"Iron Man"

The movie opens with a caravan escorting Tony Stark through the Middle Eastern desert and a very funny line by Tony, “I feel like you’re taking me to court.” With a few laughs with the other soldiers, the caravan gets ambushed. Tony for some reason escapes the Humvee, even though he was told to stay three times, and almost gets obliterated from a torpedo that displayed his name. He tries to get away from it only to be caught up in the explosion. In the rest of the scene, I couldn’t tell whether or not he had a Kevlar vest on, but shrapnel had pierced his chest regardless. If he didn’t have a Kevlar vest, why didn’t the military give him one? He’s supplying them weapons. If he did have a Kevlar vest, why didn’t it work? Why doesn’t he have his own Stark vest that he created to withstand his own creations?

Then we travel back in time to one of the two magical times before the said event: 36 hours earlier. The other is 72. Of course, Tony is so egotistical that he doesn’t show up to accept his award at an awards ceremony. After the ceremony, he gets confronted by Vanity Fair reporter Christine Everson, who asks if Tony loses an hour of sleep over the weapons he creates, to which he replied that he would lose a few with her. AND SHE BOUGHT THAT! The next morning, the “famous” Pepper Potts kicks her out the next morning. I can only say she's "famous" because I don’t know the names of any of the other love interests in the MCU.

Cut back to Tony in the desert. I buy that Tony was able to replicate the arc reactor, that powers his factory, to power the electromagnet in his chest. Actually, pause there for a moment; the electromagnet is preventing the remaining bits of shrapnel from entering his heart. So what are the bits doing? Floating around in Tony’s bloodstream? That can kill him regardless. Will the magnet ever collect the bits? Will Tony be able to walk without the arc reactor in his chest? So many unanswered questions! Okay, continuing.
I also buy that Tony was able to build a shoddy suit to escape with. But what about his friend that saved his life? He gets killed because Tony didn’t make him one too. Tony walks out of the cave armed with guns, and he flies out of danger with the weapons exploding beneath him. Where did he have guns in his cell? Where did he get the fuel? He only had twelve torpedoes to work with on the Jericho missile. That can’t be enough to even take off. What was his plan after that before the suit got obliterated when he crashed into the sand? What would have happened to him if the suit remained intact and he flies to the nearest US base where they think some knock-off Iron Giant is coming toward them going “Superman”?

Then we watch Tony spend the rest of the movie building the suit. In the meantime, he hasn’t investigated who sold the terrorists his weapons. He gets locked of his own company. His best friend, Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes, is advising him against flying the suit at all. Then it all comes out when his father’s best friend tells him that he was the one who put a hit out on Tony and that he was the one who locked him out of Stark Industries. Jeff Bridges felt wrong for this film. The Dude plays Obadiah Stane, a power-hungry psychopath that was willing to kill anyone who got in his way, including Tony, the terrorists, and possibly Tony’s father, Howard Stark. In the "36 hours before" montage, Howard suddenly died, Obadiah steps in, and then Tony took over. Then Tony almost dies, he shuts down his weapons manufacturing and gets locked out of his company.
Tony and Stane finally came head to head in an epic showdown Malibu Beach that ended in Pepper frying the Stark factory's electrical grid and electrocuting Stane. The next morning Tony gives a press conference explaining the incident, and he reveals that he is the mysterious "Iron Man."

I felt the movie opened the MCU properly. The whole film seemed like it could have been a decent stand-alone film. It is one of the few films that can hint an inevitable franchise, and in this case, all it took was 17 seconds for it to explode. Well, maybe the whole movie because Agent Coulson from the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, which was the running joke for being ridiculously long, kept butting in to the point where you share Pepper's frustration when he shows up. Then at the end, he says to call it S.H.I.E.L.D., hinting at something. Then Nick Fury shows up, and you're like HOLY SH*T!!!
So, now I really want to know. Did anyone outside Marvel Studios know that this was happening? I remember hearing Iron Man hitting theaters, and I was whatever about it and didn't go. But it never occurred to me that it was a start to something as massive as this. I didn't really pick up on that until The Avengers. I want to know if anyone who went to see this film had any idea what was to come next. If the post-credit sequence wasn't in the movie would you have thought of it as a passable superhero movie? Who would have thought, outside Marvel Studios, that 17 seconds was all it took to change everything? 

