2. Special Effects
The Marvel Cinematic Universe's special effects have been pretty spectacular from the get-go, but Iron Man 3 stepped up a gear and really produced the goods. The scene involving the multiple suits fighting Killian and his henchmen was breathtaking (potentially even out-doing the final battle in the Avengers movie on the goose bump-generation scale) and the glow emitted by the Extremis soldiers was cool as hell, but the one scene that really blew me away was when Tony used to JARVIS to recreate the scene of one of Killian's atrocities. Tony's friend and 'Head of Security', Happy Hogan (John Favreau), finds himself falling victim to one of the Mandarin's attacks outside the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood - being knocked out and in to a coma by the explosion - but not before pointing to a military dog tag while he faded into unconsciousness. At the time, the audience is left wondering why he's pointing to it and who he's doing it for the benefit of. But, using JARVIS, Tony accessed SHIELD's database as well as various government databases to piece together the Mandarin's crimes, culminating in an exact 3D holographic recreation of the Hollywood disaster scene, which allowed Tony to witness Hogan pointing to the dog tag, giving him the information he needed to find the perpetrator of the crime. The visuals were absolutely stunning in this scene and the movie's effects as a whole were out-of-this-world.