Random Thoughts on Iron Man 2

[selenite0]

I took celticdragonfly out to the movies to celebrate Mother's Day. We saw Iron Man 2 and loved it. You do need to see the first one to appreciate it, it's a continuation, not a stand-alone story. We really want Natasha to have her own movie. Whee.

There's various stupid stuff in the movie, most of which I just ignored as comic-bookisms. A few forced me to throw brown penalty flags. The pretended impotence of the US government relative to Tony Stark was annoying enough to get a post of its own. Linear accelerators do not get adjusted with monkey wrenches. There are undiscovered elements out there. They're undiscovered because they break down faster than anyone can find them. This keeps them from being an OSHA-friendly replacement for whatever you'd been using.

A more subtle technical complaint: if you're making armored drones there's no point in making them bipedal. Tanks are shaped the way they are for a reason. You want to take advantage of the cube-square law--the less surface area you have the thicker the armor can be.

Tony and Pepper really aren't going to have a decent relationship until they're in the habit of being honest with each other. So, never.

Of all the high tech wonders shown in the movie the one I want the most is the augmented reality social display. Arrive somewhere and it automatically highlights the most important people and displays their identity and key data about them. Oh, yes, please. Heck, I'd settle for one with a "What's your name again?" button that'll pull it up on request.

All the fussing over whether Tony should have a monopoly of the Iron Man suits does involve a real issue: who can be trusted with that kind of power? The movie is a good argument against entrusting it to mentally unbalanced alcoholics. I know a fair number of people who wouldn't be happy with the US government having it. But once the genie is out of the bottle, what do you do with it?

This debate happened before with nuclear weapons. Heinlein tackled it with the stories "Solution Unsatisfactory," "The Long Watch," and Space Cadet. His method relied on recruiting people with the moral fiber to choose suicide over wealth and power to stick with their principles. I think the first title holds true. celticdragonfly came up with some ways to make that system more reliable. I pointed out she'd recreated the Guardians from Plato's Republic. She pointed out we were probably the only people who watched a superhero movie and wound up referencing Plato. Best practical possibility we came up with was a carefully recruited order of Catholic monks. Which would, of course, be the Brothers of St. Michael.

I completely agree with Howard Taylor about what Tony should be doing with his reactor.

Comments

I've written my rant

[drwex]

I couldn't touch the physics - not even a little. However, I think that was actually the least-bad part of the movie.

(That said, there are theoretical super-stable elements beyond the rapid-decay elements we're finding nowadays. The stuff I read says there ought to be a plateau of several long-term stable elements with really interesting properties if we could just figure out how to make them.)

Re: I've written my rant

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Read your rant. (http://drwex.livejournal.com/267060.html) I disagree on the villains--not that I think they're strong, but that I think they're right for the movie. If IM2 was a "man vs. man" plot you'd want a strong villain to dominate the story and be a worthy opponent. But it's really a "man vs. self" movie. Can Tony stop his self-destructive behavior and be a hero for real? This gets illustrated with villains who can beat Tony when he's drunk/moping/playing race car driver but lose as soon as he mans up.

Re: I've written my rant

[drwex]

Hurm. I see your point of view, but I think it's possible to do that sort of man v self story and have reasonable antagonists. How much of a hero does he have to be to beat a pathetic failure, a pointless psychopath, and a bunch of dreadful bomb-bots?

Re: I've written my rant

[drwex]

Oh and you should totally read the link in comments about why Pepper v1 was awesome and why Pepper v2 was so awful.

[rhjunior.livejournal.com]

oh indeed. But before plathering about "who should be trusted with?" We need to go back to a much more innate moral principle: No matter what the Grabby-crats in power may wish, it's Tony Stark's dang property. That suit and all the tech in it? The sweat of his brow. This country was founded on the principle that people have an inalienable right to wield both property AND power--- in fact that their right to wield both superseded even the authority of government.

And frankly, it's already been demonstrated that the U.S. government SUCKS at keeping a monopoly on power. Either they abuse it, or it slips through their fingers. The entire Cold War started because we couldn't keep a cap on the A-bomb; the current burning fuse in the Mideast is due to our willingness to let rogue states play with nuclear power. Frankly, power does best when it's kept in the hands of the people.

As to Tony's suit? The only real innovation there-- despite some of the more clever features of the armor--- is the energy source, and the repulsors. Everything else is canonically indicated to already be in the public domain, or well within the technological capabilities thereof. The wallbanger for me was that nobody else was able to approximate the sophistication of the armor suit without Stark's patents. That should have been simplistic, doubly so in the light of the fact that the biggest obstacle, proving it could be done, had already been passed. If the government was going to be after anything, the arc reactor, and maybe the repulsors, would be it.

Bipedality, well it makes sense. Making a humanoid robot serves the purpose of making it capable of using preexisting anthropocentric equipment--- like stairs, sidewalks and doorknobs. Tanks can't do room-by-room sweeps.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

The software and user interface is farther ahead of the state of the art than the reactor is.

As for tanks, hovering one-meter-wide ones can go room to room quite well, and as spheres they'd be much more survivable and powerful than the humanoid shapes.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

(a) Heinlein's Space Cadet in fact quite pointedly references Plato; his Patrol is Plato's Guardians, and the marines are the Auxiliaries.

(b) If you read the Republic with a certain slant, it actually looks like a libertarian book. Plato says in so many words that when two people trade, they both gain from it (much superior to Aristotle's nonsensical belief that the value of the two goods is equal); he points to the wealth that results from this and the need to protect it; and he asks how to keep the protectors from becoming corrupt, and proposes to deny them both private ownership and identifiable inheritance . . . as I recall, he doesn't want this for the general population, but only for the Guardians.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

The distinction that we were wrestling with was recruiting. The Space Patrol took teen-aged applicants and tried to weed out the power-hungry ones. A task made harder by the fact that anyone wanting ultimate power would be drawn to the Patrol. Plato reduced that by taking future Guardians away from their parents and educating them to abhor personal gain. Historical examples of that haven't always worked well--plenty of greedy adults have come from well educated backgrounds. Our consensus was that if you're going to have a Guardian-type class the best way was to recruit them from adults of fully formed character who've displayed the characteristics you want.

Nobody who wants to join the club gets to be a member. :)

In practice I'd rather stick with a volunteer force under democratic control. It's working well so far.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

A month or two back I read a social history of the U.S. Naval Academy in the 19th century, which shed a lot of light on Heinlein's attitudes: his Anglophilia, his belief in the importance of devotion to an ethical ideal, his mild contempt for commerce and la basesse de l'homme interessé. About the only thing he didn't pick up was the Navy's respectable Episcopalianism.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

My google-fu has failed on "la basesse de l'homme interessé"--what's that mean?

I've never thought of Heinlein as contemptuous of commerce. DD Harriman and Lazarus Long were both proud of their profits. Though shelving him next to Heyer does make it hard for me to notice mild contempt.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The lowness of the interested person. "Interested" means roughly "self-interested," or "has something at stake."

We were talking of Space Cadet, where the three motivational types are the man driven by ethical standards, the man driven by pride and glory, and the man driven by profit, represented in space by the Patrol, the marines, and the merchants; and the figure of the merchant category is Girard Burke, who is a weasel. I'm not sure I can find as vivid an example of the trope in Heinlein's other fiction.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I read Burke as someone who'd soon be regarded as a weasel by other merchants but I grant that's not shown in story.