He’s also the actor who played The Vision in the Avengers 2 and Cap 3 movies.
I watched the movie last night. My thoughts:
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Nice to see them return to the more original Spider Man: the nerdy high school kid who struggles to keep it all together while being your friendly neighborhood Spidey. It was nice to see them avoid the Mary Jane Watson love interest (which came well after he was out of high school). One of the great things about early Spidey was that he would get so jazzed up about unexpected success; I think that got through with some of the scenes in the movie.
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I watched it in 3D, which may color my thoughts here, but the physics of what they had Spidey (and others) doing was handled atrociously. It got to where you could always tell the CGI stuff from the “real” stunts. This is a common complaint of mine with modern sci-fi/comic book movies, but really, modeling proper physics isn’t that hard, and it does make the stuff going on seem much more realistic. They might as well declare that Spidey had a tiny Bergenholm built into his suit.
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I thought they handled the plot twist in an interesting way. Vulture telling Peter Parker that he’s saving his life by not killing him then and there, so go show his daughter a good time and just stop interfering with the criminal enterprise was wonderful. It’s like he sees Spider Man as a kid, not worthy of really worrying about; just convince him to stop trying to play with the grown-ups and all will be fine. The fact that Peter saves him at the end puts the onus right back on Vulture. Interesting to see how that plays out in future movies.
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One aspect to the movie really bugged me. When Iron Man shows up at the ferry and saves the day (in a rather trivial way, compared to Spidey’s efforts), Peter justifiably gets upset with him over the fact that Stark didn’t appear to listen to Peter’s warnings about what’s going on with the weapons. Iron Man replies that he DID listen; that’s why the FBI was there.
The FBI??? You’re talking about Chitauri-tech weapons and you send in the FBI??? That’s the most ludicrous thing one can imagine! There would be a dozen dead FBI agents in no time! They had nothing with which to tackle the sort of weaponry that Vulture and his gang were using. Why is S.H.I.E.L.D. not called in? I mean, if Stark called in the FBI for this, then he really WASN’T listening to Peter
And, as someone else pointed out, Stark takes away the Spider Man tech suit because Peter has endangered a whole ferry of people trying to stop the sale of the weapons without appropriate help. But, then, when Peter damn near blows up a good chunk of NYC by causing the Avengers’ plane to crash into it, because he takes on the bad guys again without appropriate backup, he’s suddenly a hero? He’s learned his lesson, proved himself worthy?? The only lesson in all of this is that, as usual, Tony Stark is an ego-centric jerk who pays no attention to anything that doesn’t personally involve him, and is the LAST person you would want mentoring the young, inexperienced Spider Man.
When he said that bit about the FBI, I laughed out loud in the theater, it was so absurd.
All in all, though, a fun movie to watch. I’d rate it better than all the earlier Spidey movies, except, of course, for the first one. That one is iconic for one simple reason: a kiss. (and did you notice the homage to that kiss in this movie??)
I wish there had been more of the Vulture in the movie. I thought he was the best Spider Man villain in any of the movies.
DSYoungEsq:
I don’t think that’s the case. They were there to intercept an arms deal going down, but they did not expect the villains to be firing weapons in a public place (and on a boat, which would sink if a mishap occured). Until Spider-Man showed up (and Vulture thought he had him outnumbered - not like a dozen FBI agents coming out of the woodwork), the villains didn’t go for their high-tech stuff.
You mean to tell me you think they wouldn’t have used those weapons to save themselves from the FBI? :rolleyes:
Also, your recollection is wrong. They actually start shooting them at the FBI before they try to do anything about Spidey. Indeed, Spidey ends up saving one or two of the FBI guys being shot at before everything goes to hell and a handbasket, if I recall correctly.
I didn’t mind the FBI being there at all. It served two important narrative purposes. First, the level of crime fighting that Peter’s at is “Real Federal Government” crime, not, “Gods and Space Aliens” crime. Second, that in the years since the Battle of New York illicit alien tech is common enough that the regular alphabet agencies handle most of it, not super spy organizations. Which makes sense - SHIELD was gone for a few years, there, just when super crime was ramping up. The other law enforcement agencies would have to step up to fill the gap.
Also, they didn’t go in totally unprepared - they brought Iron Man with them.
Laser blasters and electric boxing gloves are nice, but they’re not going to stop you getting shot if you have a dozen FBI agents pointing guns at your head. Spider-Man blew their plan by showing up when he did. If he’d stayed home, presumably, the bust would have gone down in a manner that precluded the gun runners being able to use their gear.
Also, Stark’s anger at Peter was mostly about not following orders, and hacking the tech in the suit. If Peter had just randomly been on that ferry and walked in on an arms deal, he probably wouldn’t have gotten in that much trouble over it, even if everything else had played out identically. When he stops the Vulture from stealing the Stark tech from the plane, it’s much more a case of, “He was just in the right place at the right time.” Also, he succeeded without needing someone to come in and bail him out, and was able to shut down the gun runners and capture their leader, as opposed to letting them all get away, like he did on the ferry.
