The Amazing Spiderman is Pretty Good (Spoilers)

[AndrewL]

Originally Posted by Dendarii Dame

My husband and I just saw it. Shouldn't Gwen just have broken the spread-the-lizard-gas device? She had fire, plus plenty of heavy looking objects to break it with. Maybe she could have tossed it out the window, even. Yeah, yeah, then the police wouldn't have been cured, but still.

You might as well ask why they had bothered keeping the machine around in working condition all those years, if they had decided they weren't going to use it. Even if they had decided to keep it just in case, you'd think they'd have it mothballed in pieces in storage somewhere, rather than keeping it ready to run in a corner of their lab.

[AaronX]

I'm just wondering how can the police be looking for spider-man, yet not analyze the webs and see where he got them from.

[Andy L]

Originally Posted by AndrewL

You might as well ask why they had bothered keeping the machine around in working condition all those years, if they had decided they weren't going to use it. Even if they had decided to keep it just in case, you'd think they'd have it mothballed in pieces in storage somewhere, rather than keeping it ready to run in a corner of their lab.

But it's one thing to keep a machine around in a (theoretically) secure lab after you've decided it has too many problems to be worth using; it's quite another to pass up the opportunity to destroy it when you know a psycho is on his way to use it.

[bup]

Finally saw it last night. Overall, it was what I expected, which is fine. Lots of familiar territory, but I was in the mood for a Spiderman movie.

Small things:
Given that Peter had brought up the idea that radical changes in temperature could affect the Lizard, way before the final fight, it was stupid not to arm himself with fire extinguishers and tell everybody he could to find supplies of liquid nitrogen or whatever.

One thing I really liked - small point, but I think it was intentional - after Peter first gets home after being bitten, he catches a fly by plucking it out of the air. After he lets it go - he smells and almost licks his fingers. Disgusting, but cool. Having spider DNA has bad side effects as well as good ones.

[Bozuit]

I saw this today and I wasn't very impressed.

First of all, I enjoyed Raimi's Spider-Men and so didn't see any point in a reboot that doesn't take a fundamentally different approach, as Nolan did with Batman. But I wasn't thinking about that when I went into the cinema; I expected to enjoy the film.

I suppose my biggest problem with the film is I just didn't like this Peter Parker. He seems to be trying to look like Robert Pattinson's character in Twilight. Also his pre- and post-bite characters aren't as radically different as I felt they should be. Peter is already confident and has some physical ability/daring (inferred from his skateboard) and almost no attempt is made to make him come across as any kind of nerd. We're told he's smart but it's just not convincing. I didn't really care about Gwen Stacy either. As for Curt Connors, how many times will we see the "well-meaning-genius-experiments-on-himself-and-goes-crazy-about-his-technology" antagonist in these superhero films?

Apart from the characters, I also found the action a little disappointing. The rules for what Spider-Man can do seem to be "what would a 10 year old think is cool?". Dodging bullets is too much. A football bending a metal post is also ridiculous. A few other things I can't think of right now also seemed over the top.

[Spoke]

Very disappointing.

It just felt like a generic superhero movie. Like they were going down a checklist. Hero discovers new powers? Check. Mutant villain whose alter ego is a friend of the hero? Check. Girlfriend in peril? Check.

Boring.

The score was repeatedly used as a crutch for a lifeless script. There must have been at least five extended segments with no dialogue and just a cloying score telling us how we are supposed to feel.

I loved how the lizard gas bomb kept announcing "Lizard gas bomb will explode in T minus three minutes..." Good of them to include a handy loudspeaker on the device.

And how can you have a Spider-Man movie without his comic foil J. Jonah Jameson? How???

The ONLY way in which this movie was superior to even the least of the Raimi films is that Emma Stone is a far superior actress to Kirsten Dunst.

(Well, OK, maybe the FX are better, too, but the filmmakers can't take credit for advances in technology.)

[Dendarii Dame]

I noticed a wedding ring on the villain's hand. I remember he had a wife and son from the cartoon, but don't remember if he had them in the comic book. They weren't mentioned in the movie, anyway.

[Bozuit]

Originally Posted by Spoke

And how can you have a Spider-Man movie without his comic foil J. Jonah Jameson? How???

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this. Big mistake!

[Krokodil]

Originally Posted by AaronX

I'm just wondering how can the police be looking for spider-man, yet not analyze the webs and see where he got them from.

In the comics, his webs evaporate completely after either an hour or 24 hours, depending on the requirements of the plot. I can totally see them disappearing before some poor overworked CSU tech gets around to analyzing them.

Originally Posted by Spoke

And how can you have a Spider-Man movie without his comic foil J. Jonah Jameson? How???

In the comics, JJJ didn't appear until Spider-Man's second appearance. They already had quite a bit crammed into this.

For all the praise I've read and heard, this really isn't as great as the first Raimi film (although I too prefer Emma Stone to Kirsten Dunst). Andrew Garfield just doesn't sell me that he's Peter Parker the way Tobey Maguire did, and I thought he got too chummy with Flash Thompson a little too quickly. And a skateboard before getting his spider-bite? Not the guy I remember.

[Spoke]

Originally Posted by Krokodil

I thought he got too chummy with Flash Thompson a little too quickly.

Yeah, that bugged the hell out of me, too.

[Sealemon2.0]

I think it would have been cool if the Lizard had used his newly formed police lizards as the first wave of his attack on Ozcorp. Instead we just see the cops changed and then..nothing until they're shown being cured.

