This is really my problem with Marvel - the characters don't really have any kind of heroic code for the most part. I guess Spider-Man does and maybe Captain America, but I think I saw Captain America decapitate someone his sheild recently. They're not really superheroes, IMO. They're super...people I guess.
You are imposing your own classification on what is a hero. The term is subjective beyond belief. What is a hero to you might be a villain to someone else. Some supervillains are based on the ideal that the hero was more of a villain than a hero and so they act in accordance because they weren't good enough. The argument that heroic code makes Marvel characters unheroic because they don't match Superman or Batman, etc is a moot point. Its an interpretation, nothing more.
Since when did the police department adopt the motto "shoot to kill"? Are we Nazi's now? I'm pretty sure they're trained to shoot an extremity like in the shoulder or leg. At least, I really hope so.
Re-read my quote. When deadly force is warranted, they use it. They are trained when in a situation where they (one person making that snap judgment) feel it is warranted they take it. I also said that they are told its a last resort, please read through or quote through the whole thing if you are going to counterpoint.
Batman isn't entirely clean, but he doesn't kill and he didn't kill Ra's. He saved Ra's life once and Ra's returned the favor by leaving Bruce for dead in his mansion. It's more about balance than anything. If Ra's truly wanted to escape he could have, but the look on his face, almost at peace with the ending of his life at the hands of his own creation, leads me to believe that he may have been at peace in some sense. Either way, Batman didn't kill him.
He didn't save him. For Superman it would be a good as killing him by his own hand, because his moral code is much higher than Bruce's. For Batman it was a decision to not intervene and whatever will happen, will happen but you can't be naive and say that he didn't know he would die.
I just have a basic problem of superheroes getting involved in real-life conflicts. I find it disrespectful to what's going on over there. There's a reason DC never had Superman go over to Europe and wipe up the Nazi menace in an afternoon. It was disrespectful to the men and women dying over there.
Do you Comic homework. If you look at the films for example, Superman IV is about the nuclear arms race. Look at comics produced in the 40s you'll see plenty of adventures where Batman, Robin and Superman go after Nazis. One of the Superman comics I believe or Batman has the letter on the cover to "Slap a Jap". Comics are reflective of the culture going on now and many Comic Book artists and writers have used modern motifs, there are stories dealing with WWII, Vietnam, Korea, 9-11, the new birthing of the Captain America's series before he died had him in Afganistan fighting people there too.
The problem with this sequence from Iron Man is that it's never followed through. If the filmmakers had legitimized the sequence within Stark's mind instead of just having him watch a terrorist message on the evening news and getting angry enough to suit up and go and kill the terrorists, then I might be okay with it. But the sequence plays out like a typical Rambo-style action sequence where just swoops in, kills some bad guys, blows some stuff up, and goes home. Nothings said. No problems are solved. It's done for cheap thrills, nothing more.
The director felt it was given that he made the decision to save the innocent. You are giving it your own spin and perspective that it needed to be rationalized obviously since it wasn't a huge protest item, I would say you are in the minority. You can believe that you make you like the character more but the reality is I love the character and made that conclusion on my own and I'm glad the director didn't deem me daft enough not to make it but its just two different perspectives of the same scene. Doesn't make it wrong just show you didn't fully understand or care for it.
Also, he says he'll stop producing weapons when he returns during the press conference.
He says he'll shut it down but they don't actually say he did. Obi even goes to New York to calm the stockholders. The division that creates Iron Monger is part of the weapons group that are just now focusing on the Arc Reactor tech because he always planned on Iron Monger to be a weapon which is why they refer to him as Iron Soldiers in the Middle East. If Tony really shut it down after the press conference then the whole latter of the film with Iron Monger wouldn't have happened.
Then that kind of makes him one-dimensional in a sense. If there's no identity issues, no sense of duality, then he's just...a rich guy killing terrorists. There's nothing really internal going on other than the kind of superficial stuff that we normally get out of superhero comics.
What exactly are you looking for as dimension? A man who has the power to save, to kill, to be great, who is almost unstoppable yet cannot overcome his own demons? That is Batman in a nutshell my friend. That is also Tony Stark. Batman and Tony Stark have amazing parallels. The only difference is that Batman does it because he needs to feed a lust for vengeange. Tony does it because he likes it and it fuels his hero complex. Different motives, same bag of problems. If you call Iron Man one-dimensional then you have to paint Batman with that same brush. While the film didn't get into it too much, Tony has serious daddy issues because he was such an icon where as Bruce has a perfect memory of his parents that he tries to live up to because they were taken at a young age before they became flawed through the angst of teenage years.
They are more alike then most people would like to admit. Same with Superman/Captain America and a dozen of other archetypes that are repeated. Like I said before DC takes these archetypes and raises them to God status. Marvel takes them and keeps them grounded in reality and humanity. The characters though as the stories progress often mimic one another.
