Movie Review: Spider-Man 2
Okay, let’s talk movies. I haven’t seen enough recently, but I have opinions.
Starting with Spider Man 2, which people keep calling the best super-hero movie ever, or at least the best since Superman. That combined with Michael Chabon’s work on the screenplay was enough to make me interested in seeing it. I am afraid that I am going to have to dissent from everyone else on this film. There are a few great things about it, including some perfect action sequences and some fun performances (and two brief non-superhero sequences with genuine emotion). If you are into that sort of thing, it is worth seeing. But the story is a jumbled mess of unrelated elements, which necessitate the sort of needlessly lengthy ending that Return of the King was (falsely) accused of. And it is full of really unsubtle teen angst. That wouldn’t be so bad if any of the plot threads ended in a satisfying manner. But all of them end up leaving them either so unresolved that you wonder why they were in the movie at all, or wrapping things up so nicely that you wonder if there was really any conflict after all. It leaves you wondering what the movie was all about.
When the movie is about something, it is the Spider-Man version of the general superhero moral that those who have the opportunity to make a difference have an obligation to do so. I missed the last Spider-Man movie, but I would be shocked if they didn’t cover exactly the same ground there. The promise of a sequel is that with all the exposition taken care of in an earlier movie, one can focus on taking the characters story in new directions, rather than just reiterating the last film. Also, Spider-Man was never my favorite comic book character, but I always thought that one of his endearing characteristics was that he always had clever quips to deliver when in costume. The only things I can think of that he says to his enemies in this film are along the lines of ‘Put down that woman you picked up that I cannot admit to knowing.’ I know that Chabon didn’t actually get dialog writing credit for this screenplay, so I am hoping that his ideas were jumbled in, and that the screenplay to his perfect testament to youth won’t be similarly insipid.
Yes, this is bothering me more than I probably should. I basically liked this movie, yet I have more negative things to say about it than I do about a lot of worse ones. That is partially a consequence of having expectations set so high expectations. It is also a result of having the opposite experience last summer, when Marvel’s big superhero movie was Ang Lee’s Hulk. While I would not call it a perfect movie, I thought it was a fascinating attempt at transforming the emotional and visual information of a great comic book into something cinematic. But it was panned for being slow and pointless. At the end of the day, people associate comic books and heroic action movies, and judge them with little regard for story, characters or originality. Which is understandable, but disappointing. (As a related aside, I am on one of my occasional comic book-reading phase. The book of the moment is Planetary, but unfortunately there are not many paperbacks available for me to read of it.)
Rating: 5/10