The unfortunate results of the meddling studio heads really show when the merits of the film crew are actually measured.
In the few moments that “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” actually manage to be true to themselves, they reveal a level of potential that dwarfs anything done by the franchise and could have made for a true contender in the genre.
While spotty writing prevented Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker from coalescing into a coherent character, his body of work doesn’t necessarily refute his potential to play the character properly. Even within the finished products as they are, he displays spots of brilliance, including his proactive investigations and experiments in order to pursue villains and criminals. That’s to say nothing of his stellar performance in the mask, doing things with Spider-Man that I never believed could be translated from page to live action.
His hits can be further attested to Marc Webb’s brilliant direction on the films when he gets a proper opportunity to stretch his legs. Webb’s affinity for human drama continues to stand strong despite the poor material that he is granted but has nevertheless proven himself as a solid director of a variety of action. The grounded practical effects of the first film and the flashy elaborate CG utilizing fight choreography of the second are undeniably dazzling and deserving of a better film than what was built around it.
Overall, “The Amazing Spider-Man” has been a substantially messy and problematic venture that shows itself to be behind the times of Hollywood convention and the superhero genre in general. Setting executive blunders aside however, it is symptomatic of a bigger problem with the Spider-Man franchise in general.
With Marvel back in the spotlight due to the success of their many properties featured within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it only makes sense that their flagship franchise would ride the coattails of its peers back into popularity. The problem is that while all of the current properties associated with “The Avengers” cinematically are being granted their first shot at the mainstream while exhibiting actual growth, maturity and passage of time, Spider-Man has become consistently overexposed to mainstream media for nearly a decade and refuses to actually grow.
While Raimi’s trilogy marched onward with its characterization, his departure from the series brought about its end before the production of a fourth film that didn’t seem to hold much promise.
The critically acclaimed “The Spectacular Spider-Man” featuring tight continuity, surprisingly complex content for a children’s cartoon, strong characterizations and character development was brought to an end due to legal kerfuffles resulting in its replacement with “Ultimate Spider-Man,” a cartoon apparently stuck in a single time period with an immature teenage Spider-Man choosing to patronize a younger audience with short attention span theater.
Meanwhile, if the actual comics weren’t already in a downward spiral after instituting a deus ex machina to eliminate Peter’s marriage and all plot elements that actually made him feel like an adult dealing with relatable problems, they’ve dived off of the cliff face first with the possession of his body and death of his consciousness by Dr. Octopus and somehow manages to keep falling from there.
After being revived in time for the release of “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” he’s been handed fame, fortune, the attention of every hot woman on panel at any given time and a hot sexy super powered fantasy girlfriend in a skimpy, thin, poorly concealing costume, whom he’s only known for weeks, to help him fight crime in the field and bone off the clock.
In short, “Spider-Man’s” popularity that once allowed Marvel to put resources behind him and take chances with new ideas has become the poster child for everything that’s wrong with every medium of storytelling.
In comics, his growth is stunted to keep him as close to a teenage mentality as possible because that’s what most people associate the character with despite him pushing 30 at this point, reducing the tale of a once bright young man growing older and wiser as time passed into a disgusting, immature, amoral and borderline sexist male power fantasy. In animation, he’s reduced to toothless, zany, and unfocused gags lacking any hint of cleverness while playing to every negative stereotype of animation that its peers and predecessors both past and present have fought to dispel.
In film, he’s forced to pander to the crowd and follow ideas that don’t mesh with his story rather than be a trailblazer and stand independently, which is what made the franchise so popular and allowed its modern competition to even be produced to begin with.
And the less said about this… thing, the better.
There are a lot of ways to fix Spider-Man but the truth of the matter is that none of them are likely to be approached because that would involve looking at the character with passion rather than statistics. It ultimately comes down to two choices.
Find a driven and talented storyteller to handle the series and trust them to tell a well conceived story that evolves organically, no matter how “out of touch” it may seem with another entity of the franchise. As it grows, it will gradually turn into something that may seem different from what it was in another era but is that any different from people maturing into better human beings in real life, something that was a selling point of the comic no more than 8 or 9 years ago?
Or, failing to do the above, just let it die, drop off, and disappear for at least 7 or 8 years before coming back to try again. After all, if Sony chooses to underestimate their audience’s standards again by sucking up to them with lazy, uninspired, and slapdash work packaged with unrelated popular trends like an embarrassing slang using parent trying to be hip, at least they finally gave me an opportunity to miss seeing the Web-head in live action.
Not that that is likely to happen, if this is what I have to look forward to from Spider-Man in the foreseeable future. It just seems rather telling that the only worthwhile Spider-Man entity is currently from a universe where Peter Parker died before growing up.
No comments:
Post a Comment