IMS_Blog

Well, as I mentioned I was going to see it, I suppose I ought to give my impressions of Spider-Man 2. Careful, there will be SPOILERS. It’s OK. That’s about it. It’ll rule this summer’s movie charts mainly due to the lack of competition but as a movie to stand up for years to come, I doubt it. Don’t get me wrong, it is good fun—in the parts where it can be bothered to do anything. At a shade over two hours it is most certainly too long. Yet I couldn’t help leaving the cinema not with the impression of how fun it was but with the sense of just how many faults it has.

First, perhaps I’m biased in that I’ve never really got spiderman. Maybe it’s just I’ve never quite figured out what his superpowers are meant to be (with Superman it’s pretty obvious. Spiderman can, er, catch flies really well). I still think at least some of my points are valid though.

We’ll leave the “science”. This is after all a comic book and we can therefore legitimately ask that we forget what we know about the laws of the universe. Nor should we ask why such an important and well financed experiment is taking place in somebody’s over blown garden shed. You probably don’t become Spider-man if your bitten by a radioactive spider either. One point must be made though, as it shows just how poorly thought out some of this felt. We know Doc Ock’s (ohh, catchy) funny AI arm things are “impervious to magnetism and heat” or something. Which kind of suggests that the ball of sun or whatever it is he’s making is a little on the warm side. Funny that to put it out you just have to drown it then, the water won’t simply boil or anything like that.

The movie starts by try to demonstrate all the problems poor Peter Parker is undergoing thanks to his being Spidey. Unfortunatly it never really managed to illicit much sympathy with me. It wasn’t helped by the birthday scene, where the actors appeared to decide that what was really called for were impressions of mobile wood, aided by some truely awful dialogue. I will mention this scene no more in an attempt to wipe it from my mind.

Having established that Peter is having a hard time and still in love we actually get some half decent action. The mad scientist goes, well, madder. Spiderman’s strongest point is it’s action and it would have been much better if the action to sloppy badly done crap was higher. In passing I’ll mention that the film does share Hollywood’s current obsession with cars flying through the air. It seems you’re not allowed to make an action movie without at least a couple of cars spinning around like confetti. Why this is I have no idea. Interspersed with not enough action we have Spiderman’s fall and rise. This took at least an hour and can be summerised thus: Oh no the conflict I’m feeling means I can’t operate effectivly; I give up; Look, the world (or New York) is now a worse place because I have turned my back on my arachnoid destiny (incidently Spiderman would be much cooler if he really had eight limbs); “There’s a hero in us all”; oh look I’m back. I heard this described as deep. The Atlantic Oceon is deep. This barely quailfies as a paddling pool.

Having come threw all his turmoil, and the girl inevitably having been kidnapped there comes a final confrontation. And in the end Doc Ock prooves to be disappointingly simple to defeat. More peril is posed bby falling masonary than by the actual villan, who at the end reiterates the message of a hero in us all in case we missed it first time.

I’m fairly sure the actual highlight of the movie was the violin plucked rendition of the spiderman song but that had more to do with the girl whom I was sitting next to near the back row with my arm wrapped around her, than anything else.

On the way to such an anticlimatic finish, the third movie (during which it would seem the world and his wife will know Peter is Spidey is Peter) was so blatently set up that I was almost surprised not to find a trailer for it at the end of this one. I’ll probably go and see it. The franchise is fun. But I won’t expect too much, or get caught in the hype.