But with that aside, I think there were some things left out. Even at 2½ hours long, I feel empty. The actual “Iron Man” maybe only had 30 of those minutes. Much of the movie is spent way too long on building the suit. The relationship Tony has with Pepper is dysfunctional fun for five minutes. The talking over each other is annoying. And Pepper would have been more enjoyable if she didn’t overact. It’s okay for her to freak out for Tony, but she took it too far.

I hope you liked this. Be sure to subscribe and leave a comment about what you thought or if you want to recommend a movie for me to review. Thank you for reading. I'll return next week with another movie. See you then.

Released On: May 2, 2008
Rating: PG-13
Stars: Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard, Samuel L. Jackson
Director: Jon Favreau
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93% Certified Fresh
IMDb Score: 7.9/10

Awards
Academy Awards

• Best Visual Effects John Nelson, Ben Snow, Dan Sudick & Shane Mahan - Nominated
• Best Sound Editing Frank Eulner & Christopher Boyes - Nominated

(Click here to view more awards for "Iron Man")

Videos
How It Should Have Ended - How Iron Man Should Have Ended
CinemaSins - Everything Wrong With Iron Man In 4 Minutes Or Less
Screen Junkies - Honest Trailers - Iron Man

Movie Thoughts Presents: The MCU

This is kind of unfortunate timing with the passing of Stan Lee (Excelsior!), but life goes on. Here we go.

I will not be posting a review this week because of Thanksgiving. I will return November 30th to start reviewing the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's a shock, I know. But you should know that the MCU is the reason I started this blog in the first place. I finally decided to watch them all from the very beginning, and I would write how I felt about the movies.

This series might make you angry because I will be asking questions that could be answered in the comics but I didn't read the comics growing up. But some of my questions do get answered in the following movies, so bear with me.

This series will be leading up to the premiere of Avengers 4. I'm starting this early because I'm so far behind. Including the upcoming Captain Marvel, I have 21 films to power through. Also if you add up the time, I will be finished on April 19, 2019. I know Avengers 4 is scheduled to be May 3rd, but knowing Robert Downey, Jr. worked some magic to have Infinity War released a week early, I'm anticipating that. If it remains May 3rd then I have a week off.

I hope you like what I have to say. Happy Thanksgiving, and I'll see you November 30.

November 30, 2018

December 7, 2018

 December 14, 2018

December 21, 2018

December 28, 2018

January 4, 2019

January 11, 2019 

January 18, 2019

January 25, 2019

February 1, 2019

February 8, 2019

February 15, 2019

February 22, 2019

March 1, 2019

March 8, 2019

March 15, 2019

March 22, 2019

March 29, 2019

April 5, 2019

April 12, 2019

April 19, 2019

Ready Player One: The Book vs. The Movie

LET'S GET READY TO RUUUMMMMBBBBLLLLE!!!

This is me at this point.

I mean seriously, what in the hell? Dude! Stevie! You had the teen movie to end all teen movies. You pushed the envelope of movie making so many times. You made a monster movie with barely any monster in it. You made children fall in love an alien. You made Harrison Ford a bigger star than George Lucas ever could. YOU MADE DINOSAURS WALK THE F*CKING EARTH!

What happened? D’you decide to play it safe? ‘Cause I think ya did.

The book was a treasure trove of movie worthy moments, and you didn’t use any of it.

I will admit that I was a little discouraged that the book was nearly six hundred pages long. But I burned through it in three days. I haven’t read a book this size this quickly since Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. That was nearly eight years ago for me. The book was slow burner because it had to. Wade/Parzival provides a ton of pop culture references from movies, music, television, games and anything else to help him on his quest to find the egg.

