The Four Color Media Monitor

Ben Shapiro's taken his own look at the third Iron Man movie, and reading this, it looks like the worst fears of anybody worried about its political approach may have been proven correct. He says it makes light of Islamic terrorism, and by that he doesn't mean "shed". He means it trivializes. Shapiro says that:

...the whole enterprise has an anti-American feel. The film opens with an act of terrorism by what appears to be a terrifying Islamist who calls himself The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). The Mandarin is obviously a planning genius, a scholar of world history (or at least of the works of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn), and a frightening foe with access to the President of the United States’ cell phone.

Except that he isn’t. As it turns out, The Mandarin, whom we are assured will shoot you in the head if you dare to look at him, is actually a drug-addled Britisher in the employ of two brilliant white scientists. He explains to Tony Stark that he has been wooed by a steady stream of hallucinogenics and women. He is, in short, an idiot.

If only this could be called good news that the Mandarin isn't actually American. Unfortunately, as further explained by John Boot over at PJ Media:

It turns out that the Mandarin is actually an actor, and a bad one — a Cockney hired from the fringes of the British stage scene by mastermind Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce). We first begin to suspect the Mandarin isn’t actually a terrorist when we meet him behind the scenes — he’s warning a couple of gorgeous babes he shares a bed with that after his latest trip to the bathroom, “You might want to give that 20 minutes.”

Millions of fans too young to remember 9/11 will line up to see Iron Man 3, but it’s not just to them that Hollywood’s leading filmmakers have a duty. Reducing the alarmingly durable threat of Islamist fundamentalism to potty humor is an insult not just to Daniel Pearl’s family but to the millions of Americans who continue to wage the War on Terror. It’s as if, a decade after Hitler, a movie portrayed a Hitler-like villain as a harmless oaf who was no threat to anyone.

What?!? This is ridiculous. Even if the film doesn't explicitly mention Islamofascism or make its villains such, the approach here to the terrorism subject itself is still insulting to the intellect, and a cheat for anyone who was hoping the Mandarin would be the prime adversary and not just a second fiddle. For a comics fan, it's stupefying, and for outsiders it's just as much a betrayal.

And back to Shapiro's review, he also notes that:

Not only does the film label Islamic terrorism a non-threat, it mocks expressions of patriotism (Don Cheadle’s Iron Patriot is derided as an idiotic knockoff of Iron Man, and foolishly breaks down random doors in Pakistan when the real villains are in that terrorism hotspot, Miami). The real threat of terrorism, says Hollywood, lies in all of us. It lies in our frustrations and our anger.

Oh, that is alarming and embarrassing alright. I wonder if reducing the Mandarin to a theater actor was part of the filmmakers' efforts to appease the Chinese? In fact, something I may have missed earlier was that this movie's rendition doesn't feature the ten power rings in use. Even for someone new to comics but old to science fiction, that would surely have to be one of the biggest cheats of the film. Suppose the Baron Harkonnen in Frank Herbert's Dune novels used similar weapons, and a new adaptation were filmed without them? Fans of the series would be equally justified in feeling let down.

Also, from some of the reviews I found, it looks like Tony Stark doesn't spend as much time in armor as he could. How that's supposed to please the audience I have no idea. Yet none of this is as bad as the filmmakers sellout to both China and political correctness of the worst kind.

Labels: Europe and Asia, Iron Man, islam and jihad, marvel comics, politics, terrorism