Spiderman 3 Better Than Amazing

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by VulcanJedi, Jan 24, 2013.

  1. wonderstoat

    wonderstoat Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    Hi - I didn't know that. Can you elaborate?
     
  2. Shazam!

    Shazam! Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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  3. The Evil Dead

    The Evil Dead Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I skipped The Amazing Spider-Man. It seemed so pointless. As a lifelong Spidey fan, I'm tired of his origin. Oddly enough, I will happily go see the sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man probably having never seen the first film.
     
  4. DalekJim

    DalekJim Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Sony had to rush a movie out in order to hold on to the rights. It's the best Spidey movie but it's a very bland, mediocre product.
     
  5. Captaindemotion

    Captaindemotion Admiral Admiral

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    That's how I feel.
     
  6. wonderstoat

    wonderstoat Lieutenant Red Shirt

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  7. Relayer1

    Relayer1 Admiral Admiral

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    Whilst sick of everything being rebooted, I preferred ASM to the previous three.

    And the third one stank...
     
  8. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Seriously? Wow, I found them radically different in tone and approach. Raimi's were more broad and larger-than-life and, well, Raimi-esque, while Webb's film is more serious and down-to-Earth. And the casting couldn't have been more different. Obviously the makers of ASM were deliberately trying to differentiate it from the previous series as much as possible, so that it wouldn't seem pointless, and I think they succeeded.


    Consider the source material. The Lizard in the comics has been a split personality since long, long before SM2 was made. In fact, the trope fits the Lizard much better than it fits Doc Ock, because in the comics Ock was never portrayed as being controlled by his arms the way he was in the movie.


    Which can be said of most live-action superhero movies ever made, and was a trope of the genre long before Tobey Maguire put on the red-and-blue suit. Actors like to have their faces on camera. Filmmakers like to have their stars' faces on camera. It's what much of the audience is paying to see, for one thing. For another, it's hard to convey emotion through a mask. In animation, the animators can cheat and have the mask's eyeholes and such distort to convey emotion, but that can't happen in live action. So most live-action superhero movies have the characters lose their masks at key dramatic moments. Heck, it's not even limited to superhero movies. Look at all the military movies where fighter pilots take off their oxygen masks to deliver dialogue, or cop movies where officers in body armor take off their helmets at key dramatic moments even when they're still in the line of fire. This is one of the universal tropes of cinema, so it's completely unfair to claim that it's an imitation of Raimi's Spidey films in particular. It's just a hard thing to avoid in any live-action film featuring a character in face-concealing headgear.
     
  9. Shazam!

    Shazam! Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    The new Spidey film had the opportunity to ditch that particular trope though and I for one was disappointed that they did not.

    I applaud Dredd for this very reason, but that was a flop at the BO so what do I know.
     
  10. Roshi

    Roshi Admiral Admiral

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    :guffaw::guffaw::guffaw::guffaw::guffaw:

    [​IMG]
     
  11. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    Spider-Man 3 terrible for two reasons (at least): Dancing Emo/KD Lang Spidey, and the Exposition News Channel setting up the third act. There's many, many more reasons but those or the two bigger ones, for me.

    And really, I think it retroactively makes the others movies not "as good" as they were when they came out because it sort of sums up the tone of the Rami movies.

    TASM was far from "perfect" and certainly has its own flaws but I think I liked the tone and how they treated the characters more, better fits in the current climate of how comic-book movies are. A bit more seriously than action scenes and villain/hero confrontation scenes that look like they were taken from a Power Rangers movies.
     
  12. DalekJim

    DalekJim Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Those strike me as fairly minor issues compared to the laughably atrocious Harry Osborn amnesia plotline, the fact Green Goblin II is in fact aimed at an extreme sports demographic and now called "NuGoblin", Toby and Kirsten's beyond awful performances, the incomprehensible unnecessary new backstory to Uncle Ben's murder, the "dark" symbiote from the comics now turning Peter in to Austin Powers, Harry's butler's random revelation he'd been holding back for no reason and of course, Venom being built up to for the whole movie only to be killed after 5 minutes. Where he was almost always unmasked because that's how people roll in the Raimi films.

    None of the aforementioned storylines fit together in any way. It's a film comprised of utterly idiotic elements clashing together and somehow making eachother more idiotic. Calling Spider-Man 3 "better than amazing" has caused Sergei Eisenstein, Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles, John Ford and Jean Renoir to spin in their graves so fast, they're now tunneling through the Earth's crust.
     
