Quote Originally Posted by GoktimusPrime View Post
Saw it last night, enjoyed it. I agree that it would've been nicer to see Tony Stark in armour more, but I can understand that the writers wanted to increase the plot complication for Tony by removing the armour from him and letting him be the hero without his powers. So that was an interesting angle.

The kid in the garage was also an interesting concept -- the idea of another potential Tony Stark in the making (i.e. child prodigy), only that he lives in a fairly mundane setting raised by a single mum, whereas Tony was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had all the best opportunities in life handed to him. So it was pretty sweet to see Tony kinda passing on the torch at the end when he pimped out that kid's shed.

The one thing that kinda bugged me was the surgery to remove the palladium shrapnel at the end... why didn't he get that done before?!? I thought the whole reason why he had the miniature arc generator in his chest was because the shrapnel was too close to his heart or whatever to remove. He was imprisoned with a doctor... and say even if that doctor lacked the resources to surgically remove it, why didn't he then have the procedure done when he returned to the United States? Especially in Iron Man 2 when the poison was spreading... weird.

Unless the procedure to remove it was only recently developed... but I don't recall the movie explaining that to the audience.
I'm wondering if that was a deliberate choice by the film makers: Stark is always looking forward, looking forward to the next development, the next invention. In IM2 he was so caught up with his suits, etc (which he needed the arc reactor to power) that he didn't really think that removing the arc reactor and the shrapnel was a way of ridding himself of the palladium poisoning, he was too caught up with "being Iron Man" (as he admitted at the end of the first film). Wasn't there a line of dialogue in one of the first two films where he said something like "there is only this, there is only the next mission"? I thought that perhaps the events of IM3 (and his time relying on himself and his smarts rather than the power of the suits) caused him to re-evaluate his life and priorities a little bit.

It may be a little flimsy, but it's a theory.

I was a little more bothered by the shrapnel being removed in IM3 not looking at all like the tiny barbs that Yensen showed him in the first film - a barb like that would be more likely to be an issue to remove (and kinda fits the "inching towards his heart thing"), rather than the shard type thing that was actually removed. But that's probably being a bit finicky - I'm not certain any explanation for the metal thing in his chest stands up to any measure of medical or scientific scrutiny. I'm happy to suspend my disbelief.