Iron Man/Fridge: Difference between revisions

=== Film Examples ===

* Something I only got the second time I saw it is the way the film manipulates the viewer's expectations to get your attention away from the real villain and the real plot. The people who kidnap Tony Stark appear at first to be your standard stereotypical Hollywood-issue Muslim extremists from [[Qurac|Unspecifiedistan]], and the scene where they record a video of Stark is deliberately set up to look like real-life hostage videos -- but the kidnappers' dialogue is not subtitled, which allows the filmmakers to pull the wool over our eyes. In fact, {{spoiler|they're not Muslim extremists at all. Their leader wants to conquer ''Asia'', and even says as much, but the Al-Qaeda-like trappings of the camp where Stark is held were enough to make me assume that they were the throwaway first-act villains who wouldn't be seen again, just as they were in the comics continuity. When Pepper translates the video and we learn that they were actually working for Obadiah Stane all along... }} well, I for one thought that was a ''very'' well executed bait-and-switch. And if you look carefully, there's a bonus for comics fans: {{spoiler|the organization is called the Ten Rings, aka the source of the Mandarin's power.}} -puritybrown

** Confirmed: the Mandarin is the villain.

* In the first ''Iron Man'', while the Air Force convoy is driving along the road, they pass by an Afghan farmer with a goat. For the first twenty or so times I watched the movie, I just thought that was a harmless bit of scenery. Then I suddenly remembered: insurgents sometimes use otherwise innocuous farmers (or insurgents disguised as farmers) as spotters for ambushes on convoys! That was how the Ten Rings knew when precisely to hit Tony's convoy!

* When Tony has Pepper overload the Arc Reactor in the factory, it shoots a huge beam of energy into the sky. Exactly the same thing that Tony does with his own, smaller Arc Reactor when he fires his "chest beam" at Stane earlier in the fight!

* Why would they test the Jericho missile in an active war zone as opposed to say...Nevada?

** They weren't testing it. They were ''demonstrating'' it.

* It was pretty clear from the beginning that Vanko/Whiplash was supposed to be an [[Evil Counterpart]] to Tony Stark, but it wasn't until later that I figured out just how much he was supposed to mirror Stark. Both men are seen building their first power suits from scratch using substandard technology. Both men were imprisoned and escaped. Both men eventually found ways to use the resources provided to them to build a weapon for someone who thought they were in control in order to build weapons for themselves and exact their vengeance.

* How can Tony end the weapons contract with the government one-sided? wouldn't such a contract be obligatory?

** The sole fact that Rhodey could pilot the armor without any problem, unlike Tony during his firsts steps at flying, indicates that Tony has previously allowed Rhodey to use the Mark II armor to learn how to fly it. Which is a callback to Rhodey wanting to fly it in 1. It's likely he asked Tony who equiped it with it's own arc reactor. Also the Iron Man armors require a lot of CPU. While Tony's own armor is always connected to Jarvis, this would mean the Mark II had it's own CPU too.

** It's also possible {{spoiler|Natalie/Natasha}} put the reactor in and was engineering to get a suit of armor away from Stark and in government hands. Given {{spoiler|her comments to Tony right before the birthday and her statements at the end that Tony's unqualified to operate the suit}}, the whole thing might have been a [[Plan]] to replace Tony with War Machine.

*** Nope, Black Widow says that Rhodes shouldn't have even been able to use one of the suits unauthorized... which means that Tony must have already anticipated Rhodes taking up a suit. Probably not under those exact circumstances, admittedly.

** Not only that: Added layer of meaning in that, in Russian, {{spoiler|the word "salute" (салют, pronounced /salyut/) means "fireworks, firework show"}}

* One meta joke that didn't hit me until after the 2nd viewing. In ''Iron Man 2'', Rhodes shows up unexpectedly during Stark's hearing. Stark puts a pause on the action to go have a little chat with him, where Rhodes (being played by a different actor) says something to effect of: "Yeah, it's me. Deal with it, and let's move on." Just in case anyone in the audience was complaining about the switch.

** Whether it was indeed a cut piece from the first film and incorporated into the second as a major plot piece, I must say that I would have to go Tony's drinking of that green chlorophyll goop to try and keep his blood healthy. Isn't he drinking the SAME stuff in the first Iron Man when he's telling JARVIS to use gold titanium for the new MK III suit? He must have caught on early that the palladium in the reactor was already giving him problems and rather heap on a problem with Tony in the first one, they must have shelved it and made it part of the second film. -bw3viper

*** The other guns were only ''manufactured'' by Hammertech, but are real-life guns that have their own designers that worked out all the kinks. The Ex-Wife was the only one ''designed'' by Hammertech.

