Iron Man 3 has finally been released in the states and has garnered a lot of negative reception, primarily from fans of the comics who expected to see the Mandarin as a truly deranged madman bent on terrorizing America. Instead, what we found out was that the Mandarin, as we saw him from the trailers, was merely a cover for AIM. A drunken, Aussie actor know as Trevor, proved to be an insult and bastardization to Iron Man's arch-nemesis for many hardcore comic book purists. Do they have a right to be pissed, or are they overreacting to this major departure from the comics.
In the film, Aldrich Killian made it a point to declare himself the real Mandarin to Tony Stark. This is the important detail that I think most fans are missing. (Interestingly enough, I saw the film with 7 other people who are casual moviegoers, and they all referred to Guy Pierce's character as the the Mandarin after the movie was over.) Guy Pierce WAS the Mandarin, and Ben Kingsly's character wore the mask for him. This isn't an insult or bastardization. It's a mask worn by the villain in the same vein that most supervillains hide behind a mask.
Most fans worried that the Mandarin wasn't going to be the superpowered villain we know from the comics. We worried that he wasn't going to physically challenge Tony Stark in addition to mentally challenging him, which has plagued the series from the start with these quick little skirmishes at the end of each film that last around 5 seconds. With the Mandarin's mask out of the way, we see the REAL Mandarin in the form of Aldrich Killian kicking all sorts of ASS in the film's epic climax. For the first time in the Iron Man series, we see Tony Stark get into a long, drawn out fight with his primary foe, and visually it is satisfying. But instead of Ten magic rings, he uses the Extremis virus. A departure from the comics, but all the Marvel movies have taken their liberties with the source material. Given the film's run-time, it would have been impossible to shoe-horn in ten magic rings and somehow make the movie better. So instead of adding a separate plot regarding alien technology (which would have been out of place in a movie primarly focused on EXTREMIS) Shane Black took liberties and made the Mandarin into an extremis soldier. Smart move, Black. I honestly expected as much.
Before you go on about source material, remember that CBMs take liberties all the time. (I'm looking at you, Christopher Nolan. After all, the Mandarin had nothing to do with AIM in the comics, and Bane had nothing to do the League of Shadows.) Personally, I can see a few similarities between Aldrich Killian and the Mandarin from the comics. For one, both are expert martial artists and scientific geniuses. And there were plenty of scenes in the climax of the movie where Aldrich Killian invoked the below image.
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