I will personally round up a bus full of hobos to reply to your awesome story if it means the next part gets posted.





For me, it was something of a wash. As I said, I actually got riled up by the Afghanistan fight scenes, and my biggest complaint was probably how short they were.

I saw that they brought in the "Samurai Jack" creator to help with the fight scenes in the sequel, but to be honest I mostly remember a lot of flying around and stuff blowing up.





It was definitely odd to have a villain be underground for the entire film, never increasing the stakes or ramping up the tension. He was just believed dead by everyone until the very end... and really, attacking Tony was the only bad thing we saw him do until the finale. There wasn't a big sense of "This guy must be defeated!" At worst, he would help a Stark rival make a big weapons deal with the US government... I wasn't entirely clear on why that would be so horrible.





I agree... I felt I had to grudgingly admit, however, that he wasn't as cartoonishly "off" feeling as he was in the original's post-credits scene.

I just saw the scene from "True Lies" where Charlton Heston plays a thinly veiled version of Nick Fury, and that was easily the far better character.





I enjoyed that sequence, and my only complaint about the Widow's costume was that she didn't actually use her bracelets for anything. In truth, I'm not sure what would make her "feel" like the Black Widow to me... We'll have to see what Joss Whedon does with her, if anything.





I was fine with it, and Cheadle did a good job. I do think the story kind of took for granted that affection from the first film would carry over to the characters on the second, and by changing the actors I think they hamstringed that a bit. The history of the characters from the first film didn't totally translate over to the conflict here because of the new face, for me.





Definitely. I'm eager to see more Marvel movies, and if they're all as good as this one then they'll be in fine shape.

Can you round up a bus full of hobos to help write it? I haven't had a chance to work on the next chapter yet; I've been refereeing soccer almost every night this week.




Well, the original Whiplash fight was mostly Iron Man just standing in one spot to Whiplash could continue to flail at him. I actually liked the fight between Tony and Rhodey at Tony's birthday party, though I don't know if they explained how Rhodey powered up the old suit without an arc reactor in his chest.

I do remember thinking though when Whiplash showed up in his armour at the end (which should have been red for two reasons; one to acknowledge they'd combined the Crimson Dynamo with Whiplash for the villain, and two so he stood out more from the War Machine armor visually) that they committed a cardinal Iron Man sin; they had Whiplash create the more powerful armor.

Tony is supposed to be the ultimate inventor in his story, but here we have someone else building a more powerful suit of armor (in the first story we had the plot device of Tony running on a primitive version of the arc reactor that was never designed to power his newer suit). If Whiplash hadn't been dumb enough to open up his mask I don't even know if "crossing the streams" would have worked.







I guess Justin Hammer was supposed to be the villain doing that, but really he was a whole new character with the only similarity being the name (and company I guess). Kind of like Nick Fury really; familiar name, new character. I didn't necessarily mind the type of characte Hammer was, he just wasn't Justin Hammer.







The more I see of Fury the more it bugs me, actually. He doesn't look like the head of SHIELD to me; his agents run around in suits, not military uniforms, and he's not dressed in either.

I think maybe it'd be easier to teach the hobos to referee soccer for you rather than explain the Parodyverse. Your call though.





Marvel seems to be taking pains to point that out. But then, news about Hugo Weaving playing the Red Skull in Captain America was out for nearly two months before Marvel "confirmed" it... so it's likely a matter of salary negotiations and schedules and such. I'm sure it could still fall through, but until it does I just assume it's much stronger than a rumor.





They play fast and loose with some of those details. Rhodey also seems to have known exactly how to work it as well. They at least gave a nod to the fact that you would have expected Tony would have some kind of security to keep someone else from piloting one, or that Jarvis wouldn't suit someone up without authorization, by Fury pointing out that he "let" Rhodey fly off with one of his suits.

I liked the Monaco sequence quite a bit, even though the fight wasn't far ranging. My main issue is something all of these superhero films seem to do these days... going with the assumption that because someone is a super-hero or super-villain, regardless of what their powers are of how they got them, they can shake off damage that would cripple a human. There was plenty of that in "Spider-man 2" with the Spidey/Doc Ock fight, and then when Whiplash was hit by the car here I had the same reaction.





