The Marvelous Marvel Rewatch (Now Playing: Avengers: Infinity War)

[Angelus]

mZuzek said:

Angelus said:

Howard Stark is shown to be rather incompetent in this movie. His hover car doesn't work, on the super soldier project he's a glorified assistant, and when examining the tesseract's energy he almost blows himself up. Tony must have got his genius from his mother's side of the family.

I'm pretty sure this was the point, to show that Howard Stark, who has been previously only mentioned as a genius, had to work to get there. I mean, it'd make no sense if he was a genius whose every project was a massive revolutionary success if he's still barely out of his teens.

That's a fair take on it. I didn't have any issue with the way they presented him, I just thought it was amusing is all. They present Tony in the first Iron Man as a child prodigy, graduating from MIT or something at the age of 13 or so. Dude can basically do whatever he wants with anything he gets his hands on. Yet, when we last hear about Howard, in Iron Man 2, we get all this stuff about him being the one to  discover this crazy new element that can save Tony, with him remarking on how his dad is still taking him to school, and then we cut to First Avenger with Howard basically looking like a scrub. Must have been a late bloomer, that's all.