Iron Man

 Released Year: 2008

Directed by Jon Favreau

Casted by:

Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark / Iron Man

Terrence Howard as Lt. Colonel James "Rhodey" Rhodes

Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane

Shaun Toub as Yinsen

Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts

 Story: 

Genius, billionaire, and playboy Tony Stark, who has inherited the defense contractor Stark Industries from his father, is in war-torn Afghanistan with his friend and military liaison, Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes to demonstrate the new "Jericho" missile. The convoy is ambushed and Stark is critically wounded by one of his own rocket propelled grenades. He is captured and imprisoned in a cave by the terrorist group the Ten Rings, and an electromagnet is grafted into his chest by fellow captive Yinsen to keep the shrapnel shell shards that wounded him from reaching his heart and killing him. Ten Rings leader Raza offers Stark freedom in exchange for building a Jericho missile for the group, but Tony and Yinsen agree Raza will not keep his word.

Stark and Yinsen secretly build a powerful electric generator called an arc reactor to power Stark's electromagnet and a suit of powered armor to aid in their escape. Although they keep the suit hidden almost to completion, the Ten Rings attack the workshop when they discover their intentions. Yinsen sacrifices himself to divert them while the suit powers up. The armored Stark battles his way out of the cave to find the dying Yinsen, then in anger burns the Ten Rings weapons and flies away, crashing in the desert and destroying the suit. After being rescued by Rhodes, Stark returns home and announces that his company will no longer manufacture weapons. Obadiah Stane, his father's old partner and the company's manager, advises Stark that this may ruin Stark Industries and his father's legacy. In his home workshop, Stark builds an improved version of his suit, as well as a more powerful arc reactor for his chest. Personal assistant Pepper Potts places the original reactor inside a small glass showcase. Though Stane requests details, Stark keeps his work to himself.

At a charity event held by Stark Industries, reporter Christine Everhart informs Stark that his company's weapons, including the Jericho, were recently delivered to the Ten Rings and are being used to attack Yinsen's home village, Gulmira. Stark also learns Stane is trying to replace him as head of the company. Enraged by these revelations, Stark dons his new armor and flies to Afghanistan, where he saves Yinsen's village. While flying home, Stark is shot at by two F-22 Raptor fighter jets. He reveals his secret identity to Rhodes over the phone in an attempt to end the attack. Meanwhile, the Ten Rings gather the pieces of Stark's prototype suit and meet with Stane, who subdues Raza and has the rest of the group killed. Stane has a new suit reverse engineered from the wreckage. Seeking to find any other weapons delivered to the Ten Rings, Stark sends Pepper to hack into the company computer system from Stane's office. She discovers Stane has been supplying the terrorists and hired the Ten Rings to kill Stark, but the group reneged. Potts meets with Agent Phil Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D., a counter-terrorism agency, to inform him of Stane's activities.

Stane's scientists cannot duplicate Stark's arc reactor, so Stane ambushes Stark at his home and takes his. Stark manages to get to his original reactor to replace the taken one. Potts and several S.H.I.E.L.D. agents attempt to arrest Stane, but he dons his suit and attacks them. Stark fights Stane, but is outmatched without his new reactor to run his suit at full capacity. The fight carries Stark and Stane to the top of the Stark Industries building, and Stark instructs Potts to overload the large arc reactor powering the building. This unleashes a massive electrical surge that causes Stane and his armor to fall into the exploding reactor, killing him. The next day, at a press conference, Stark admits to being the superhero the press has dubbed "Iron Man".

In a post-credits scene, S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nick Fury visits Stark at home, telling him that Iron Man is not "the only superhero in the world", and explaining that he wants to discuss the "Avenger Initiative".

 L² Scored: 6/10 

L² Comment:

 All these while Iron Man is not my favorite superhero and i'm not sure why. Back in 2008, when I first watch this movie in the cinema with bunch of my friends, everyone was kinda excited while waiting the movie to start but not me... Half way through the movie, I actually fell asleep :P 

Well, 8 years later i decided to give it a try and re-watch this movie since Iron Man is one of the main character of Avengers, and apparently without Avengers he won't get famous by himself at all. This time I did not fall asleep half way but its still not that attractive to me. By giving 6/10, it would be very generous of me to do so... All because Gwyneth Paltrow is in it. Beside that, I realize Terrence Howard is the original cast of War Machine, however he was replaced by Don Cheadle in the future movie, not sure what's the reason, but i feel the producer make the right choice to take Terrence Howard away....

