.. and then the entire sequence where Tony synthesizes the new element with garage apparatus (even billionaire genius garage apparatus) blew my suspension of disbelief right out of the water. Yes, comic book movie, blah blah blah.. but the first movie stretched SoD to an extent or direction that was awesome. This was just a little too far.. who were the science advisors on the movie?

Hmm. I could see it under a very specific condition. We've already got at least one "impossible" element in Marvel: adamantium. The garage apparatus Tony was playing with looked to me like a particle accelerator*. It would not be unreasonable to be able to transmute the little-known and exotic material adamantium into some other, even less-known and still more exotic substance by bombarding it with [insert particle here]. You wouldn't necessarily even need exotic particles; an electron beam is enough to do transmutation.

Though in that case, why's he doing it in open air? And why isn't he doing the experiment inside his armor; he needs the radation shielding... Eh, well, you can't have everything.

*Then again, this may be a case of everything looking like a nail when you spend all day playing with hammers.

Secondly, the Tony/Pepper dynamic was actually much better in the first movie. BUT it is a bloody excellent film overall.

Oh yeah. No question there.

I was more annoyed that he was doing the manual labour himself. Isn't that what staff/robots are for? Loved the use of a certain shield in that scene!

My first thought, and this would never fly with the fans though it would be totally typical of Tony Stark, is that that he'd use the shield as a target; the unobtanium in the shield is what he's planning to turn into unobtanium-B for his arc reactor.

So I just saw the movie and um, two random observations.

1. Rhodes was following ESD procedures while removing the reactor from the suit. Good for you, Rhodie. Electrostatic Discharge is mostly a non-issue in most circuits, but way to follow protocol with those lovable, dorky wriststraps.
2. Howard Stark's notebook somehow has elementary maxwells equations from electromagnetics 101 on the page right before drawings of tesseracts. Somehow, non-euclidean geometry has something to do with the right hand rule

[salutes Nephtys]

I can think of a way to make sense of #2, sort of. There's a fairly straightforward series of derivations that gives you the 4-D spacetime equivalent of Maxwell's Laws: the tensor form From there, I can imagine Howard Stark leading the student (assuming the student is some kind of legendary genius who can skip a dozen steps at a time) through higher-dimensional weirdness to explain the physics of whatever bizarre-matter the "unobtanium" elements in Marvel are.

But yeah, that's a blatant handwave, and there should be a LOT more weird equations thrown in there. I know there would be if I were the one writing the notebook...

Anyway, though, I see nothing wrong with Jarvis congratulating Stark on creating a new element. If anyone did that where I could see them do it in real life, I'd be congratulating the heck out of them. And backing away in fear.

It would seem regardless of precautions in arc reactor tech being openly public, it was going to be developed again independently anyway, as Vanko proves. Now that Hammer and the US gov't have working reactors and even insights into Tony's main suit design from the stolen Mk. II, we could have a whole army made of each now.

Qutie possibly. Though Vanko had a huge advantage in independent rediscovery of the arc reactor: his father's notes. Anyone else would be in the same position Stane and the random Stark Industries scientists were in.

Just one observation of note, did anyone see those Hammer robots and think they reminded you just a bit of Tau Battlesuits?

Yeah. Now all we need is for North Korea to steal a few, reverse-engineer them, and go on the rampage for the Greater Good and the Ethereal Caste Kim Jong Il...

[Shroom Man 777]

Whuh? Vanko's dad invented the giant Arc reactor, nothing more. Stane and the random Stark Industries scientists were working with those same giant Arc reactor blueprints - with an actual-factual working Arc reactor right there in their buildings too! If anything, Vanko was a piece of shit shmuck who likewise built his gnarly Arc reactor things in his own basement with limited resources - the only thing he had going with him was the technical knowhow, but for the rest of it? Nada. He didn't have cash, and he didn't have the resources Stane and his scientists had. While he might not've been quite the genius Stark was, out of all the characters we've seen so far Vanko probably had the second-best brain in both films.