I’m gonna break it down.

It made absolute sense to move Wade from Oklahoma City to Columbus entirely. That was a large chunk of the book we didn’t need.

Both opened up with the death of James Halliday, creator of the virtual reality game OASIS. The book gave little chunks about Halliday throughout the book, especially when the story demanded it. It allowed us, the reader, to get a glimpse as to how that came to be. Like why did Halliday choose Dungeons and Dragons to be the location of the first challenge? Halliday was introduced by his friend, Ogden Morrow. And in that chunk the author left a cliffhanger like bit of information. For instance, Dungeons and Dragons was where Halliday first met Kira. At the end of the book we go back to that snippet of information, and we find that Kira’s D&D character, Leucosia, was the password to the final challenge.

The movie, however, just vomited exposition on James Halliday and his death. Everything we know is from whenever anyone says something about Halliday, or when they visited the Halliday Journals, which doesn’t exist in the book.

The biggest question I had at the end of the movie was what did Halliday die of? The movie never gave us that answer. In a single sentence, on page 5, Halliday was shown to have a 76-year-old cancer-ridden figure. Cancer. He died of cancer. Thank you, Page 5 for clearing that up.

Much of the book's beginning exposition composed of Wade and his upbringing on the OASIS. He even showed some nihilistic opinions of how society has lied to him and how he doesn’t believe in God, Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny.

Instead of this, the movie relied too hard on Easter eggs of its own to focus on developing any of the characters. This is vitally important for later on. Not Wade getting religion or anything, but this is a starting block to understand his position and why he feels this way. He lives in a sh*tty time in the world. The OASIS is the only place where he feels wanted. We watch Wade progress throughout the book to actually begin to care for another human being, especially with his relationship with Art3mis. We see him falling in love with her. He’s always focused on her. When she leaves him. He is heart broken. But rather than sit around moping, he decides to change his attitude and prove himself to Art3mis. That he is not living in a fantasy.

The movie doesn’t show any of that. Instead he gets reconciled when he told how beautiful she looked, even with her birthmark. Then everything is fine and dandy.

I’m undecided as to whether or not Wade attending school was important. School was nonexistent in the movie. In the book it kind of was important. If it wasn’t for his boring day in Latin class, he would not have cracked the riddle to the Copper Key. In the movie, Wade mentions that someone cracked the first clue and a portal opened up. I’d like to know what that clue was, and why did it trigger a Mario Kart game on steroids? I guess it made sense to change the challenge from a game of Joust to a race. It’s much more exciting watching a ton of cars plow through Manhattan instead of one person beating a video game character at another video game. But to be honest, I would have enjoyed watching Wade meet Art3mis for the first time this way instead of recognizing her and saving her from Kong.

It didn’t make sense, however, that you have to obtain the key, and then travel to another sector in the OASIS to clear the gate. The movie did good with dropping that altogether. I think it would have been difficult to recreate WarGames and The Holy Grail, two titles Warner Brothers didn’t have, so they focused their energy on The Shining.

The three challenges in the book was to play Joust to win the Copper Key, reenact WarGames to clear the Copper Gate, collect the trophies in Zork and blow the Cap’n Crunch whistle to win the Jade Key, play Black Tiger to clear the Jade Gate, jam out on Alex Lifeson’s guitar and place on the altar to win the Crystal Key, play Tempest, reenact Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and get the Easter egg in Adventure to clear the Crystal Gate and win the contest. In the movie, it was to win the race to get the Copper Key, journey to the Overlook Hotel, from The Shining, and dance with Kira to win the Jade Key, and get the Easter egg in Adventure to win the contest.

The very beginning of the book had Halliday playing Adventure and getting the Easter egg planted in it and talking about the creator wanting to let the world know who made it, thus creating the Easter egg. I said to myself if that is how this whole thing ends, I’m gonna be super pissed. And guess what? I’m super pissed!