Contagion

 Released Year: 2011

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Casted by: 

Matt Damon as Mitch Emhoff

Marion Cotillard as Dr. Leonora Orantes
Laurence Fishburne as Dr. Ellis Cheever
Kate Winslet as Dr. Erin Mears

Jude Law as Alan Krumwiede
Gwyneth Paltrow as Elizabeth "Beth" Emhoff

 Story:

 The film follows several interacting plotlines, with no single protagonist nor antagonist, over the course of several weeks from the initial outbreak and attempts to contain it, to panic and decay of social order, and, finally, to the introduction of a vaccine. It is revealed in the end of the movie how the virus began.

After a business trip to Hong Kong, businesswoman Beth Emhoff stops in Chicago for a dalliance with an old boyfriend before returning to her husband and family in suburban Minneapolis. At first she appears to have contracted a cold during her trip. Her son, Clark, also becomes symptomatic and is sent home from school. Beth's condition worsens and two days later she collapses with severe seizures in her home. Beth's husband, Mitch, rushes her to the hospital, but she continues to seize and dies of an unknown virus. Because it affects the brain and central nervous system, pathologists attribute it to a meningoencephalitis virus. Mitch returns home and finds that Clark has also died from a similar infection. Mitch is put in isolation but turns out to be genetically immune to the disease. He and his daughter attempt to flee the city, but a military quarantine has been imposed, and they are forced to return to their home to face decaying social order and rampant looting of stores and homes. Not knowing whether his daughter inherited his immunity, Mitch struggles to balance his teenage daughter's frustration with quarantine with his desire to protect her, while trying to come to terms with his own loss.

In Atlanta, representatives from the Department of Homeland Security meet with Dr. Ellis Cheever of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and express fears that the disease is a bioweapon intended to cause terror over the Thanksgiving weekend. Cheever sends Dr. Erin Mears, an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, to Minneapolis to begin the investigation. In addition to tracing the outbreak back to Beth, Dr. Mears has to negotiate with local bureaucrats reluctant to commit resources. She later becomes infected with the disease after being in contact with contaminated fomites while staying at her hotel. The Minnesota National Guard arrives to quarantine the city, and a badly deteriorating Dr. Mears is moved to the field medical station she helped set up, where she later dies.

Investigations into cures via treatment protocols or vaccines initially prove fruitless as scientists cannot find a culture to grow the new virus, which has been named the Meningoencephalitis Virus One (MEV-1). Professor Ian Sussman violates orders from a CDC scientist, Dr. Ally Hextall, to destroy his samples and identifies a line of bat cells that will support research of a vaccine. At the CDC, Dr. Hextall uses this breakthrough to begin to characterize the properties of the virus, which turns out to have a mix of genetic material from bat, pig and human viruses and appears to spread via fomites with a basic reproduction number of two. This later goes up to four after the virus mutates.

A conspiratorially minded freelance internet blogger, Alan Krumwiede, posts videos about the disease, and in one of them appears sick and later claims that he recovered using a homeopathic cure called forsythia. Panicked people attempting to obtain forsythia overwhelm pharmacies, accelerating the contagion as infected and healthy people congregate. Krumwiede leaps to national attention and, during a television interview, accuses Dr. Cheever of informing friends and family to leave Chicago before a quarantine is imposed. It is later revealed Krumwiede was never sick with the virus, but was attempting to boost demand on behalf of investors in the companies producing and distributing the homeopathic treatment. He is arrested for conspiracy and fraud, but is soon released after his 12 million blog readers collect and pay his bail.

Dr. Hextall identifies a potential vaccine, using an attenuated (live) virus. Because of the difficulties of human subjects testing, she follows the precedent of other vaccine researchers and inoculates herself first. Hextall visits her gravely ill father in the hospital to expose herself to the virus and test the vaccine. Production of the vaccine is rapidly ramped up and the CDC awards vaccinations via a random lottery based on birth dates for one full year until every survivor is vaccinated. Dr. Cheever, feeling guilty for his past actions to protect those who are close to him, gives his fast-tracked MEV-1 vaccination to the son of a janitor he works with at the disease center. Dr. Hextall places the surviving samples of the MEV-1 virus in cryogenic storage with H1N1 and SARS.

Dr. Leonora Orantes, a World Health Organization epidemiologist, travels to Hong Kong to trace the origins of the infections. She collaborates with Sun Feng and other local Chinese epidemiologists and public health officials and they identify Emhoff as patient zero. As the virus spreads, Feng kidnaps Orantes to use her as leverage to obtain the first MEV-1 vaccines for his village. Orantes spends months living in rural China with the villagers until the vaccine is announced. Feng exchanges Orantes for the vaccines, which turn out to be placebos. Orantes rushes away when she is informed of this, presumably to warn the village.

