Almost no one else I know would place Iron Man 3 in their Top 5 Marvel movies – but I would. Like the strangely rejected stepchild of the family, Iron Man 3 is most often described as “definitely not as bad as Iron Man 2, but nowhere near as good as the original Iron Man.” I’ve even heard people say that Tony Stark’s best scenes in the MCU don’t even appear in his own films but more in Captain America and Spider-Man’s story lines. Others think Iron Man 3 should be skipped over entirely when rewatching the MCU films.
With all due respect to those people, I need them to know they’re wrong. Iron Man 3 isn’t just the best Iron Man movie, but one of the most important films in all of phase 2. Also, it was one of the first MCU films to be made by an actual clever writer-director in Shane Black, and I deeply believe it was after Marvel executives worked with him that other great writer-directors like Taika Waititi, James Gunn, and Ryan Coogler were entrusted with their respective MCU movies.
In this film, we see Tony’s real-time reaction to the fallout of what happened in New York City during The Avengers. For the first time in the MCU, we see how the mental health of our heroes is affected by the violence that exists in this universe. Most notably, we watch as Tony struggles with PTSD even after being a part of the winning team; he didn’t have to watch his friends die in that fight and still he was incredibly affected by it. This only adds more significance to films later on in the series – specifically Age of Ultron and Infinity War – when he is forced to watch his friends die. In Iron Man 3, in attempts to ween off his own anxiety, Tony throws himself into work making dozens of Iron Man suits and preparing for a war he’s not even sure will come. These actions affect his relationship with Pepper and lay the groundwork for the moral quandaries that arise in Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War.
While most critics’ qualms with Iron Man 3 ultimately come down to the allegedly “unsatisfying” twist with the Mandarin, I feel like the twist is one of the highlights of the movie. Comic book fans hated that the Big Bad Mandarin turned out not to be the low key racist stereotype and instead was secretly a manipulative White Guy Tech Bro, which feels odd to me. I loved how Shane Black’s clever script played on the audience’s expectations of what a terrorist supposedly looks like and flipped that on its head. Guy Pearce was a formidable villain to Tony Stark, and is extremely believable as a post-9/11 adversary using weaponized technology.
To me, so much of Iron Man 3 is really about Tony going back to his roots and rediscovering himself in that Tennessee garage. Mirroring how he puts together his first Iron Man suit in the cave from the first Iron Man movie, Tony is reminded by the precocious young boy Harley that he’s a mechanic. Tony Stark’s value and character have never been defined by his superhero persona; he’s always been defined by his actions when he’s not wearing the suit. This point comes full circle when we learn that Tony was never in the Iron Man suit that saved a dozen people who were literally falling out of the sky during one of the most exciting sequences in Iron Man 3.
Ultimately, Tony saves the lives of hundreds of innocent bystanders in this movie with the aid of his genius technology, sure, but it’s when he’s out of the suit in Iron Man 3 that he most shines. It may take another decade, but I believe that one day everyone will see why Tony Stark’s character arc in this film is perhaps the most important in all of the MCU. If not, Shane Black and I can enjoy this one ourselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA7b28MBBXo
You’re right. On rewatching, I was surprised how much Iron Man 3 set up almost everything to follow. Without Iron Man 3, Tony wouldn’t have been able to tell Peter Parker, “If you’re nothing without the suit, you shouldn’t have it.”