I understand that they had to cram a 600-page book into a 2½-hour movie, but the time it took to solve the riddle to the Jade Key feels more realistic. Even with all that knowledge, they can’t right away know what any of it means. That ruins the suspense and the twists, like when Art3mis obtains the key first, and then Sorrento.

Nolan Sorrento was better fleshed out in the movie, and it gave Wade a better target. In the book, he was just a random corporate asshole that attempted to kill Wade. We don’t get to hear much of him aside from what Wade tells us from watching the Scoreboard. In the movie, he’s a corporate asshole that would plow anyone who got in his way. We also saw that he was better flawed. In the book, he was an actual video game designer who knew his stuff. The only flaw he had was his greed. In the movie, his knowledge for pop culture was taken away, and we watch him struggle to match wits with Parzival and the High Five. He consults iR0k, who was also better fleshed out in the movie, to snipe

Parzival any way he can as well as use the Orb of Osuvox to create a shield around the final gate.

The whole Wade going to the loyalty center scene in the book would have been brilliant to see. The whole time, I was going “WHAAAAAAAT?” Though The Shawshank Redemption isn’t owned by Warner Brothers, you could have a little Thomas Newman score playing underneath while we watch him work through IOI and break out? Or maybe something from David Holmes, who did the music to the Ocean’s Eleven franchise, a title Warner Brothers does own? Oh, my God, such a wasted opportunity.

One thing I left out in the book review, but I think it’s important to discuss, is the part about Wade buying a sex bot. I understand that to make an entertaining kid’s movie, you got to cut some things out. This part I’m okay taking out of the movie. But it’s important to understand how Wade felt doing it, and how he reacted to it. He buys it, after Atr3mis dumps him, in self-pity, raging hormones and curiosity, but he immediately regrets it because it didn’t feel right. This, and I think it also has to do with Art3mis’ absence, shows that he is not living in a fantasy. Not entirely. We watch him fall for Art3mis. He even considered marriage. He wanted to meet her in real life. When she leaves, he feels destroyed. This is an important theme here. Separating reality from fantasy. When he sees her distinguishing feature, he knows it’s still her underneath. He didn’t care how she looked. That’s another theme: Acceptance.

Speaking of acceptance, in the time when we need it most, the filmmakers sweep Aech’s entire backstory under the rug. The reveal of Aech’s sexuality gives us a better understanding of how Helen ticks. She created the male persona because her mother did the same to give them a better living status. It also tugs a few heartstrings when we learn that Helen’s mother kicked her out over her dating a woman. Helen was nervous talking to Wade wondering how he’d react. He didn’t seem at all surprised. It made him feel better about talking to her on personal “guy” stuff. He initially felt embarrassed when he finds out Aech is a girl. Anyone can understand that. But it’s what Wade did next that was really something. He didn’t think anything less of Helen/Aech. Aech was his best friend, and he is glad to have Aech on his side.

Shoto’s name in the movie is “Sho.” (?) Both Daito and Shoto/Sho weren’t completely fleshed out in both the book and the movie. In the book, Daito didn’t really have a choice; IOI killed him. I’m okay with making Sho eleven years old because that’s how it should be. A group of video game nerds should include at least one preteen. In fact it elevated his status in the movie. Wade called him badass, and Art3mis nearly smothered him. However, they only existed in the book because Wade needed friends after he lost touch with Aech and Art3mis. Their backstory was even more swept under the rug. They became filler characters.

As I said earlier, iR0k was better fleshed out in the movie. All he really was, in the book, was a Biff wannabe, who was schooled by Parzival. If only they were able to implement that into the movie, it would give iR0k some motive rather than just be a hit man for Sorrento.