The film concludes by tracing the origin of the virus from a bat nesting in a tree being cleared by Emhoff's mining corporation. The bat flies to a nearby pig sty and drops a banana where it is eaten by the pig, presumably transferring the bat virus into the pig. The pig is sold to and butchered by a chef in a Macau casino, who greets Beth Emhoff without washing his hands of the pig's blood, transferring the bat-pig hybrid to her and creating the MEV-1 human strain.

L² Scored: 10/10

L² Comment:

Oh fuck, this is an extremely good film. I love all those big casts and the storyline, there's almost flawless in this film~ excellent work and excellent cast :)

The Avengers 2012

Released Year: 2012

Directed by Joss Whedon

Casted by:

Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark / Iron Man

Chris Evans as Steve Rogers / Captain America
Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Bruce Banner / Hulk

Chris Hemsworth as Thor

Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow

Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton / Hawkeye
Tom Hiddleston as Loki

Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury
Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill

Story:

Nick Fury, director of the espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D., arrives at a remote research facility during an evacuation. The tesseract, an energy source of unknown potential, has activated and opened a portal through space, from which the exiled Norse god Loki steps through. Loki takes the tesseract, and uses his abilities to control the minds of several S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel including agent Clint Barton, and physicist consultant Dr. Erik Selvig in order to aid in his getaway.

In response to the attack, Fury reactivates the Avengers Initiative. Agent Natasha Romanoff  is sent to India to recruit Dr. Bruce Banner, while Agent Philip Coulson, approaches Tony Stark and requests that he review Selvig's research. Fury himself approaches Steve Rogers with an assignment to retrieve the tesseract from Loki. During his exile, Loki encountered the Other, an alien conqueror who in exchange for the Tesseract offers Loki an army of the alien race the Chitauri in order for him to subjugate Earth.

Rogers, Stark and Romanoff travel to Germany to apprehend Loki, who is recovering iridium needed to stabilize the Tesseract's power and demanding that the civilians kneel before him. After a battle with Captain America, Loki surrenders and is escorted back to a S.H.I.E.L.D. plane. However, Thor, Loki's adoptive brother and the Norse god of thunder, arrives and attempts to free Loki to reason with him. Stark and Rogers confront Thor, and Loki is eventually returned to the Helicarrier, a high-tech, flying aircraft carrier, and placed in a cell designed to hold The Hulk.

The Avengers are divided, both over how to approach Loki and the revelation that S.H.I.E.L.D. plan to harness the tesseract's power to develop weapons. Fury admits that the events in New Mexico a year before made S.H.I.E.L.D. aware of extraterrestrial life, some of whom may see Earth as a target. The decision was made to produce weapons with the tesseract as a means of deterrence. As the group argues, Barton and Loki’s other possessed agents attack the Helicarrier, disabling its engines in flight. As Stark and Rogers attempt to restart the damaged engines, Banner transforms into the Hulk, despite Romanoff's best efforts to calm him down, and runs amok inside the ship, fighting Thor. During a fight with Barton, Romanoff discovers that a blow to the head — powerful enough to knock Barton unconscious — is enough to break Loki's mind control. Loki escapes, killing Agent Coulson as he does so, and Thor and the Hulk are each ejected from the ship.

Fury uses Coulson's death to motivate the Avengers into working as a team. Stark and Rogers realize that simply defeating them will not be enough for Loki; he needs to overpower them in a very public way so as to validate himself as ruler of Earth. Using a device built by Selvig, Loki opens a portal to the Chitauri fleet over Manhattan, summoning a Chitauri invasion.

The Avengers rally in defense of New York, but quickly realize they will be overwhelmed as wave after wave of Chitauri descend upon Earth. With help from Barton, Rogers and Stark evacuate civilians, while Banner transforms into the Hulk again and goes after Loki, beating him into submission. Romanoff makes her way to the portal, where Selvig, freed of Loki's control, reveals that Loki's staff can be used to close the portal.

Meanwhile, Fury's superiors attempt to end the invasion by launching a nuclear missile at Manhattan. Stark intercepts the missile and takes it through the portal toward the Chitauri fleet before running out of power and plummeting back to Earth, but the Hulk catches him as he falls. Thor escorts Loki and the Tesseract back to Asgard, while Fury notes that the Avengers will go their separate ways until such time as a new world-threatening menace emerges.

In a post-credits scene, the Other confers with his master about the attack on Earth.

