the level of automation present in the Iron Army. I mean, if Tony can set Jarvis to that level of autopilot, it completely robs him of heroism, as it puts his physical presence in the suit to the level of trivial and merely egoistic narcissism. The reason I'll defend the party fight in Iron Man 2 till my dying breath is because it perfectly captures Tony's mastery of the suit and puts it front and center -- even falling-down-wasted, he can outfight a trained combatant on roughly equal technological footing in his suit, to the point where he can intentionally lose convincingly without the other guy even realizing it.
For that reason, I do really love the fight where Tony escapes captivity in Iron Man 3 with only one glove and one boot: it highlights his "piloting" skill with a lot of panache and flair. The rest of the movie let me down in that regard, though.
I have no beef with the mark 42's remote piloting capability -- not only is that well established in the comics, but that's still Tony operating the suit rather than giving a simple one-line voice command to Jarvis and having that suffice for the duration of the engagement.
The last scenes of the script demonstrate a conflicted understanding of the character -- the words are spot on, where Tony declares that Iron Man isn't the suit, that he, himself, IS Iron Man. The Iron Army completely undermines that, however, by proving that once he's invented the suit, Tony is completely superfluous to its use.
Other scenes which raise problems in underlining that wrong message include the several times that untrained operatives fight convincingly and/or effectively in various Iron Man tech -- the two times Pepper finds herself in the suit (at the beginning and the end) and the AIM guy in the Iron Patriot suit who manages to fool people into thinking he's Rhodey. Think back to 2 when Rhodey first puts on the suit -- he's clumsy and only crudely effectual for the first half of the party fight -- in fact, that was the entire point of Tony picking that fight in the first place, was to give Rhodey a crash course before Tony completed his self-destruction. But no, AIM guy flies without a hitch, lands with style and confidence, and walks with a smooth gait, all things that Rhodey didn't initially but should be recognized for now. And Pepper pulls off a very accurately aimed combo shot without helmet targetting despite having first fired the repulsor once (twice?) only days before.
I would have been much more comfortable and satisfied had Tony's direction of the Iron Army been, as it has always been presented in the comics, a display of his immense aptitude for multitasking, big picture situational awareness, and command of the suits' impressive data and telemetry aggregation, collation, and presentation. That it was essentially Jarvis fighting, even at an arguably reduced capacity, with 41 of the suits at a time really tainted my impression of the film, no matter how well-intentioned the approach to the character.
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