The following article contains a MAJOR SPOILER regarding "Iron Man 3". It is strongly recommended that you do not read this until after you’ve viewed the film. Pick up the Blu-Ray, - released today - watch it, then come back and read this.
If you saw "Iron Man 3" this summer (given the $1 billion worldwide gross it enjoyed, chances are you did), you were probably caught off guard by The Mandarin. Given how he was displayed in the trailers, fans fully expected him to be the primary villain facing off against Iron Man. His measured speech delivered in an indeterminable accent threw a cloud of mystique over the character, played by Ben Kingsley. Where did he come from? Who are his allies? What does he want? He wears lavish robes, is adorned in jewelry, and sits on a throne. All of this means he MUST have power, and this is why we should fear him.
It’s not until you watch the film that you see Marvel has successfully orchestrated one of the greatest trailer misdirections of all time. It turns out The Mandarin isn’t a powerful terrorist leader at all. He’s just an actor, and a particularly goofy one at that. His entire existence was a ruse devised by Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) in order to satisfy his own evil plot. Writer and director Shane Black took Iron Man’s greatest nemesis from the comic books and reduced him to a punch-line; a meager pawn in the scheme of a villain that hardly appears in the comics at all.
And it’s an absolutely brilliant decision.