  13. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    Oh, believe me, those are all on my mind. Most certainly. Ugh, I'm roll my eyes and just thinking about all of those things. There's just a lot of terrible, terrible, things in those movies. But I just hated that the climax of the movie didn't come from a progression of events throughout the move it all happened off camera and we're told the details through the most conveniently informative news cast in the history of the universe. And the actions of Spidey on the symbiont suit is just... Ugh. That movie is loaded with problems.

    Eddie Brock goes into a Catholic Church and prays to God to kill Peter Parker?! Really?! Does he not know how God works?!
     
  14. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    That plotline actually came directly from the comics. The problem is that in the comics, it played out over years, while here they felt the need to cram it into half an hour. It goes to show that sometimes being too faithful to the comics is a mistake in a feature film.


    In live-action films in general. Batman literally tore his own mask off at the climax of Batman Returns, even though there was a bad guy standing right there watching. RoboCop lost his helmet at the end of act 2 and spent the rest of the film bare-faced. Iron Man had his helmet knocked off in his climactic fight with Iron Monger. Aragorn and Legolas fought bare-faced in the LOTR movies while everyone around them had the sense to wear helmets -- ditto Mal and Zoey in the opening scenes of the Firefly pilot. Sylvester Stallone's Judge Dredd spent most of his movie barefaced even though the comics character never removed his helmet on-panel. (The recent Karl Urban Dredd is a rare exception to the norm.) And so on.


    No, the thread title means "better than Amazing," i.e. better than the film entitled The Amazing Spider-Man.


    A lot of people don't. Just recently, Kansas's House Speaker e-mailed his Republican colleagues with an exhortation to, essentially, pray for President Obama's death. And he's far from the first.
     
  15. trekkiebaggio

    trekkiebaggio Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Pretty much. It seemed like they had a checklist to complete in the first movie so they could get to the second movie.
     
  16. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    ^Good grief. Some people are complaining that the movie copied too much from the previous films, and others are complaining that it tried too hard not to cover the same ground. Just goes to show, no matter what you do, you won't please everyone.
     
  17. DalekJim

    DalekJim Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Why can't all the people I talk to on my computer like the same Spider-Man movie that I do?

    It's really upsetting.
     
  18. The Lensman

    The Lensman Commodore Commodore

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    The best thing about Amazing is that it gave us these.

    [yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KSPiTOMR8[/yt]



    Seriously, that stuttering shit was beyond annoying.

    [yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiV7Xs2cvqg[/yt]



    Amazing seemed more like it was based on the Ultimate version, while the original films felt closer to the original comics. At any rate, at least Spider-Man 3 only had Emo Pete for a bit in the film, while Amazing had Emo Pete for the whole movie.

    And seriously, no one was like "WTF?! How did this goal post just get bent? What the hell hit it?" No one was in anyway fazed by that?
     
    Last edited: Jan 24, 2013
  19. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    I would hardly call Peter's behavior in the TAS as "emo", Peter gets called that in EM3 more over his look than anything else, anyway.
     
  20. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    All the Marvel films of recent years, including Raimi's, have drawn on the Ultimate universe to some extent, particularly when it comes to elements of the originals that are somewhat dated. Both Spidey film series have replaced radioactive spiders with genetically engineered spiders, for instance.

    I don't think either version is closer to the original comics. I think they both draw on different aspects. Raimi's version was closer in things like J. Jonah Jameson and the Bugle, the use of wrestling in the origin story, the Norman/Harry Osborn story arc, and the like. But there are a lot of things from the comics that were missing in Raimi's version but present in Webb's. In Raimi's version, Spidey very rarely spoke or made wisecracks while in costume, which I always found to be a major failing. In Webb's version, Spidey's a nonstop wisecracker just the way he should be. Raimi's version had the revisionist (and in my view quite silly) organic webshooters, while Webb's goes back to the classic mechanical webshooters, which are important because they highlight Peter's intelligence and inventiveness as a facet of his crimefighting. Raimi skipped over Gwen Stacy altogether for two films and retconned MJ into his first crush, and when Gwen finally did appear, she was little more than a plot device, a disservice to this deeply important part of the Spider-Man mythos. But Webb is handling Gwen in a way that's much truer to the comics and serves the character far better. Raimi barely used Flash Thompson at all, but Webb's film distilled Flash's growth in the comics from Peter's bully to his friend.

    So no, it is not true that Raimi's version was closer to the comics than Webb's in any absolute sense. There are some ways Raimi's version is closer, and there are other ways that Webb's version is closer. I liked Raimi's films, but there are things that I think they got wrong, and I was very glad to see Webb get those things right.