[Simon_Jester]

Whuh? Vanko's dad invented the giant Arc reactor, nothing more. Stane and the random Stark Industries scientists were working with those same giant Arc reactor blueprints - with an actual-factual working Arc reactor right there in their buildings too! If anything, Vanko was a piece of shit shmuck who likewise built his gnarly Arc reactor things in his own basement with limited resources - the only thing he had going with him was the technical knowhow, but for the rest of it? Nada. He didn't have cash, and he didn't have the resources Stane and his scientists had. While he might not've been quite the genius Stark was, out of all the characters we've seen so far Vanko probably had the second-best brain in both films.

Vanko, Jr. had the advantage of Vanko, Sr.'s knowledge in designing miniature arc reactors. Stark, Jr. has the same advantage: his father's knowledge.

No one else has that knowledge. Even if they're as smart as Vanko or Stark, that's a big disadvantage. Now, if the researchers Stane hired were as smart as Stark or Vanko they'd have solved the problem, but they weren't.

Anyone else, even if they have a guy as smart as Vanko or Stark, will be way behind in arc reactor research.

[Bilbo]

Two questions


1. Are we to assume that the Hammerdroids were running with Vanko built Arc reactors?

2. Do all of the Marvel movies fit into the same timeline? I know the new Hulk movie and the Iron Man movies are about the same timeframe. But what about Spiderman or the XMen Movies?

I am kind of assuming that the XMen movies are int he future relative to Iron Man and Hulk. If nothing else from the Sentinels in the Danger Room simulation. If the government can build Sentinels then Iron Man while impressive isnt the end all be all of America's defense. That or the XMen movies and Wolverine movie fit into a different reality.

[Crazedwraith]

It's only recent movies, coming out under the Marvel Studio name that are related. Thus far only the two Iron Man films and the Incredible Hulk are linked. All prior Marvel Films, Spider-Man, X-men, Blade etc are each in their own separate reality.

[Havok]

Two questions


1. Are we to assume that the Hammerdroids were running with Vanko built Arc reactors?

Yes.

2. Do all of the Marvel movies fit into the same timeline? I know the new Hulk movie and the Iron Man movies are about the same timeframe. But what about Spiderman or the XMen Movies?

No. And don't expect it to ever happen. Sony and Fox will keep producing those movies now that they have realized what cash cows they are, to keep the rights from reverting back to Marvel. IIRC, as long as they have a movie in production, they can hold onto the rights.

I am kind of assuming that the XMen movies are int he future relative to Iron Man and Hulk. If nothing else from the Sentinels in the Danger Room simulation. If the government can build Sentinels then Iron Man while impressive isnt the end all be all of America's defense. That or the XMen movies and Wolverine movie fit into a different reality.

Iron Man can rip through Sentinals like tin foil on his worst day. That has always been the case. Real or not. The Danger room tech may be alien, but the movies don't get into that. Regardless, they are a separate universe, so it doesn't matter.

[Jeremy]

I am not familiar with the story in the comics.


Vanko's father fled communism to work with a major corporation and was then exiled for wanting to make a profit on his product.

Tony Stark's control of the Iron Man suit is hideously dangerous. A man becomes a god in that suit, and what kind of king's justice would an enraged and drunken Stark be willing to show? If I were Rhodes, I would have tried to knock Stark out when his face shield was up. That may violate Posse Comitatus, but how long until an inebriated drunk with a hand cannon misses his shot?

Stark is sickeningly narcissistic. I love it.

The Hammer guy, how can such a dunce run a major corporation? How is he still free after the Iran Powered Armor Test Video?

Vanko is (minus the toothpick) likable. I really wish that Tony's Power Armor Lite only covered a portion of him. I also wish that Tony would have lost a limb or suffered serious injury in his first fight with Vanko. It would have brought home the prosthesis line very nicely and heightened the impact of "making god bleed".