The ultimate showdown in the book was filled with more twists and surprises than in the movie. Regardless, the Orb of Osuvox had to be shut down. When they had a Short Circuit robot walk up to the orb with a bomb and detonate it in spectacular fashion, the filmmakers decided to go with Art3mis whispering the magic words from her personal Magic 8 ball speaker. I guess it was a pretty funny form of premature jubilation from iR0k saying the shield can stay up for 10,000 years, and Art3mis shuts it down two seconds later, but I would very much like to see the Short Circuit blow up the orb and shutting down the shield.

The Cataclyst was another showstopper that failed to the stop the show. In the book, they all suddenly died. In the movie that would have been awesome to see, and you would say, “Holy sh*t! What just happened?” But instead, the filmmakers played the “Tried to Stop the Enemy from Destroying the World and Failed” card. However, the movie did do something right about what happened next. In the book, Wade plays a perfect game of Pac-Man and wins the magical quarter, kind of giving away the ending. In the movie, he wins a bet with the Halliday Journals curator, gaining the magical quarter. Although, now that I think about it, it would be hard to imagine what it would be used for, like it could have started a game in the final challenge that needed a quarter to start.

Over all, the story has a number of messages to the reader, from acceptance to exploring the nature of growing up, to knowing the difference from reality and fantasy, to courage, friendship, and the dangers of constantly video games, watching movies, and not going outside. You know, you can learn the darndest things at a gas station. I’m sure you have seen the Gas TV at the pumps at most gas stations. I learned what gregarious meant from the Word of the Day, which means “sociable,” and I now realize that Halliday’s company, Gregarious Games, is an oxymoron, as people who play in the OASIS become more isolated than ever before, especially when they took part in the Hunt. Halliday himself pointed out that Wade should not make the same mistakes he did. Halliday was always afraid to socialize. He advised to get outside every once in a while. The book actually ends with Wade saying that he hadn’t thought about logging back onto the OASIS since he met Samantha.

One thing I just remembered. Its Ogden Morrow’s involvement through the whole thing. In the book, Og, as he preferred to be called, left Gregarious Games because he and his wife, Kira, were tired. But before Halliday dies, he entrusts Morrow with overseeing the contest. In the movie, almost none of that was in there. Morrow was in charge of the contest, that was true, but he was forced to sell his shares to Halliday. In the book, Morrow, I like to think, cheated by bringing the remaining High Five to his private estate to complete the hunt in peace. In the movie, Morrow didn’t really exist until the last ten minutes. It focused, although, on Halliday’s relationship with Morrow. Morrow was the Rosebud of the story, as Wade put it. Losing Morrow as his best friend was the worse thing to happen to Halliday instead of never telling Kira he loved her. The movie tried to add something to that plot device by making them go on a date, hence the Shining challenge. I think D&D is the only way to express their relationship because there seems to be no way for Halliday to get the courage to ask Kira to go on a date with him. I wonder if Kira ever had any feelings in return and was just waiting for Halliday to act. If that is so, did she really have a good relationship with Morrow? I guess so because they were happy until she died, but I wonder if there was something in the back of her head that made her wish she was with Halliday instead. You wanna pull some heartstrings? Put that in there.

In all honesty, I believe Spielberg has been falling off his game ever since he got his Masters. If you notice, some of his best movies, Indiana Jones, E.T., Jaws, Close Encounters, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, and Saving Private Ryan were before 2002. Sure he’s had some success since then, Munich, Lincoln, War Horse, but nobody’s talking about them. My theory is that there are a set of rules you have to follow once you earn your degree to make you look sophisticated and sh*t. But that’s just not fair. To a be good artist, you learn the rules so you can learn to break them.

Photo Credits

https://www.kisspng.com/png-tattoo-clip-art-wrestling-ring-openclipart-vector-6687659/download-png.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One#/media/File:Ready_Player_One_cover.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One_(film)#/media/File:Ready_Player_One_(film).png

I hope you liked this. Be sure to subscribe and leave a comment about what you thought or if you want to recommend a movie for me to review. Thank you for reading. Stay tuned for an important message that will be posted tomorrow.