Good points on both. I guess since Iron Man is red, they didn't want to go that way, but I would have liked to have seen a design more original looking than what they ended up with.

And I thought "crossing the streams" as well for the finale. Of course, I also wondered why they didn't just shoot him directly in the face for that matter.





I don't know the Justin Hammer of the comics at all, but I really enjoyed Sam Rockwell's character. I hope he comes back to go after Pepper in the next one.





That was my main problem with him in the after-credits scene. I was like "*This* guy is the boss of those professional agents in suits? This guy skulking around Los Angeles in a black turtleneck, trench coat and eyepatch?" He really seemed like he was from some completely different property. With the Black Widow's outfit, he at least looked somewhat more integrated here, and they gave him much more natural sounding dialog to spout. Still, I believe that he's a totally needless expense. He essentially was given all of the lines that would have gone to Agent Coulson had they never introduced him in the first place. The movie would have felt more cohesive, and Marvel would have saved on Sam Jackson's salary.

I really think Marvel needs to hold back on these kinds of cameoes until such characters are actually needed. All they are doing is limiting the options when it finally comes time to add the characters for a reason. Now they're pretty much stuck shoe-horning in Sam Jackson Fury with each property since they've signed him to a 9 picture deal before any scripts requiring him were even written.





It wasn't until this point that I realized a slightly worrying trend in Marvel's self-produced films. All three of them (Iron Man 1 & 2, Incredible Hulk) end with a fight for a fight's sake. There's really nothing bigger at stake. In the first 2 X-men films, there was a plot to stop, innocents to save. With Spider-man 2 there was Ock's experiment that would destroy the city, with Batman Begins there was the fear chemical in the water supply, and so on. With these Marvel Films, there's a bad guy who wants to fight the hero, and that's it.

I don't think that's going to continue to cut it... I think they'll need to start introducing villains who have something greater to achieve, so there's more to the climaxes of these films.

...I admit to and regret being absent, since my blooming career as a freelance writer should give me more time to get caught up on the goings-on of my friends, but these days it's so hard to separate work from fun on my ( not always well ) self-disciplined schedule, that I have a hard time keeping track of everything. I don't know if there are any other freelancers on this board, but I could use some advice on how to manage everything without the nervous breakdown aspect...

Anyway, I liked Iron Man 2 a lot, and I thought there were some utterly brilliant scenes in it. My favorite two being Tony drunk in the armor, for the sheer painfulness his embarrassing actions exude, and the post-humous message from Howard Stark, which actually made me tear up. Scenes like those go a long way towards making up for the shortcomings in other places, like the lack of evidence that Iron Man is actually protecting America ( since the only threats we see-- Vanko and Hammer-- were brought in by going after Stark, and would not have menaced civilians if Tony didn't exist ).

Also, the thing with Tony's heart poisoning him reminded me of a story by Kurt Busiek in Iron Man's third volume, where he finds out that the armor's ambient energy is killing him. In both cases, it sets up a dilemma where Tony's life as Iron Man is destroying him and he needs to make some hard decisions about his identity-- then completely voids the dilemma by having him fix the problem with his inventive genius, and gets to resume his self-destructive lifestyle without learning anything. At least here there was the symbolic aspect of Tony working with SHIELD and finding his father's notes, along with his hook-up with Pepper at the end ( something we never really got to in the comics ), but it's still annoying.

www.rubysworldcomic.com

Hmmmm... Without the nervous breakdown? I admire your ambition.

I just finished a killer two weeks working freelance on a game project. Really, some weeks I have no life outside of work, while others I have way too much free time. Scheduling is rough... I wish I had some tricks to tell you.





I kind of wonder how "privatizing world peace" keeps the company in the black. Unless you loot the countries you conquer...




I couldn't help but notice that Tony suffered from one of those Hollywood poisonings where you can be cured and not have any lasting consequences. Actually, that new element he creates not only doesn't poison his body further, it apparently cures all the lingering effects of the paladium in his bloodstream. We should all have some of this stuff jammed in our chests.