Editing (Spiderman)
If you watch this site closely (too closely… unhealthily closely… I mean like really, have you no life outside of watching this website, because people who work here don’t even notice most of the time…) you know that we sometimes edit blog posts after they’ve been “published.” I’ve even edited strips, because the dialogue in panel 3 had an extra “a.” Usually this editing is to correct grammatical, typographical, or excessive verbosity errors. Very rarely do we edit to correct informational errors.
Usually when we find we’ve misstated a fact (gotten something wrong), we suck it up, and say we were wrong by publishing a correction. This is the situation I find myself in today.
The Amazing Spiderman is in second run theatres right now. A few months ago, thumbing my nose at other reviewers, over Avengers, I said that summer wasn’t over because “The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spiderman both [had] release dates.” The only correct fact in that particular sentence was that the Sun’s rays were perpendicular north of the equator. Between Avengers, Dark Knight, and Spiderman, only Avengers lived up to the hype.
It’s not that The Amazing Spiderman is a bad movie. It just isn’t a very good movie.
The writing is full of plot holes. Prompting the audience to often ask “why didn’t he just [do something way simpler]?”
This might stem from a need to tell exactly the same origin story as a film everyone in the country has seen, or it might have been holes left behind by removing all of the staples of Spiderman’s world: neither Mary Jane Watson-Parker, J Jonah Jameson, nor Aunt May’s classic white hair appear in the film; the Spiderman proclamation (“With great power…”) is not uttered even once; and “The Daily Bugle” is relegated to a single shot of the paper laying on a stool.
As usual, the writers should read a police procedural book before writing a scene where New York’s Emergency Service Unit (SWAT team) breaks cover and marches, line abreast, toward a giant lizard man. “You know what? Y’all go ahead. I’m going to hang out back here, using this rifle in my hands, so I don’t have to be anywhere even close to hand to tail combat range!”
The film was intended to be 3D. So we get several truly nauseating breaks in the cinematography for travel scenes better suited to a ride at a Universal Studios theme park than a movie theatre.
The Amazing Spiderman is worth seeing, just not at full price for two adults with popcorn and soda.
Correction 2: when I implied that Bane was my least favorite comic character, I omitted Peter Parker’s birth parents. They are far more interesting in absentia, than as spies who had to hide Peter before they faked their own deaths for a sequel.
I’m glad I didn’t rush out to see The Amazing Spiderman. I’m not likely to rush out to see the sequel, either. Unless it’s titled May Parker, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.