That said, I agree, Tony’s a terrible mentor figure. That’s why it’s such a great idea to cast him in that role.
Oh, PLEASE. :rolleyes: What did Spidey’s presence do that caused the FBI not to be able to shoot the bad guys in the head? The FBI doesn’t make their presence known suddenly because Spidey’s there; they show up when they do because that’s their plan! And the bad guys react predictably, start using high-tech stuff, and none of them is shot and dies, but several FBI agents would be dead if Spidey hadn’t helped them out. It’s simply ludicrous to argue that the FBI in that situation wasn’t in over their head. And that’s without considering the contribution of Vulture to the eventual battle with the FBI.
As for Iron Man being there, it’s not so clear he was originally part of the bust. I got the impression he showed up only because by monitoring the Spidey suit, he found out that Peter was in serious trouble, and needed a rescue. Otherwise, why didn’t Iron Man simply lead the FBI in in the first place? 
One of the things I hate people doing with science fiction and comics movies is trying to explain away things that are poorly put together with tortured logic. :dubious:
Yeah, doesn’t the movie pretty much acknowledge that Tony is way over his head in this? That’s why Cap lead the Avengers.
Except that he’s a war criminal now.
If Spider-Man hadn’t been there, presumably, the FBI would have sprung their bust when the bad guys were in an enclosed area, where they could be easily surrounded, and before they could pull out their super guns. Because Spider-Man showed up and started a fight (in the middle of a huge crowd of civilians) they had to move before they had the tactical position they wanted, and against targets that were already alert and ready for a fight.
Because a ferry full of innocent civilians is a bad place to bust out a pair of mechs and start duking it out. Iron Man was in reserve, in case things went bad, but ideally the FBI gets everyone in cuffs before they have a chance to fire a shot.
The FBI breaks up arms deals all the time. 99% of the time, they do it without a shot being fired. The stuff being traded by Tooms’ gang aren’t WMDs, or chemical weapons. They’re just really fancy guns. There’s no reason why the standard FBI techniques for breaking up illegal arms deals wouldn’t be appropriate here, except a teenager with superpowers shows up and messes the whole sting up.
That’s a pretty insulting tone, there. Is that really necessary when discussing a movie about a teenager who can lift a dumptruck over his head?
I’ve seen the movie a couple of times now and it is really weird how it goes out of it’s way to not mention SHIELD at all. I wonder if it’s part of the pissing contest between the Marvel TV and Marvel movie people (they don’t like each other).
Well, SHIELD hasn’t really been re-formed in the movie world. Also, timeline wise, the rebirth of SHIELD was a few months after Civil War. This movie also takes place a few months after Civil War. This may take place before SHIELD comes back and everything in the last season of Agents.
I saw the movie last week just based on people saying it was good. I haven’t seen any of the previous Spiderman movies and didn’t know much about the character from comics. I also haven’t seen hardly any other Marvel movies.
So, for being completely blind I really enjoyed this movie! It didn’t leave me bored at all.
And then once my friend filled me in on all the stuff I missed I thought it was even more fun. I love meta movies.
This statement alone means there’s no real point discussing this with you rationally. One of those “fancy guns” splits a ferry into two pieces when it overloads. At least two agents would have been quickly dead had Spider Man not intervened to save them. Vulture was always there, and was not going to be taken by some gun-toting FBI guys staking out the buy, so your theory is simply absurd.
As for why it’s important: one of the constant complaints I’ve had about science fiction and science fantasy films and television (including comic book adaptations) is that the fan base is willing to accept all sorts of stupid stuff and still goes bonkers over it. For goodness sake: in the Harry Potter movies, other than the excellent bit about how to complete the “Wingardium Leviosa” spell (with a flick of the wand and a proper intonation of the words), every spell cast involves someone just saying some meaningless phrase and pointing a wand, and voilá, magic happens! That’s absurd. Really good fantasy magic fiction always pays attention to the detail of HOW that can happen, and if I recall the books correctly, Rowling didn’t completely abandon this herself. In the Star Trek reboot movie, the original Spock watches a planet (Vulcan) implode, in a scene that can only work if the planet he is on is a very close moon to Vulcan (in which case God help it when Vulcan implodes!). Stupid stuff like this is written in all the time and no one ever cares. The expectations are so low, it’s like people just are happy that science fiction/science fantasy is being produced at all!
To have people at the SDMB engage in that sort of post-fact rationalization to justify stupid stuff is even more annoying, since we’re supposed to be a bit about dispelling ignorance. I don’t mean to be insulting to you, but really, you should know better than to defend the FBI showing up to bust a gang of weapons makers who are using chitauri-powered artifacts to create weapons that no average policeman can possible deal with effectively, especially when that gang is led by an arch-villain with a pretty nifty flying rig which, if not at the level of Iron Man or War Machine, certainly seems to be at least as good as that used by Falcon.
