Iron Man 3: a review from a comic book nerd & dad

Iron Man 3: a review from a comic book nerd dad –
TIRADE ALERT

Last night I took my awesome wife out to see iron man 3. I have been crazy excited about this movie for ages. We bought tickets hours ahead of time and showed up 30 min early, greeted by a nice long long of fanboys and 4 year olds. 4 year olds? Let me segway here for a moment. I have many friends that let their kids see movies like this and ones that are PG-13 when the kids are clearly 6 years away from ever meeting that restriction age. I am fully aware that some PG movies play like PG-13 and some PG-13 movies really could pass for PG. I also know that every parent gets to choose how they parent. We might be in the extreme in that we haven’t let any of our kids, including our 12 year old, see any of the comic book movies.

The reason is simple… Innocence.

It is a word we seemed to have lost along the way in regards to our kids. We live in a day in age when 15 year olds can get the morning after pill, children bring guns to school, bullies no longer just pull hair, and terrorism can come from your next door neighbor. It’s possible some of my friends might be mad at me for saying this, but as parents I think more than ever we need to guard the innocence in our children. Notice I didn’t say put them in a bubble, but there is a difference between our kids just experiencing life and parents introducing violence and sex into an 8 year olds brain and heart. I will get back to that in a second.

This Iron Man was fantastic. It had every element I love from the comic, the other iron man films and even tying in the avengers through the movie. Some of the twists were interesting and I will eliminate spoilers here. Some changes I liked and some I didn’t.

The writing in this film is brilliant. Character development, story arc, love interest, and it keeps you entertained from beginning to end. Through the movie we start to see bits of humility shine through stark and yet we retain his witty ego which is a blast to watch. I would have loved to have seen iron mans Extensis armor. I can’t wait for Avengers 2.

Gwyneth Paltrow, an actress I am normally not a fan of, was pretty great in the film.Gwyneth is a woman who supposedly works out every day for 2 hours with personal trainer to the stars, Tracy Anderson. I actually have one of Tracy’s videos that my wife and I have worked out to and it kicked our tails. What I noticed in the film was they made sure to as much as humanly possible show Gwyneth’s Abs. At the end of the credits I was waiting for a workout video info-mercial.

Now back to what I started with. This was the most violent and dark film of the marvel superhero genre so far. It didn’t bother me one bit because I am 36 and have been reading comics all my life. I am a nerd/geek and proud of it. While I was watching a film a film with a hero that of course saves the day it also had terrorism, people being burned, people being shot, evil characters in bed with two women, and very close to home flickering scenes of maniacal evil people. The whole time I sat there I enjoyed one of my favorite characters, but only could slightly because I watched parents bring their 4 year olds into the room. In front of us 7 and 8 year olds were cheering their hero while watching scenes sprinkled with violence that was growing them up too fast.

I can go on for days on this, but let me end with this:
Iron man gets 5 stars from me. Its brilliant and dark and awesome. It is also PG-13 for a reason.
The parents who brought there 4-11 year olds into the theater last night get -12 stars because they chose not to exercise wisdom and are subjecting their kids to “comic book violence”. As much as we would not like to admit it the “comic book violence” we saw on that movie is happening all around the world even as I type this.

So GO SEE IRON MAN 3!!!! but… for the sake of keeping our children innocent for just a little bit longer please don’t take them with you.