4. Your Protagonist Needs Inner Demons
Aside from having a central villain to battle against, it's important that protagonists have their own "inner demons" to face up against, too. It's the
flaws that make protagonists interesting, after all, and watching how they deal with them over the course of a movie is what we're all ultimately drawn to, whether we realise it or not. It's the whole "how do they change?" thing that you hear over and over again when it comes to this craft. Nobody likes a perfect protagonist, because - just like in real life - a perfect person would be rather boring to be around. In the case of
Iron Man 3, not only does Tony have to battle the Mandarin and his associates, but he's dealing with his own crippling anxiety attacks relating to the events we saw at the end of
The Avengers, in which he strapped a nuclear bomb to his back and launched himself headfirst into an alien portal. Your own protagonist doesn't have to be dealing with events quite as heavy as that, but give them something - a mistake they made in the past, or a scar that reminds them of somebody they lost - that resonate throughout the narrative. Unfortunately,
Iron Man 3 doesn't really tie up the idea of Tony's panic attacks in a particularly satisfying way. If
you can directly tie your protagonist's inner demons to the plot problem at hand, and resolve them both simultaneously, then great. Once again, this is screenwriting 101, but I've read dozens of spec scripts over the past few years that feature main characters with nothing to define them but their quirky names. Pick any movie at random, though, and I guarantee the main character is dealing with something internal, as well as external - it's an essential component of any script.