By now you've all seen Iron Man 3 in theaters. And probably about 90% of the comic book fans have likely walked out into the lobby, asking themselves the exact same question.
"THAT'S THE MANDARIN?!"
Almost everyone over the past year and a half has been on the edge of their seats, wondering what to expect when they heard Tony Stark's arch-nemesis was finally being brought to life for the third installment in the film series. After all, they've been hinting at him since the first movie via the terrorist group "The Ten Rings" (who by the way are left out of in this film). And with the sense of realism brought to the franchise since 2008 everyone has been wondering just how to bring a maniacal robe-wearing Chinese wizard into a down-to-earth motion picture.
You know, the same universe that introduced us to this...
Well, being even just a mediocre fan of the Iron Man mythology, I can honestly say I was shocked...no...horrified at what the studio decided was "the best way" to introduce this supervillain into a cinematic format. Because as we all know, the Mandarin in Iron Man 3 is not real. Ben Kinglsey plays an actor playing the Mandarin, payed by Guy Pearce playing by Aldrich Killian. Confusing? I watched the friggin' movie and I'm still bewildered. And ticked off!
Why? Because this is just shoving in a plot twist for the sake of shocking the viewers, which hardly ever works. This is not a justified twist in terms of the story being told in this movie. The Mandarin first of all was shoe-horned into this film from the start and the pay-off received just leaves a bad taste in your mouth if you've been waiting years, like me, to see him finally trade blows with Robert Downey Jr. And the worst part is, there were some pretty simple ways to make this character work without sinking to the lowest common denominator. Here's a list of the options starting with getting the character as accurate as possible to the source material.
1) THE MANDARIN FINDS TEN RINGS IN THE WRECKAGE OF THE CHITAURI INVASION
One of the themes of this movie is picking up in the aftermath of the Avengers where Tony realizes that there are things out there he doesn't understand. He's just walked out of a battle with aliens, gods, super-soldiers and technology he never knew existed. The Chitauri invaded and Tony's world was changed completely as he knows it.
Enter the Mandarin...
If you know about the Mandarin, you know his origin story off by heart: guy finds a spaceship with ten "magic" rings that allow him various superpowers. Technically, they're just alien technology that give the appearance of magic. And so, the Mandarin uses these powers to start taking on his enemies.
Well, as you will recall from the Avengers the Chitauri didn't exactly leave a small impression from their attack on New York. The streets were littered with corpses, guns, ships and creatures. Likely the government hauled them off to some secure place like Area 51 following the events of the film.
So some psycho in the desert, who already has a terrorist cell that has a grudge against Tony Stark - remember him blowing up a cave full of a hundred terrorists called the Ten Rings? - sits there and thinks, "Wait a second. You're telling me there's a military base out there with hundreds of alien guns and weaponry that could take out an entire city? Boys! Get in the helicopters! We're breaking into Area 51!"
Few scenes later, Mandarin and his guys find the alien souvenirs, breaks into a ship where he finds ten rings, slips them on his hand. BOOM! There you have it: easy introduction to a series that has already established there are "magical" forces existing in it and fans get almost exactly what they want. You could even have something like Tony trying to reverse engineer the alien tech in order to boost his company's production line.
Only things that would have made this a little hard to pull off is that it sounds a little too much like Captain America: The First Avenger. You know, people finding technology from another world and using it to their advantage? But still, with Tony being a technology-driven character there are many ways that it could develop the tone of the series. And don't give me any excuses like, "Well, it wouldn't fit the realistic atmosphere of the Iron Man series!" By round three of this trilogy, Shane Black took over. We were bound to get a new kind of take on just what works in an Iron Man movie. No, we didn't get aliens back on the screen, but we got guys pumped with radioactive heat powers that can regenerate entire limbs on command.
Yeah, that's more plausible.
2) MANDARIN IS A HACKER WHO GETS CONTROL OVER TONY'S ARMOUR
One of the things implied in the trailers was that Tony was going to lose control over the armour and it was going to go all Skynet and try and kill him.
Didn't happen...
In fact, the closest you get is that the Iron Patriot armour gets stolen by Alrich Killian's men who then override it so they can use it for their own evil schemes.
Haven't seen that before, have we?
Well at the end of Iron Man 2, it left a possible dilemma open to speculation. "Wait a second, some guy was able to take over one of the Iron Man suits and almost got people killed. If someone can hack one Iron Man suit, what if they got control over all of them?"
Well I can safely say that idea was tossed into the screenwriter's waste basket.