 L² Scored: 8/10

L² Comment:

I suppose to dislike this movie, i suppose not to watch this movie in cinema; but i love this movie and i watch it in cinema too :P At first when i saw the trailer, i thought that it was some rubbish film which they put all the superheroes together just for the sake of making a profitable movie, but this is good, real good... Beside having all those action scene about fighting with intruder from out of earth, there are some comedy scenes as well... Only thing i m dissapointed is, Mark Ruffalo look kinda old in this film... i still prefer Eric Bana as Hulk.

Iron Man 2

Released Year: 2010
Directed by Jon Favreau

Casted by:
Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark / Iron Man
Gwyneth Paltrow as Virginia "Pepper" Potts
Don Cheadle as Lt. Colonel James "Rhodey" Rhodes
Scarlett Johansson as Natalie Rushman / Natasha Romanoff
Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer
Mickey Rourke as Ivan Vanko
Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury
Jon Favreau as Happy Hogan
Story:

Russian television shows Stark Industries CEO Tony Stark revealing his identity as Iron Man to the world. Ivan Vanko, whose father, Anton Vanko, has just died, sees this and begins building a similar weapon.

Six months later, Stark has used his Iron Man armor to help maintain world peace. He re-institutes the Stark Expo in Flushing Meadows to continue his father Howard's legacy. Senator Stern demands that Stark turn over the Iron Man technology to the government. Stark refuses, claiming that foreign nations and business competitors are decades away from successfully recreating his achievements, and that the armor is in fact his own property.

The palladium core in the arc reactor that keeps Stark alive and powers the armor is slowly poisoning him, and he has failed to find a substitute. Growing increasingly despondent and reckless due to his impending death, and choosing not to tell anyone about his condition, Stark appoints his personal assistant Pepper Potts CEO of Stark Industries, and replaces her with Stark employee Natalie Rushman.

Vanko attacks Stark while racing at the Circuit de Monaco, using an arc reactor of his own powering whip-like energy weapons. Stark defeats Vanko with the aid of his portable briefcase armor. He learns that Vanko is the son of his father's old partner, Anton Vanko. Anton collaborated with Howard on the first arc reactor, but was deported to his native Soviet Union following his attempts to profit from the technology and died in poverty, explaining Vanko's desire for revenge on the Stark family. Rival defense contractor Justin Hammer fakes Vanko's death and recruits him to perfect a line of armored combat suits to upstage Stark. At what he believes is his last birthday party Stark gets drunk while using the Iron Man armor, forcing his friend, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes, to intervene. Rhodes dons Stark's Mark II armor and after battling him, delivers the armor to the military. Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D., approaches Stark, revealing Rushman as undercover agent Natasha Romanoff and that Howard Stark was a S.H.I.E.L.D. founder that Fury knew personally. Fury gives him some of his father's old material; a hidden message in the diorama of the 1974 Stark Expo proves to be a diagram of the structure of a new element. With the aid of his computer J.A.R.V.I.S., Stark synthesizes it. Vanko reveals to Stark that he is still alive and seeking revenge so Stark uses the untested element, removing his dependency on the palladium.

At the Expo, Hammer unveils Vanko's armored drones, led by Rhodes in a heavily weaponized version of the Mark II armor. Stark arrives in his new armor to warn Rhodes, but Vanko seizes control of both the drones and Rhodes' armor and attacks Iron Man. Hammer is arrested while Stark's bodyguard Happy Hogan and Romanoff attempt to capture Vanko. He escapes, but Romanoff returns control of the Mark II armor to Rhodes.

After defeating his drones Stark and Rhodes confront Vanko himself, now in a new, very powerful suit of armor. Neither can match Vanko, but Vanko is ultimately defeated when they fire repulsor rays at each other, causing a large explosion. With his suit too damaged to continue the fight Vanko ignites his suit and his drones' self-destruct mechanisms, apparently killing himself in the process. Stark saves Potts from the exploding drones' remains. Potts quits as CEO, but she and Stark kiss.

At a debriefing, while news footage of the Hulk's rampage plays, Fury informs Stark that while Iron Man is a suitable candidate for the "Avengers Initiative", he himself is not. Stark agrees to be a consultant if Senator Stern presents himself and Rhodes with medals for bravery. In a post-credits scene, S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Coulson reports the discovery of a large hammer at the bottom of a crater in a New Mexico desert.

L² Scored: 7/10

L² Comment:

I'm not really an Iron Man's fans, did not watch the first movie. However, since my friend lend me the DVD, i might as well watch it coz Paltrow is inside it :) The whole movie is not bad, the way Downey acted in those arrogant way is quite good.

Heard that Johansson is getting her own movie from this character, Black Widow. Hopefully its good~ Let's pray for her ;)