arnabocean

I’m not a fan of the Hangover franchise. I guess it’s been popular, but I never felt the urge to watch Hangover II after watching the original.

It wasn’t a bad movie, just that I don’t need to watch three movies on that theme.

Or even two.

More on Iron Man 3, featuring Dr. Drang

In my previous post about Iron Man, here’s what I’d written:

A more technical quibble: In the sequence where Tony Stark gets his first taste of the super humans, a sidekick attempts to melt the columns of a water tower to bring the water tower down over Tony Stark. The water tower column is shown to be glowing a bright orange, which means it’s seriously hot, I’m guessing at least about 800-900C. At this temperature, should the column not have failed by itself? In the movie, the column needed the efforts of the villain of the hour to “pull” the column apart to make it collapse… I just have a feeling that was very wrong; the column would have failed all by itself way before the villain needed to pull it down.

Turns out someone else noticed this too. Here’s Dr. Drang explaining the same thing in much, much more detail, with way more numbers to back him up.

The problem is that the leg would have failed long before it got to that orangey yellow state. Even though it doesn’t melt until about 2500° F, steel just isn’t very strong above 1000° F.

Do go read the whole post; it’s as excellent as always from Dr. Drang.

Iron Man 3—Some thoughts

Iron Man 3 has been out in theaters for a while now, and we went to watch it today. We liked it—but didn’t love it. It’s a great third movie, especially after the fluffy and plotless second movie. But it’s far from perfect.

Here are some thoughts why. (Spoilers ahead.)

• The essential force of evil in the movie is a new technology that modifies the DNA of organisms (in this case, humans) to alter their characteristics. In the present case, the altered humans possess the ability to produce heat to about 3000C, and re-grow tissues and limbs at will. This means that people with physical disabilities are able to remove said disabilities, and villains with severed limbs are able to regrow those limbs. This also means metallic projectiles (such as bullets) don’t have any effect per se, since (presumably) the internal heat of the person helps to simply absorb the projectile.

  This is great stuff, and has immense possibilities to explore how such super-humans may be defeated. But all that the movie comes up with is… explosions. More explosions, powerful explosions, explosions at close range. And this somehow defeats said super human villains.

  Didn’t the writers think this through at all? Explosions are damaging to humans because of (a) heat generated (b) metallic projectiles, that damage the body. The super humans are immune to these effects! How on earth are they getting damaged?!

  The pathetic thing is that it doesn’t take too much thought to come up with interesting possibilities. When the super human characteristic is to produce heat, what happens if you super cool them? How about liquid nitrogen? Suddenly cooling a very hot body does have very detrimental effects, including making it very brittle and even breaking it if the cooling is unequal. Since this is science fiction, there could have been all sorts of interesting phenomena there.

  But no. Not as long as there are explosions to solve everything!

• Tony Stark has created a mechanism so that the Iron Man suit can self-assemble automatically right onto his body, wherever he happens to be. To implement this, he is shown injecting himself with 50 presumably micro-devices that help the Iron Man suit ‘find’ him and ‘know’ where to assemble itself.

  This should mean that this mode of self assembly should be only possible on Tony himself. Indeed, when Rhodes asks for such a suit, Stark responds with something that amounts to “No, they’re only linked to me.”

  But then, how on earth does the Iron Man suit assemble around Pepper Potts at the beginning of the movie? That should be impossible, no?

• If all of Tony Stark’s mansion and property are destroyed, how does he produce all of his Iron Man robots at will?

• During the final fight sequences, Iron Man’s arm is shown being split in two. How does Stark get away with his arm still intact?

• A more technical quibble: In the sequence where Tony Stark gets his first taste of the super humans, a sidekick attempts to melt the columns of a water tower to bring the water tower down over Tony Stark. The water tower column is shown to be glowing a bright orange, which means it’s seriously hot, I’m guessing at least about 800-900C. At this temperature, should the column not have failed by itself? In the movie, the column needed the efforts of the villain of the hour to “pull” the column apart to make it collapse… I just have a feeling that was very wrong; the column would have failed all by itself way before the villain needed to pull it down.

I really liked the movie, but it irks me when the details are all wrong. Tony Stark is great, and Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts is as elegant and as gracious as ever in all she does. Go watch the movie, and then tell me what you think. :)