*** I always got the impression that Hammer was fine with conventional weapons - it's when he tried to get fancy like Stark (as with the [[Powered Armor]] or the Ex-wife) that he crashed and burned (he's probably not that hot with computer stuff either, going by Vanko...)

* I just got the reference to John McCain's statement during the economic collapse of September, 2008, when Pepper's on the phone after returning from Monaco trying to salvage the company - "Yes, but the fundamentals of the company are very, very strong." I hadn't noticed that previously because the line is so perfect to the situation that it doesn't seem forced or worked-in at all.

* At the end of the climactic battle at the end of the first one, Tony tells Pepper to blow the reactor through the roof and at Tony and Obadiah. I always thought it was lame that Tony would "miraculously" survive with the flicker of the chest reactor after it, but later it occurred to me that it could have been that Tony, being the arc reactor expert and general physics genius that he is, knew or calculated that he was light enough to be pushed out of the way and not take the brunt of the blast, while Obadiah was not. Pepper just thought that he would die, but he knew he wouldn't.

** And why would he need to convince Rhodey with such an elaborate scheme, instead of, y'know, just asking him? Because he already did ask, and Rhodey refused to participate, in the first movie.

** At the end of the second movie, Rhodey asks Tony if he can borrow the suit for a little while longer, and Tony flatly answers no. Considering that much of Tony's dialogue was improvisd, this might have been a throwaway joke - But it could also be taken to mean that Tony doesn't consider Rhodey to be borrowing the suit, because he's already given it to him permanently.

* When he tries to talk Pepper into taking a European vacation(and tell her he's dying in a relaxed setting), he tries to pine her with a handmade omelette... that looks like some kind of diseased sea slug(and took three hours to make). It's highly possible that he's not a good cook, but here's the [[Fridge Brilliance]] moment: at 30,000+ feet, '''''no one is!''''' Low air pressure at extremely high altitudes means that heat transfer is screwed up, and skillets, ovens, etc. don't work as expected - that's why frozen pizzas and such have alternate cooking times for high altitudes such as ''mountains''. It's why airline food comes in little microwave packages - that's the only cooking method that works on a plane.

** But aren't planes internally pressurized to mimic ground-level conditions? You know, to keep people from suffocating and dying? He's not cooking the omelette out on the wing. Airline food is probably microwaved not because it's the only cooking method that works, but because there isn't room for a kitchen.

** Wait a minute... if the theories about {{spoiler|what happened to Schmidt at the end of ''Captain America'' are true and he was just transported to a different dimension by the Tesseract, is it possible that the arc reactor did the same thing and Stane is still alive somewhere? After all, they [[Never Found the Body]]...}}

*** Well, the beam fired up just knocked out the Iron Monger suit and (possibly) killed Stane. He then fell with the suit into the blown reactor.

* Where did Howard Stark come up with all those radical notions about new elements and developing Arc Reactor technology? [[Captain America: The First Avenger|He studied HYDRA-adapted Asgard tech during World War II.]]

** Further, Tony is adamant on his stance that the government can't have his Iron Man suit, as well as refusing to let Stane study his miniaturized reactor in the first film. This is because, as the son of the man who studied HYDRA's weapons, he'd likely know exactly the sort of damage weapons derived from the Arc Reactor tech could do.

** Best part? Vanko ''got the Ten Rings exactly what they wanted.'' By giving Vanko false ID and a ticket to get him to Monaco so he could pick a fight with Stark, they scared the US government into seizing Iron Man technology. Acting on behalf of his superiors, Rhodey stole a suit, and let Hammer pull it apart. Between Senator Stern's political/military connections and Hammer's criminal connections, '''Stark's technology is out of the bottle.''' The Ten Rings, via the connection the military refused to acknowledge, now has its "gift of iron soldiers". And "A man with a dozen of these could rule all of Asia." Say Hi to the Mandarin for me, Stern.

*** Here's where things get Meta: Tony Stark's primary mission for the Iron Man armor, as stated in the first film, was to keep his weapons tech out of enemy hands, ESPECIALLY the weapons tech ripped from his own Iron Man armor designs. The above point ensures that each new film in the Iron Man franchise will have an opening for a sequel.