Animated Movie Review: Iron Man - Rise of the Technovore

Iron Man: Rise of the Technovore (2013)

A bit of a shorter review this time around. I watched this last week, and it's... an interesting one? I've been sort of cherry-picking through old superhero animated movies, and one of the old DVD's I have is this movie, Iron Man: Rise of the Technovore, something that I've never really watched before. Released in 2013 to coincide with the live-action Iron Man 3, this movie is an... interesting one. Obviously, it has a lot of the trappings of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how many of the animated, video game and comic-book projects post-2012 have been slowly moving to make it more MCU-esque. And that's okay. It's also a mostly-standalone movie starring Iron Man, his supporting cast, SHIELD-allied Avengers and, uh... the Punisher for some reason?

Oh, and it's also done by one of the more well-known anime studios. I have absolutely no idea about this, and I had no idea until reading about this movie that a 'Marvel Anime' subline of TV shows exists. And that's... interesting. 

And I'm going to talk about the animation first, before for the most part, it's actually pretty fluid. There's some sense of awkward robotic stiffness in the earlier scenes with Iron Man and War Machine racing around canyons and stuff, and it will really take some getting used to seeing Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, Black Widow and a lot of these Marvel characters rendered in a more anime-esque manner. It's not terrible, but it's just kind of jarring at times is all. The animation, I feel, is the most comfortable and fluid when they're animating the more Gundam/Evangelion-esque villains, though. From the attack of the random Sazabi-esque enemy mech-suits (both on SHIELD's side and on the Technovore's) to the Technovore's eerie (and very Evangelion-esque) debut as he slowly moves through the corridor of the Stark base and calmly murders everyone in his path, the animation of the movie is really pretty. Other highlights that I really liked include Iron Man's briefcase suit deploying, and that very fluid action scene between the Punisher and Black Widow. Voice-acting wise, it's... all right? We get a lot of familiar names from other superhero works, with, I feel, Iron Man, Hawkeye and especially the Punisher getting great voices. But there's a bit of a stilted awkwardness in some parts of the movie where it's kind of obvious that they're trying to dub in a line of dialogue that has to fit with the runtime. 

That said... the movie itself isn't anything to write home about, I feel, once you get past the pretty and unconventional (for a Marvel comics movie, anyway) animation. There's a solid if bland plot there, and I do appreciate the decision to attempt to make this feel MCU-esque while also picking a villain that's pretty different from the likes that we see in MCU movies so far, ultimately the rather odd clash ends up feeling like you dropped the MCU characters into one of those monologue-heavy anime movies in the vein of... well, Evangelion again. That final form of the villain turning into a huge, mutant god-like entity taking over skyscrapers and stuff while spouting quasi-religious monologues about the winds of change and whatnot is pretty interesting. And I'm not saying that the contrast itself is bad, but ultimately it does lead to a bit of a clashing storytelling style that doesn't really work particularly in the second half. 

That said, being a standalone movie does let this movie do a bunch of rather interesting things. War Machine is seemingly killed and basically assumed to be dead for a good chunk of the movie, and Rhodey's seeming death at the hands of this vile new villain is a pretty interesting way to motivate Tony Stark. And while it's certainly nothing new in the realm of superhero storytelling, the fact that SHIELD itself is out for Tony Stark's arrest when he's going rogue does end up making for an interesting second act where Black Widow, Hawkeye and a squadron of Man-Droids hunt down Tony. 

Oh, and the Punisher shows up in the second act, because, uh... okay? This is a relatively original movie that's not inspired by any specific comic-book run, so it's kind of weird to include the Punisher as a character in the less 'street' story. And there's, I suppose, an attempt to contrast the Punisher's more brutal methods to that of Stark's, but ultimately all the Punisher really serves is to act cool, say cool lines of dialogue and send Stark on his way. 

The villain of the movie is Ezekiel Stane, who's one of those crazy troubled youths that you see in anime a lot of times, just unnervingly serene, with a lot of baggage from his abusive father Obadiah. And he's gone kind of insane in creating and manipulating the Technovore techno-organic virus while giving huge quasi-religious speeches. And... I honestly admit, the movie kind of lost me during Ezekiel's huge rant, but ultimately during the fight in both Ezekiel's base and later the Helicarrier, Iron Man manages to talk Ezekiel down, he regains his humanity, only to be taken over by the Technovore and mutated into increasingly hideous forms. Then they fight the Technovore's final form, there's an attempted sacrifice bit, and the bad guy's defeated. 

And... I dunno. I'm not sure if it's the English-language script that doesn't quite work as well (I think this movie was originally made for a Japanese audience, then dubbed into English?) or if it's just the fact that the monologues themselves just ran on for too long, but I honestly didn't really like the movie's final act at all with Ezekiel just ranting about evolution and religion and god and daddy issues and stuff. It just feels so kind of superficially hollow, and the fact that the tone of the speeches kind of clash so wildly with the otherwise pretty cookie-cutter 'action action snark action' rest of the movie does feel like they could've done a better job at integrating the two halves of the movie.