I don’t think this can be stressed enough. I hated the special effects in the first movie – they not only didn’t look real but provided a real disconnect. Instead of watching Spiderman I was watching a special effect.
In 2 they did a much better job of giving him a feeling of weight, and the fight/swinging scenes were so much more creative than the first one that I was cutting them a lot more slack than I had previously for the bits that looked obvious.
There were also a lot more bits where the mask was put on and taken off which helped maintain the illusion that it was Peter Parker (or Tobey Maguire) under the costume and not a random stunt guy (or just coding:)).
Story-wise I guess it’s just subjective. I enjoyed the story a lot more than the first one. It didn’t seem so rushed and the action scenes seemed to flow more naturally out of the drama.
I have to agree though that I got really sick of PP forever doing the “I want to say something but can’t get the first word out” thing. I wanted to bitchslap him a few times. It did pay off a bit in the end where MJ says “Can’t you trust me enough to let me make my own decisions?.” If only she’d been shaking him at the time…
I think you missed the point here. He didn’t lose his powers. It was all in his head. His body didn’t change but he was having doubts so he developed psychosomatic loss of powers.
Overall, I liked this movie a lot for what it was: a real Hollywood movie.
There’s a couple things that have been bugging me, though:
Doc Ock needed money, so he robbed the bank. Then what did he do? Did he order all his equipment from a catologue and pay COD with sacks of gold coins???
Doc Ock needs to capture spider-man alive, so he kidnaps the girl. But just before he does that, he throws a car at her and Peter. It was only by sheer luck and spidey senses that they managed to survive that. What if they had died? How would Doc Ock have fulfilled his task then?
The beginning of the movie was good. You need to set the stage. The end of the movie was good. Spidey fighting Doc Ock was great. The Jameson character was fantastic. Definately a show stealer. But, that’s what I would expect from Shillinger.
I didn’t want this movie to suck. I like comics, and I was a fan of the first spiderman. However, there is a period of about a half hour in the middle of the movie that just needed to be cut entirely. One of the scenes in question was Peter explaining what happened in the first move to his Grandma. The audience had already seen this! There isn’t any need to spend a 10 minute scene slowly explaining something that the audience already knows. Very boring. I actually found myself fidgiting and looking at my watch. This is not something I ever do in movies.
Oh, and Doc Ock did always use a counterweight. He would always anchor himself to the pavement with two tenticles while the other two were lifting something heavy. I had no problems with the physics in the movie. It is a comic book movie, and the viewer must be forgiving.
According to the novelization, Ock ended up stealing a bunch of exotic hardware from some military bases anyway, and the Army kept the news out of the media. But I doubt that was in the original script, since the novelization also features a fifty-foot-tall rampaging robot in the first act.
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who was disappointed - I was feeling like a freak!
My major complaint is that the motivation of the characters seems too pat and simplistic. Peter has all this angst because he only has two choices: spend every spare moment as Spider-Man, saving the city, and thereby sacrifice everything he holds dear, or just be a student and let the city go to absolute hell. But in actuality he could do something in between. In any case he has to acknowledge he is just one man, and he has to sleep sometimes, so he must be dealing with missing some bad guys - would it be so impossible to carve out some time for studies and romance as well? (I also found it quite silly that he single-handedly controlled the crime rate in the city, but it’s a comic book so I’ll let that slide.)
The other thing that bugged me was both Peter and Aunt May blame him for “killing” his uncle. Hello, has anyone in the movie encountered the idea of Proximate Cause? I can kind of understand his feeling guilt - we often blame ourselves for things that aren’t really our fault. But his aunt turning her back on him when she found out that he failed to exact vigilante justice on a robber who he had no way of knowing would carjack his uncle later? It just seemed stupid to me.
I also thought it was really dumb that Peter knew he was losing his powers, but went swinging blithely from skyscrapers anyway. And I didn’t get that losing the powers was just psychosomatic. It seemed reasonable that his wacky spider bite might just be quitting on him, and it didn’t make sense to me that he could just will his powers back.
I loved it, but that’s probably because I loved the comic. The cheesey teen angst is what Spider-Man is all about. And Kirsten Dunst looked great to me. She’s very beautiful.
You gotta remember, Peter’s going around with Major League Guilt™ from the death of Uncle Ben. Because he indulged in a petty personal thrill (that of letting the robber escape from the sports arena), his life and those of his closest relatives were irrevocably changed. He’s now feeling obligated to the point where if he knows a problem is brewing and he doesn’t lend a web to try and make things better, he interprets that as shirking his responsibility.
Not the most healthy mental attitude to have, but it’s Peter’s angst that’s made Spidey such an iconic figure.
I couldn’t agree more - I loved it. It embraced the spirit of the Spider-man comic that I loved as a kid and made it come alive on a big screen. Sure there were plot holes and physics inconsistencies - it’s a comic book, fercrissake! I’m not looking for something as tight as The Usual Suspects, plot-wise - I want it to work, embrace the characters and basic premise of the comic and be reasonably internally consistent.
For me, it delivered big time. YMclearlyV - to each his own.
Obviously I meant Aunt May. The scene sucked. It (and most scenes surrounding it) could have hit the cutting room floor easily and the movie would have been far better off.
If you think it was absolutely required for Peter Parker to tell Aunt May what happened then they could have done it without a boring ass scene which described in detail what the viewers already saw in the first movie.
Can someone explain to me the basic ideas behind the counterweight physics referred to by tim314 and Agent Foxtrot?
Why must Doc Ock have a counterweight when he is lifting these extremely heavy objects? I realize that for a forklift that would be necessary because lifting something in a vertical direction upon an object with no anchor will mean that it tips over.
However, doesn’t Dock Ock have another pair of tentacles that he sticks in the ground to use as an anchor while he lifts objects? Thus wouldn’t he have the necessary counter-weight?
Please explain.
–Oh and I haven’t watched the movie yet, but realistically I wasn’t exactly much excited by it given that the best thing I like about the first movie was J.J - and thinking even that makes me shudder–
