I agree to an extent, I don't think it was shield's inclusion that cause characters from the original to take a step back. Cause as I said before Fury only has like two scenes and I feel there would have been a character in Widow's place regardless.
I've got to disagree on the Black Widow front. Her only purpose was to service the SHIELD sub-plot. I'm not opposed to the thought of Black Widow becoming a supporting character in the Iron Man films. I think espionage and Iron Man go well together. The problem is that any meaningful characterization, and for that matter, any significant impact on the story as a whole, were sacrificed for the sake of making SHIELD look cool. To riff off of Bass, she
was an advertisement for the Avengers (or, well, let's say she was an advertisement for "the Marvel film universe"). She was a flat character who was defined wholly by being highly competent. Her only role was to legitimize the credibility of SHIELD. They skirted around the possibility of her being a monkey wrench in the relationship between Stark and Potts. If they'd followed through on that plot line, I could have possibly gotten behind that, because then she would have been at the nucleus of the story. She would have become a factor in the character story. If she had been a threat to Stark's monopoly on his own technology, perhaps in the service of the US military complex or Hammer Industries, then it would have provided some depth to the plot as well, and potentially to Rhodey's growth as well.
As for Nick Fury, his only role in the film is to be a deus ex machina. He drops the mcguffin that allows Stark to overcome his problems and win in the end. You say his role was minor, but I say the character dominated the whole second act, to the disservice of the movie as a whole. He appears halfway through the movie and out of the blue introduces a whole new plotline: Tony living up to the legacy of his father. Up until that point, Howard Stark had only been mentioned in a passing bit at the beginning of the film and then suddenly we have a subplot where we discover and then reconcile the relationship between father and son, all revealed through sloppy exposition. Could a Howard/Tony plotline have worked? Sure. It's possibly a little trite, but it's ultimately a sound idea. But the problem is the execution. It's dropped in the middle of the story out of nowhere, all vomited up at once and then quickly resolved so that the hero can rush along to the denouement. It felt shoe-horned in there so they could establish a connection between the Stark legacy and SHIELD.
Random said:
But I think when you add the new characters, whiplash, hammer who need screen time to establish themselves (unlike the first film where there were tonsof focus on the small supporting cast) plus the storyline itself of stark alienating himself from his friends I think caused that. And it's more of an execution and the story's pros and cons than a fundamental idea of shield's involvement.
When you cut out the SHIELD characters, IM2 has a pretty small cast. You have the hero, his best friend, and his love interest. Then you have two antagonists who were efficiently established and wound together. If you stripped away all the clutter, you would have had significantly more time to explore the relationships between the characters. Tony being away doesn't preclude an expansion of Pepper and Rhodey. Hell, Black Widow and Fury
could have been used to offer more insight into the core cast, but they weren't. Instead, they felt like invaders from another film. So, I guess you're right when you say it's not about the inclusion of SHIELD. The presence of the military-industrial complex is a pretty strong element of the film. But that's not the point I'm making. The point is that none of the SHIELD characters were brought organically into the universe. They instead seemed included as an ad for Marvel's crossover plans: to show how cool SHIELD is, to tie Howard Stark back to the organization, to provide Tony with an impetus to join with them.
Moving on to the argument about Marvel Studios as a whole and the possible despotic meddling of the producers involved... There's a lot of talk about how big a travesty it is that Ed Norton isn't playing the Hulk. That by itself doesn't upset me. I can perfectly understand why Marvel might not want Ed Norton in the role. I actually really digged the last Hulk movie, but it was clearly something of a love letter to the old TV series. I'm of the mind that the integrity of each film should take precedence over the desire for a shared universe. And I can perfectly understand how the vision for Hulk in the Avengers might differ from Hulk in solo films. They might want to make him a villain, and as such, their vision for the character might not mesh all that well with the version of the character defined by Norton. But, the Norton news, compounded by the fact that they hadn't even started a script and murmurs elsewhere about conflicts between the studio and the talent, makes me a little suspicious. It might be all rumors, but it wouldn't surprise me either. I'll be curious to see how the idea of a "film universe" works out for Marvel.
To be perfectly honest, I'm kind of hoping it crashes and burns, just so it might convince WB to not follow suit with their DC properties.
