For lack of anything worth watching on the tube this evening, I had the first Iron Man movie on. It was playing on FX, so it was chock block full of commercials, but it was better than Entertainment Tonight, Wheel of Fortune or the 38th viewing of a Two And A Half Men repeat episode. One of the best sequences of the movie is Tony busting out of that cave with his cobbled together original Iron Man suit. Just after crashing into a sand dune in the middle of the desert, miles from who knows where, we go to some commercials.
What comes next in the movie I saw in the theaters 4 years ago, and what is on the DVD I got for Christmas later in 2008, is we see Mr. Stark walking around in the sand and then within a couple minutes Colonel Rhodes shows up with some helicopters to rescue him. I always thought this a little odd because, how did they get to the middle east and the scene of hundreds of Stark Industries exploding in flames so fast.
What came next on TV was a scene of a bunch of soldiers loading into some big helicopters. Tony’s friend “Rhodey” Rhodes is there and gets stopped by some General who teasingly chides him that heading off to find Stark is a fools errand as no one has any way of knowing where he might be. This explains away that quick find.
Pretty coincidental timing on the search mission and Tony completing his escape in the newly finished Iron Man suit. Then again it is a “comic book” movie, so you really can’t dig too deep on anything going on without finding incongruities.
Sometimes the delete scenes on the DVD go a long way toward describing gaps in the plot and strange coincidences such as this.
You know, I probably looked at the deleted scenes when I first got the DVD and either one of two things happened, I starting watching them and then after viewing a couple gave up because I thought they didn’t add anything or I watched that and in the intervening 4 years forgot I had seen it. Probably the last one.