Also the webs would vanish as soon as they were spun. This was most noticible when he was swinging under the bridge.

Otherwise it was a pretty good movie, but not the equal of 1 or 2.

[Miller]

Originally Posted by Spoke

And how can you have a Spider-Man movie without his comic foil J. Jonah Jameson? How???

The first Raimi Spiderman didn't have Jameson either, did it?

[Spoke]

Originally Posted by Miller

The first Raimi Spiderman didn't have Jameson either, did it?

Oh yeah, it had him. Gave the movie a sense of humor that is really lacking in the new film.

[Bozuit]

Originally Posted by Spoke

Oh yeah, it had him. Gave the movie a sense of humor that is really lacking in the new film.

There were some attempts at humour, but I found myself rolling my eyes at them a lot. I don't think it helped that I was sharing the cinema with mostly 14 year olds, and it's hard to laugh at something they think is funny.

[DCnDC]

Saw this Saturday night and man was that a fucking waste of time and money (for everyone involved, audience and filmmakers included). I was laughing my ass off the whole time and not because of any intentional humor.

Where to start?

SPOILER:

A fantastic amount of pouting and crying: Jesus fucking Christ, get a grip on yourself little girl! And I'm not talking about Gwen Stacy. Seriously, there was more crying in this movie than Steel Magnolias.

Incredible coincidences:
-Gwen Stacy, our protagonists' object of desire, just happens to work at Oscorp, and also just happens to be the intern of the man that Peter has snuck in there to [stalk?].

-Oh, and her father is the police Captain in charge of tracking down and capturing Spider-man.

They beat you over the head with plot points:
-Am I the only person who felt like the filmmakers assumed everyone in the audience was an idiot? Dr. Conners longingly looking at the reflection of his existing hand, as it appears as if he has his missing arm [back?]. Yes, YOU HAVE ONE ARM, WE GET IT.

-Gwen explaining back to Peter at the end, "He made you promise to stay away from me, didn’t he?" I suppose to catch anyone up who may have missed it in the scene that WE JUST SAW 90 SECONDS AGO.

Strange behavior:
-Peter scams his way into Oscorp, then sneaks into a lab clean room containing a rotating spider web with hundreds of glow-in-the-dark spiders crawling around on it. He not only walks right into the room, he immediately walks right into the center of the web and starts touching shit. Seriously, you don't want to at least, I don't know, take a lap around the room and see what you're dealing with?

-When the Lizard breaks into the school, he's kicking the shit out of Parker until Peter realized what he needs is in his backpack, so he grabs it with a web (which he obviously already has), and jumps to (or gets thrown into, I don't remember exactly) the next room, and emerges with his suit on and that somehow turns him into this super-badass who the Lizard can barely even touch.

Total nonsense:
-Uncle Ben leaves Peter a message on his phone the night he dies, when Peter forgets to pick up Aunt May, which Peter is too upset to listen to until the end of the movie. When we finally get to hear the message at the end of the movie, it's Uncle Ben doling sage advice and ending with "You're my hero" or something like that. Wasn't he furious with Peter when he left that message?

-Speaking of Uncle Ben's death, what the fuck was that about? So the guy had a gun in his pants. Why jump for it? It's not like he was waving it around, blasting random people on the street, he didn't even shoot the clerk, it was a smash-and-grab (without even the "smash") and the gun was just something that fell out when he trips. There was no reason to grab for the gun.

-The whole bully thing. The guy's a complete tool (named "Flash." Seriously?) who beats the shit out of him, then later Peter mildly embarrasses him in front of the whole school, and after Uncle Ben dies, suddenly Flash is all empathetic and they're like BFFs.

-When Gwen's father dies, Peter gives us a very pained "NOOOOO!" Um, you two didn't like each other, at all, right up until literally like 15 minutes ago.

I'm certain there's plenty more dumb shit to point out that I've forgotten, but that should suffice to make my point.

I know they were deliberately trying to make it all dark and serious a la Chris Nolan's Batman trilogy, but they completely and utterly failed in every possible way. All of the "dramatic" scenes were laughably overplayed and completely stalled the movie.

Seriously this was an atrocious piece of shit.

[bup]

Incredible coincidences:

That's just conservation of detail in a narrative, with respect to characters. Most stories have characters that fit together in very surprising, convenient ways.

Is Les Miserables an atrocious piece of shit?

They beat you over the head with plot points:

Gwen's explanation at the end isn't exposition. Of course we know that. But we ...

You know what? Fuck the spoilers. The thread title warns about spoilers and the movie's been out for a month.

Of course we knew Peter had promised Captain Stacy to stay away from Gwen. We didn't know Gwen knew it - she had to be a pretty smart cookie to suss it out. It was pretty obvious she didn't know for a while - she was all, "Why's Peter being a dick to me?"

[Andy L]

Originally Posted by DCnDC

The guy's a complete tool (named "Flash." Seriously?)

While I agree with the larger points you make, "Flash" is name the character has had since 1962 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Thompson

[BigT]

I'm not reading for spoiler's sake, but I had to share this: the title of this thread is what convinced my sister to NOT go see this in theaters and wait for a home video release. I read it to her, and she said that "pretty good" wasn't enough to go wasting money on it.

She's been a huge Spidey fan ever since the first movie, so I can only surmise that Spider-Man 3 disappointed her a lot more than she let on.