Vadersville
Posts: 2896
Joined: 30/9/2005
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Rgirvan44
This review is going to be foot loose and fancy free with spoilers so look at your own risk. Needless to say I am not a fan of the film. But if you are going to see it, I would say the 3D is pretty useless. I went to a 3D screening and watched 90 percent of the film with my glasses off. The image looked pretty good. Go and see it in a 2D screening.
Anyway! Onwards to this rambling review of mine….
In a world where the flawed but ambitious Prometheus is getting slain by just about everyone for a compromised script, awkward pacing and gaping plot holes, it is interesting to see how many people are giving Spider-Man a pass, when it is not only guilty of the same crimes, but it also lacks that aforementioned ambition.
It is clear that if the film had a soul, it was ripped apart in editing. The story of Peter’s parents is the only thing that exists to justify another reboot of the series, and it is the thing that the editors have taken a knife too.
In one scene Peter (seemingly and unbelievably for the first time) Googles his father’s name, and in what looks like an insert shot, we read that his parents were killed in a plane crash. Yet Peter talks about his parents as if they are alive. Plenty of clues remain that suggest Peter was the subject of a genetic experiment by his father, and his powers didn’t come from the spider bite.
Perhaps fearing reactions, it seems Sony got cold feet here, and instead cut the film to make it as close to the traditional origin as possible. There has been a lot of praise for the first hour of The Amazing Spider-Man, and while certain scenes do work, overall there is a sense of ticking boxes. The movie almost knows that the audience already went through these scenes, and quickly moves forward. Thus we see Uncle Ben killed, but he is barely referenced in the rest of the film. Aunt May disappears from the bulk of the movie after Ben’s death. Everything is by the numbers; none of it feels like it matters.
Comparisons are being made to Batman Begins, and it is undeserved. One of the great things about Begins, was a sense of a growing relationship between the man and the city. In Spider-Man he is just suddenly there one day. We get no sense what New York makes of it, nor whether he is having any effect on things. The reaction of the public is mostly off stage, and as such, New York, which is one of the characters of Spider-Man just feels like AnyCity USA.
Of course there is one scene which I am sure people will bring up in reaction to this, but remember that a) that is down to one character who has a connection to Spidey and b) because we have no sense of public opinion, the scene just doesn't come off nearly as triumphant as it should. There is a scene in the 2001 film which is similar, and while cheesy, feels like it is saying something about the character and the city.
Performance wise, Garfield is good. But I have issues with his Peter Parker. He doesn’t seem like a kid who struggles at school against bullies. He takes pictures and skates and is into science. As 21 Jump Street correctly pointed out, nowadays this version of Peter Parker would be the cool kid, and Flash would be seen as a joke.
There is no real arc to Parker – before he gets his powers he defends a kid from being bullied without question. The idea of Peter is a guy who is constantly trying to become the hero he wants to be. In Spider-Man he is already there before the bite, he just screws up indirectly.
Emma Stone is good as well, but she has nothing to do but nice cutesy romantic stuff with Peter. Hey studios – don’t bother clapping for not making the lead girl a damsel in distress when your other solution is to shove her in a car.
Rhys Ifans is…fine, I suppose. For the first half at least. I didn’t get a sense of tragedy or conflict about him. He made decisions in the film because the script demanded it, not because the audience felt a struggle within Connors.
Sheen is Sheen. He does what he does and he does it well. He is poorly served by a script that is even afraid to put the words “With great power….” into his mouth and instead gives him a less succinct alternative. Sheen has that warmth and carries with him the working class ethic seen in Wall Street, along with the nobility of West Wing. But he plays the role pretty much the same way as he did in the Departed. I love him though, so that doesn’t bother me.
The film really comes apart in the second half of the film. In one scene the Lizard is trying to stop someone from experimenting on other humans. Yet later on he…experiments on humans. Questions abound, such as why the police need to wait for Spider-Man to get to the tower? Did no one think about shooting at the tower and bring it down?
Why exactly was the Lizard at Peter’s school? Couldn’t he have just been getting on with his plan? Peter didn’t seem too bothered seeing as he was in the building. Was the Lizard unable to switch off his PC in the sewers, so as to not clue in anyone who might find it, about what his master plan was? That might have been helpful. The neat little lizard graphics rampaging around the city were a cute little addition that he somehow had the time to design up. I also wanted to see the scene where Connors was hauling all that equipment down into the sewers and trying to set it up.
It was also great that the super secure building which is established as being super secure didn’t have any security cameras or security guards around the secure room with all the genetically modified spiders. Peter wanders around with ease. Why?
Because the script has to let him wander around. I am not even sure why he went off – I suppose he couldn’t just go up to the door of the scientist he wanted to speak to and introduce himself….oh wait.
Talking of which -
“Peter, your father and I spent decades trying to perfect the formula, but it was all for nothing. I am still looking…hoping one day that I can…”
“Here you go”
“What’s this?”
“The formula”
“Oh, cheers!”
The films action, what little there is of it by the way, is rote, and without much in the way of an objective. Bad guy jumps at Spider-Man, he shoots lots of webbing, Lizard breaks free. Rinse. Repeat. There is no creativity, and in fact the best moment of all the fights scenes is when it is in the background as payoff to a joke.
Now I haven’t really gone into a comparison with the first Spider-Man but how can it be avoided when this film treads the same ground? I am not a huge fan of the Raimi films – indeed I outright hate number 3. But the first one, while dated, took time to build its world, and its relationships. Even as you knew Norman Osborne was going to be a bad guy, you were sort of touched when he seemed to take Peter under his wing. The dynamics between the kids felt real. You got to know Ben before he was taken away. The movie wasn’t seemingly devoted to setting up a sequel (Norman Osborne is dying! But we won’t show you his face. No siree). And it allowed itself to be comic book big.
Now, no one is asking Amazing Spider Man to be a replication of the first one, but what I would like to have seen was a take distinct, yet still given time to breathe. For example both films have the bad guy doing an internal monologue to themselves. But with Lizard it comes out of nowhere and doesn’t return. With Norman it is the next step towards madness, and Dafoe really sells that moment. If you are going to repeat specific moments from the first film, you better make darn sure you can do it just as well, or better. Heck they even had a scene after the final battle where Spidey has to make a promise which causes him pain.
And that is the problem. Amazing Spider-Man doesn’t do enough to make itself distinct, and in those areas where it repeats what has come before, it is the inferior version of those events.
The best bit is at the end, when Spidey does his final swing around the city (as done in previous films) and it looks like he blows his load over the audience in a triumphant final shot. I doubt I could come up with a better metaphor for my feelings about this film.
2 stars because I like the actors. And the mouse-lizard. He was awesome. Want a whole film about him.
This is exactly how I feel (except I love Spider-Man 1 and 2 but I do hate 3). This was supposed to be a closer adaptation of the comics but besides the web no longer being one of Peter's powers and Gwen being his first girlfriend and not Mary Jane I can't see how that his true at all. I too have noticed the raving by fan boys about the return to mechanical web shooters which is not only silly but rather odd when you consider in the comics Peters is supposed to have invented both the shooter and the webbing itself, whereas here he steals Oscorp technology and backwards engineers it!
_____________________________
Confusion is a way of life, not a state of mind
|
Printable Version
RE: Passionless. Pointless. Unnecessary. - 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread