Or a brief discussion on the intrinsic flaws of Amazing
Spider-Man
Amazing Spider-Man isn’t a bad movie. The broad strokes of
the story can be followed, the character’s motivations are clear enough, and the
actors do a pretty good job bringing the characters to life. There are a few
great moments in the film and some of the departures from Spider-Man dogma they
presented were pretty clever. At no point in
this movie was I infuriated.
Amazing Spider-Man also isn’t a particularly good movie. The
plot overall felt very unoriginal. If you saw Spider-Man, the Sam Rami film,
you pretty much saw a bigger, campier and Spider-Manier film adaptation of
Spider-Man with a similar collection of plot beats. In fact, much of Amazing Spider-Man is an
origin retread so a third of the movie is almost literally the same as Rami's Spider-Man. It also felt very… by the numbers? Things happened because the genre
demands it without a lot of substance or explanation. I’d go so far as to argue
that whole plot threads of the movie rely on our prior knowledge and
expectations to make sense.1 So, while Amazing Spider-Man never made
me go all geek-hulk, it didn’t really illicit any positive emotional reactions
either. I’ve heard the whole Spider-meh joke, and I buy into that.
But there is more to my apathetic reaction to this film than
its kind of lackadaisical take on the character. In my opinion Amazing
Spider-Man is further brought down by two key general problems: it gets the
soul of Spider-Man wrong and it makes ham-fisted attempts to tell instead of
show. My analysis after the cut.
It should be noted that after the cut is going to be
*SPOILER* rich… so go on at your peril.
Point the first: I feel like they got the
character of Spider-Man fundamentally wrong. I'm not talking about the changes to the origin (which were
largely pretty clever) or the fact they made Peter Parker a handsome hipster
jerk (which admittedly didn't help matters). My issue is that Spider-Man is never altruistic in the entire film. To me Spider-Man is defined by an altruistic
and maybe pathological need to take responsibility for the safety of others as
a kind of penance for failing to take responsibility for protecting Uncle Ben.
In Amazing Spider-Man, Peter doesn't yet understand the scope of his powers
when he opts not to stop Uncle Ben’s killer and therefore isn't really
responsible for Uncle Ben’s death (anymore than any other person would be for
not accosting an armed robber). More problematically, Parker's decision to
become a vigilante is motivated entirely by revenge. Seriously, he becomes
Spider-Man to anonymously assault petty criminals who resemble his uncle's killer. And what’s worse, he never confronts the guy who
killed Uncle Ben directly and never makes the decision to let justice supercede
his need for vengeance. Spider-Man never makes the transition from
vigilantism to heroism in the movie. Also: his conflict with the lizard is him trying
to make right his own involvement in the creation of the monster instead of an
altruistic need to protect others. Spider-Man, therefore, never really is a
hero in this movie, just a guy motivated by his own interests who has
superpowers.2
Point the second: The film explains unnecessary
things. From what I know about
visual storytelling (like in film and comics) the trick is to show instead of
tell. Amazing Spider-Man is really bad at this.
The Avengers, conversely, did a really good job of showing important plot points. For instance, Loki’s magic scepter clearly had the ability to brainwash people and was the mind-influencing factor that made the Avengers act all conflicty and arguey in that one Helicarrier scene. Nowhere was this explicitly stated as dialogue in the film, but everyone in the audience understood this because we were shown it. Of course, The Avengers was a really good movie in many many ways.
Amazing Spider-Man had this perplexing and off-putting tendency to explain things that we were being show on screen. At one point Spider-Man, while racing to confront the Lizard, is shot in the leg by a police officer which causes him to struggle to keep moving. A disembodied media-person voiceover immediately cuts in pointing out that spiderman looks hurt and might not make it there in time... WHICH IS LITERALLY WHAT THEY ARE SHOWING US AS THIS IS SAID.3 (Also the gunshot injury seems to clear up before the final confrontation scene minutes later...) The next scene with the Magguffin-drug-dispersal-machine included a synthetic voice, presumably from the machine, that kept announcing a time limit or the switch to an antidote or the antidote’s deployment despite all of this being rather obviously visually depicted. Following the films climax, another helpful media voiceover explains that someone released an airborne cure to the Lizard's mutagen despite our being shown the blue glowing cure-spores visually curing lizard mutants. It's aggravating and not terrible effective film making.
(I am also perplexed that these things were explained in detail, but nothing was offered concerning how the spider-bite from web producing spiders gave Peter amazing spider-powers4 or what the deal with the Lizard’s internal evil voice was. These seem like odd choices.)
So these are my general, systemic problems with the Amazing Spider-Man.
That said, I have some nit-picky ranty things to say...
The way science is portrayed in this movie is really aggravating to me. The lab looked nothing like a real lab, it makes little sense for high school students to intern in a lab (and no sense for them to intern in a private company’s lab), no one stores liquid nitrogen on a roof, and the way they injected the mouse was hilariously unrealistic (if you happen to have experience injecting mice). My biggest critique, though, is that Peter Parker finds a mathematic formula from his father that suddenly makes genetic recombination between different species possible. Unless math has magic powers in the Amazing Spider-Man universe a simple formula shouldn’t be able to change the behaviour of biology. Math can certainly be used to describe nature, but math cannot control nature. It’s pretty annoying.
The Avengers, conversely, did a really good job of showing important plot points. For instance, Loki’s magic scepter clearly had the ability to brainwash people and was the mind-influencing factor that made the Avengers act all conflicty and arguey in that one Helicarrier scene. Nowhere was this explicitly stated as dialogue in the film, but everyone in the audience understood this because we were shown it. Of course, The Avengers was a really good movie in many many ways.
Amazing Spider-Man had this perplexing and off-putting tendency to explain things that we were being show on screen. At one point Spider-Man, while racing to confront the Lizard, is shot in the leg by a police officer which causes him to struggle to keep moving. A disembodied media-person voiceover immediately cuts in pointing out that spiderman looks hurt and might not make it there in time... WHICH IS LITERALLY WHAT THEY ARE SHOWING US AS THIS IS SAID.3 (Also the gunshot injury seems to clear up before the final confrontation scene minutes later...) The next scene with the Magguffin-drug-dispersal-machine included a synthetic voice, presumably from the machine, that kept announcing a time limit or the switch to an antidote or the antidote’s deployment despite all of this being rather obviously visually depicted. Following the films climax, another helpful media voiceover explains that someone released an airborne cure to the Lizard's mutagen despite our being shown the blue glowing cure-spores visually curing lizard mutants. It's aggravating and not terrible effective film making.
(I am also perplexed that these things were explained in detail, but nothing was offered concerning how the spider-bite from web producing spiders gave Peter amazing spider-powers4 or what the deal with the Lizard’s internal evil voice was. These seem like odd choices.)
So these are my general, systemic problems with the Amazing Spider-Man.
That said, I have some nit-picky ranty things to say...
The way science is portrayed in this movie is really aggravating to me. The lab looked nothing like a real lab, it makes little sense for high school students to intern in a lab (and no sense for them to intern in a private company’s lab), no one stores liquid nitrogen on a roof, and the way they injected the mouse was hilariously unrealistic (if you happen to have experience injecting mice). My biggest critique, though, is that Peter Parker finds a mathematic formula from his father that suddenly makes genetic recombination between different species possible. Unless math has magic powers in the Amazing Spider-Man universe a simple formula shouldn’t be able to change the behaviour of biology. Math can certainly be used to describe nature, but math cannot control nature. It’s pretty annoying.
I know it’s ridiculous to argue about
Scientific accuracy in a movie about a dude with spider-powers who fights a mutant
lizard man (in fact, the film ridicules a couple of nerds discussing Spider-Man’s
pendulum motion), but the movie spends a lot of time trying to justify the
quasi-Science of the films events. If Amazing Spider-Man wants me to find its
Sci-Fi elements realistically plausible… it has to be much more convincing than
it was. The trick to making unrealistic super-science work in film is by not
belabouring it too much. Spider-Man got his powers from a spider-bite of some
sort? Cool. Doc Conners makes an elixir that turns him into the Lizard? Fine. The
drug-releaser-Magguffin can disperse a cure? Right on, brother. But once you
start saying things like “mRNA” or using a math formula to change how cells
work you are inviting skepticism.5
On another side note: anyone else think the
film had scenes that were riffing pretty hard on the Jurassic Park kitchen
scene and the King Kong on the Empire State Building scene?
1. The romance subplot is pretty shallowly developed on
screen… but we know Gwen Stacey and Peter Parker (or attractive lead male, and
attractive lead female) are meant to fall in love, so it works sort of.
2. I guess this could be like in Batman Begins where we
don’t see a fully realized Batman until the next movie…
3. You could argue that the media voiceover was needed to
set up the cheesy scene with the cranes being moved to provide an express route
for Spider-Man to swing along… but I suspect this could have been done in a
more elegant manner.
4. For one, there was a room full of these things making a
commercial web product. Presumably other people may have been exposed and potentially
bitten by them. Also, Peter becomes a successful trans-species hybrid from the
spider-bite despite a major plotpoint in the film being that trans-species
genetic hybrids can’t be made. This film has issues with internal logical
consistency…
5. The Avengers gave just the right amount of detail to make
the fantastic elements work. Hulk turns green and smashy because gamma
radiation and Cap’s serum: perfect. Cap was frozen for decades, and has powers from a
supersoldier serum: nifty. Ironman has a futuristic weapon suit: cool beans.
The Helicarrier is a flying aircraft carrier: awesome! Never did the movie try
to explain the physics or biology of any of this because that would have just
attacked the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Man, I heart The Avengers.
No comments:
Post a Comment