Again, we’re talking about a superhero movie. Is it necessary to use this kind of language over something this trivial?
The only reason the gun runners were shooting at all is because Spider-Man blew the op. Same for Tooms being able to get into his Vulture armor. Again, the FBI plan would, almost certainly, have been designed to get the drop on the bad guys before they could arm themselves. Just like, as I understand it, they do in real life.
Well, certainly we don’t want our stories about child wizards, written specifically for an audience of children, to contain any absurdity. But I think it’s worth noting, here, that you’ve got a bit of an apples-to-oranges situation going on here. There’s nothing inherently more absurd in the magic system of Harry Potter than their is in Lord of the Rings. Magic doesn’t exist, so there can’t be a “wrong” way of depicting magic. You don’t care for how Rowling wrote magic in her universe, and that’s fine - I don’t care for it much myself. But it’s no more absurd to waggle a wand, say some doggerel Latin and get a fire ball, than it is to wave a vial of water that someone shined a light at a thousand years ago, and scare off a giant spider.
Contrast with Star Trek, which is on a base level, dealing with known quantities, like how far apart celestial bodies are. And even then, that’s only a real problem because Star Trek has pretensions to hard sf. The celestial mechanics behind, say, The Little Prince are even less realistic, but the story isn’t trying to be realistic, so most people are okay with it.
Superheroes are a bit in the middle of the spectrum. They’re set in the modern world, so there’s some level of fidelity to realism expected - you can’t have a normal person run from LA to New York in ten minutes, for example. But realism is deliberately broken in many ways as well - the Flash can absolutely run from LA to New York in ten minutes, despite that act violating any number of the laws of physics. Spider-Man is absurd in his very conception - radioactive spider bites would, at minimum, be indistinguishable from a regular spider bite, and at worst, would make you die from cancer. They certainly would not give you “spider powers,” particularly inherently nonsense ones like, “proportional strength of a spider.”
So, to a certain extent, complaints about the FBI being there as “unrealistic” are cut off at the knees from the word “go,” because however ridiculous that might be (and, really, it’s not particularly ridiculous at all) it pales in comparison to literally every other thing that defines the movie. Spider-Man is ridiculous. Flying power armor that doesn’t pulp its wearer is ridiculous. A bunch of blue collar demo guys figuring out how to reverse engineer alien space guns in ridiculous. Aliens with space guns showing up in New York in the first place is ridiculous, to say nothing of them being met there by an actual Norse god.
So, the thing here is, there’s no actual such thing as a “chitauri.” Or space laser guns. Or flying power armor. So it’s a bit of a hard row for you to hoe in claiming that how society would react to these things is “ridiculous.” Particularly since your complaints don’t really hold a lot of water. Your basic complaint is that the FBI shouldn’t have been there, SHIELD should have been there - because it apparently makes a significant difference which group of government agents in dark suits show up to a thing like this? If SHIELD can train and equip its agents to deal with metahuman threats, then the FBI can also train and equip its agents to deal with metahuman threats. And given that, in the timeline we’re watching, there hadn’t been a SHIELD at all, it makes a lot of sense that the FBI (and other enforcement agencies) would step up their game to fill the void left by SHIELD’s collapse.
Of course, in terms of narrative, this really doesn’t matter one way or the other. If they’d sent SHIELD to the ferry, literally the only thing that would have been changed is the name of the agency that’s pissed off at Spider-Man. The scene would otherwise have played out exactly the same way, because the movie is about Spider-Man, not about SHIELD. So, even if your complaints held any water (and, again, they do not) it would still be an incredibly minor nitpick.
Certainly, not one important enough to justify the abrasiveness with which you’re defending your position.
There is a notable difference (as I recall) between the ferry situation and the invisible plane situation - minutes before the ferry situation went south, Peter was on the phone with Tony, and chose not to give Tony any information about the fact that he had spotted an arms dealer on the ferry. Prior to the invisible plane theft, Peter attempted to get help and was not able to. In the first situation, Peter went out of his way to avoid help when help was easily available - in the second situation, Peter active sought appropriate help.
[Moderating]
DSYoungEsq, Miller already addressed this, but he wasn’t speaking as a moderator. I am. While your post wasn’t quite an unambiguous direct insult, and therefore won’t be getting a Warning, you still need to dial it way back. Disagreeing with someone is fine, but saying that it’s not worth discussing anything with them rationally is not. And implying that rationalization by SF fans is spreading ignorance? What do you think that SF fans do? If you don’t like SF fans, then stay out of discussions with them.
The part where Spidey was giving directions to the elderly lady really cracked us up.
I wonder if the whole “spider man is a menace” triple j situation will happen eventually