But getting back to the Mandarin, this is what could have happened. The Mandarin could be this scientific genius who is controlling or working for the Ten Rings. He's this cyber-terrorist hacker who sits at a computer, probably hasn't seen the light of day for a month, and learns to control technology remotely.
Alrich Killian comes to him and wants him to hack the Iron Man armour. He wants the public to think Tony's gone rogue so in turn people will come to Killian's AIM company. Because let's face it, the moral of every one of these movie's is that every corporate other than Stark is a tyrannical sociopath.
So the Mandarin develops this kind of remote control tech that has him wearing these gloves with cables that allow him to physically maneuver the Iron Man armour however he chooses. That way you get the symbolism of the Ten Rings and the movie turns into a story about Tony trying to get control over his technology again. Seperating the man from the armour...exactly what this movie was trying to do.
See this way, the Mandarin is actually a legitimate threat. It even works with the movie's impression that the Ten Rings are able to hack TVs around the world with their threat videos. But of course, that's not what we got. So, moving to Option 3 that at least could work in the story of the Iron Man 3 movie that was delivered...
3) ALDRICH KILLIAN NEEDS A SCAPEGOAT TERRORIST...SO HE GETS A REAL ONE!
Personally, riding on the hype of this movie I didn't mind that they seemed to imply that Killian was the main bad guy. I just wanted to see them deliver the Mandarin in an intimidating and respectable manner.
I didn't even mind that the guy wasn't going to have magic rings or was being played by Sir Ben Kingsley, who obviously is not Chinese. By all means, I welcomed Kingsley aboard. I was interested in seeing them make this kind of Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now archetype who was studying all kinds of war strategies and went insane when he realized how crazy it was out on the battlefield. It was an interesting way to bring the character to life while staying true to the tone of the film series.
Nope. Apparently the way the studio executives thought best to treat the character was to turn him into a British drunk watching soccer games in Malibu. (Headslam)
Alright fine, Aldrich Killian wanted to execute his evil schemes and needed somebody to take the fall for him. So why didn't he just hire a real terrorist so that he could sell the idea even stronger? We've already established with the first movie that Obadiah Stane was able to contact the Ten Rings to make Tony's kidnapping look like a sneak attack. You're telling me Killian can't go to some terrorist cell or mercenary group, pay them to kill who he wants and do his bidding?
Having the Mandarin as Killian's attack dog would have been better than having him as his scarecrow.
4) AND IF ALL ELSE FAILS...LET TREVOR SLATTERY GET INJECTED WITH THE EXTREMIS VIRUS
Let's just say the writers and producers wrote themselves into a corner. They had no way out, they had to make the Mandarin some schmuck in cooky robes and make Killian the real mastermind. Fine...but they still could have given some dignity to the character.
If you'll recall in the movie, we find out that Trevor Slattery is the actor who has been posing as the Mandarin all this time. Killian hired him because he was a stage performer who had a drug habit and he therefore paid him in...you guessed it...booze and narcotics!
Alright fine, you could even work with that. So Tony manages to corner Slattery and the game is up, Killian panics. He knocks Tony out and Slattery goes back to what he's best at...sitting in his armchair with a beer can watching the tube.
Here's where the scene could have played differently...
Slattery comes downstairs to where Tony is being held hostage by Killian. Why? Screw it, he needed to pee. They treated this guy like a joke anyway. Maybe he just wanted to see what Tony wanted to kill him for. After all, you'd be a little curious in a man's motive if he pointed a gun at your head, wouldn't you?
Slattery overhears Killian's evil monologue about Extremis and how it can make you super-powered and invulnerable. Slattery is head over heels in love with this super-drug. After all, the dude's a junkie. He grabs a syringe, pumps himself with Extremis and goes insane with power. That way, we get at least one fight scene with Tony and "The Mandarin" even if he is a source of comic relief.
If you even wanted to sell it stronger, have the buffoon mistake Extremis for heroine! That way you get the audience laughing, which was obviously the director's intent, AND you at least give the fans an impression of what they were hoping for! You don't just tease them with a bad guy they paid money to see fight Iron Man only to find out he's some loser who couldn't fire a water gun let alone an AK-47!
IN CONCLUSION
These are just my theories of how to make the Mandarin work in the Iron Man series. You're telling me that a room full of writers and producers couldn't have come up with better? These are people who have spent years writing up masterpieces of cinema, making characters like the freakin' Sandman look interesting. The direction that they seemed to have been taking the Mandarin would have worked in this movie. Why did they have to deliver such a cop-out execution? Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine was adapted better than this guy!
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