Iron Man 3

The first official trailer is now out, which reveals the main villain will be The Mandarin, played by Sir Ben Kingsley.

Yeah. Cool.

Totally on board, hopefully the story will be far better than 2's.

Shane Black is doing this? That could go either way. Best case scenario: Kiss Kiss Iron Man.

Best case would be The Last Iron Manscout.

Iron Man's nemesis is a Tolkien Dwarf this time around?

The Mandarin has 10 magic rings (but they're actually science rings). I wonder if they'll do anything or just be decoration? I mean we have Thor and Asgardians and now, the Comic Cube and possibly the Infinity Gems, so we can get away with a little magic, but I think 10 magic rings will be a hard sell in this Marvel movie-verse.

On the other hand, now that we've seen him with other superheroes it would be nice to see him fighting something other than variations on his own suit.

Magic vs. Technology could make for an interesting theme, too.

So...Mandarin is like 10 times dorkier than Green Lantern?

Yeah I mean he's basically omnipotent but he has to use different rings to do different things, and the rings have cooldowns.

I don't understand what Ben Kingsley's accent is supposed to be. At all. Who talks like that?

I love the accent. He sounds a bit like Hugo Weaving doing Agent Smith.

In the animated series by the french, the mandarin rings give the mandarin a magic suit of armor, not all that different than the iron man suit, but scarier looking, and the rings just unlocked different powers for the suit.

He decided that Tom Hardy shouldn't have all the 'supervillain with a weird affectation' fun.

The Mandarin would like you to kiss his rings. And after that, he gives you permission to die.

Isn't The Mandarin from a made-up place? I, for one, am happy if this made-up place has it's own accent instead of middle-class-English-means-foreign.

As per the most recent telling of his origin (by the Mandarin himself, who is a notoriously unreliable narrator), he's ethnically Chinese, from either mainland China or Hong Kong. The rings themselves were found in a Makluan spaceship and were recently revealed to be parts of the ship's drive and propulsion system, each containing the soul of a Makluan warrior that imbued the ring with a specific power. Recently he tried to force Stark to build him ten giant mecha that he would transfer these alien warrior souls into so that they could eat the Earth's core. BECAUSE COMIC BOOKS.

So they're superscience!

So they're magic!

Superscience!

Magic!

Super- wait... what?

Yeeeeaaaah.

The Mandarin is a great villain in the sense that there's always something wacky he's going to pull out of his ass and take utterly seriously no matter how ridiculous it is. Chop off his hands? He'll have the rings burned into his spine until he gets new hands. Kill him? God help the next guy who puts on the rings because the Matter-Rearranger ring will reconstruct his body into the Mandarin's, while the Mento-Intensifier ring transfers the Mandarin's mind into the new body. Serial immortality, bitches! You can't just get rid of him, and he'll never win because he's the villain who just does not get it - he's the kind of guy who's so insane that doing something like "make ten giant robots to eat the Earth's core" sounds like a perfectly valid idea.

The thing is, you can't just dismiss him as a joke because he's so goddamn powerful. He'll never be a world-conqueror because his attention's focused so laserlike on Tony Stark, the embodiment of Western capitalism and greed. Stark's personally humiliated the Mandarin over and over again. And even when the Mandarin gets the upper hand (in the recent "The Future" story arc that just wrapped up), he'll eventually let his guard down and fall prey to every Evil Overlord trope in the book. He's basically a Saturday morning cartoon villain given a bit of edge and legitimacy.

Sounds perfect for a live action movie that intends on taking itself at least somewhat seriously and aimed at the 18-35 year old crowd!

I expect the Mandarin character to get some significant changes precisely to avoid the whole cartoon villain thing.

Well, yeah. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has tended to adopt a slightly more real-world aesthetic. If they tie the Mandarin into the "Ten Rings" terrorist organization from the first movie, and give some passing explanation for the rings as either superscience, unexplained artifacts (which we know exist in-universe thanks to the Captain America film), or out-and-out magic - that'll be fine. The voiceover from the trailer would seem like the Mandarin is aiming to humble Stark and/or the West (again, a consistent character motivation with the comics) so it'll be interesting to see where they go with that.

In the comics, you have to realize this is a character who's been around for almost fifty years real-time and has continually been reimagined to fit current themes. "He's a Communist! No, wait, now he's a crime lord! Now he's a Chinese ubernationalist! Now he's the second coming of Genghis Khan! Crime lord again! Superscience megalomaniac! Wait, now he's a chi master with psychic powers! Okay, no, all that was bullshit, here's the real deal!"

Other villains have it easy. Red Skull? "Nazi" - and that's all you need to say! "Nazi" is always an acceptable villain background!

So if you accept that Iron Man is Marvel's answer to Batman, think of Mandarin as Marvel's answer to Ra's al Ghul. That's probably how they'll play it in the movie, and the 10 Magic (science) Rings will probably just be miniaturized Stark-Tech weapons.

Batman, only awesome.

That's probably the best analogue, yeah.

No my dear Sir. Batman, only drunk...

Like I said!

I'm very interested to see how they play the rings in the 3rd film, especially since they deemed to give them semi-prominent footage in the above trailer. There's a small chance they bring magic into the movie universe, since they did bring in aliens and teleportation to the Avengers. But with this one seemingly set up to be (again) Stark's technology being used against him, isn't there an inherent risk in making the rings StarkTech? They've got to go in a different direction I think to stay fresh.

Wait. So what the fuck is the Iron Patriot paintjob / armor doing in the movie? That was... confusing.

I assumed it was War Machine, but I may be assuming wrong.

It also has his name on the armor.

Ah, alright. It was just a bit of a mindfuck, since I knew they weren't going to have some kind of Spiderman crossover and actually have Norman Osborne stealing the suits.

I think you mean "legitimately seized by an appointed representative of the US government", citizen.

You scum! You HAMMER apologist! How dare you, with that avatar! The Prince of Power and his eromenos would be ASHAMED.

New teaser spot.

Fuck to the yes.

I'm glad they don't have to deal with all the pre-Avengers baggage like in Iron Man 2 (I'm complaining about see Black Widow though...).

How many in the air?
13.

Goddamn, that's an effectively tense scenario is just 10 seconds.

Setting the stakes at "You can only save 4" definitely ups the ante though.