The "worst" things that Sony has done, Spider-Man-wise, are ALSO still pretty decent movies, but I wouldn't expect you to acknowledge that since you can't see beyond your own biases on anything.
Spider-Man: Homecoming' anticipation thread
- Thread starter Turtletrekker
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The "worst" things that Sony has done, Spider-Man-wise, are ALSO still pretty decent movies, but I wouldn't expect you to acknowledge that since you can't see beyond your own biases on anything.
Its not a bias just because I don't like things you do like. Also, yeah, I cosider ASM 1 & 2 to be some of the worst superhero films ever made, but I don't expect you to see past your obvious MCU biases to admit you're just as biased as me, except you treat your opinions like fact.
I don't HAVE "MCU biases", and have actually enjoyed, to one degree or another, all of the movies that I've seen which occupy that universe.
However, I don't agree with the notion that Marvel Studios can do no wrong or that Sony should just "give up" their creative autonomy when it comes to Spider-Man and related characters/properties.
And as far as "treating opinions like fact" goes, you're just as guilty of that as I am.
I admit I'm working on a slight disadvantage here since I only ever saw the movie once back when it came out on video and never since, so a few details may be escaping me. Nevertheless I think you could safely edit out all the Eddie Brock scenes with minimal impact on the rest of the plot. Certainly everything after Peter rids himself of the suit. Indeed, it may have been way more effective to leave that as foreshadowing for the next movie.
With the exception of Angel in X3, I haven't seen a character so superfluously inserted into a comic book movie. it had "studio mandate" written all over it.
The main problem with the Goblin storyline is that it entirely skips a step and goes straight for Harry donning the suit and out for blood. Yes it builds on the cliffhanger of SM2 but it does so so very poorly that his first appearance feels astonishingly perfunctory. Which for a well established character is so bizarre it shouldn't even be possible. It's all very awkward and poorly constructed.
Some of that may be blamed on needing to make room for Sandman and Venom, but we can only judge the movie they made, not the one they probably should have.
MJ may have had more to do on paper, but the end result left no lasting impression. Just more overwrought, forced relationship drama that was more about Peter than her anyway. Indeed, as I understand it, Dunst was quite sick of the role by the end of it and I can't say I blame her.
You'd have to have some pretty low standards to classify either of the last two Spider-Man movies as "pretty decent". However well the main role was cast he was wasted in those films. The first one was at best a dull retread of things we've already seen and needlessly complicated by shallow and nonsensical subplots. While the second one was just a train-wreck ploughing into a landfill of burning hospital waste. In a way the first one was worse since you have to have gone very wrong to make a Spider-Man movie *boring*.
SM3 isn't much better and if I'm brutally honest, SM1 hasn't exactly aged well either. Even SM2, which great in it's time is often very maudlin and cringe-worthy. J.K. Simmons and Alfred Molina are the only ones that save it for me.
So yeah, for my money 'Homecoming' looks to be the first legitimatly good Spider-Man movie.
Not tacked on in the sense of the progression of the final film's story, but in the sense of the progression of the creative process that led to that story. IIRC, Raimi had wanted to make a film with Sandman as the villain, and Sony insisted that he add Venom as well. Naturally the rewrite of the script incorporated the symbiote, Brock, and Venom throughout the entire plot, but it was still a thread added on to the originally intended storyline, and it made the plot more cluttered than it would otherwise have been.
Overall, ASM2 was hardly good, but its treatment of the characters of Peter/Spidey and Gwen Stacy (and Aunt May, to a degree) was excellent. That's the tragedy of it -- you had a couple of really well-done characters in the middle of a generally poorly-done movie. This was the best screen rendering of Spidey I've seen -- he had the attitude, the wit, the nonstop motormouth. And ASM2 actually let him play dramatic scenes as Spidey, with the mask on, rather than making excuses to get the mask off at every opportunity.
My standards for judging the quality of something aren't "low"; they're just not impossibly and ridiculously high, and I'm not going to crap on something just because it doesn't match my own personal expectations. What makes me criticize things comes down, in the end, to how well said thing does in holding to its own internal logic and whether or not it makes sense with regards to what it's trying to do, and while the TASM movies aren't perfect in that regard, they're also not the "dumpster fires" that people keep trying to claim that they are.
I have seem the movie a few times and I think it's a little too interconnected to remove. That's why I'd argue that, for a studio mandate forced on the movie, it turned out better than could be expected. It may make for an overstuffed movie, but it does read as one movie and thematically fits, instead of two movies mashed together that have nothing to do with each other (like say ASM2 or Iron Man 2).
(Actually, as I understand it, there was some discussion of splitting SM3 into two movies, but there was no consensus on where the break off point should be. Frankly, I think you're mostly right; end part one with the scene were Eddie gets the symbyote and then make the A plot of part two be him trying to get revenge of Spider-Man, with the B plot being Peter and MJ healing the rift between them. However, given that Sony chose to reboot after three movies, maybe it's just as well that Raimi and company played it safe and left SM3 as one movie. While not maybe the ideal movie, it's still a complete story in and of itself and gives the trilogy a definite ending. Had they split the movie, there's a good chance that the series would've never had any form of closure.)
Can't say it ever bothered me much, but then again, Harry Osborn was not exactly among my favorite parts of the series in the first place.
Well, Peter is the lead character in the first place, so the stories ultimately go back to him. Beyond that, I guess it's all subjective. Besides, the relationship between the characters was put front and center from the beginning, so it would be expected to be a major part of the story here.
Fair enough, but, as I indicated above, I think the movie made it work better than it could have been,
Fair enough. Not sure I entirely agree with you, though.
May was good, just underused. I found Gwen to be a badly-written character played by a good actress. which only goes so far. Peter might've been okay as is, but I found the character is not a good representation of the character from the franchise proper. Specifically, the movie was based on the Ultimate Spider-Man comics, and, having followed those, I think I can say with some authority the movie Peter and Ultimate Peter are not the same characters. I also found Peter in the movie to be an unlikeable jerk.
As always, your mileage may vary.
It's to Raimi's credit that, even though he had Venom forced upon him, he didn't just petulantly 'cram' the character into Spider-Man 3 but found a way to make the story he wanted to tell work with that character included.
In fact, it's not Eddie/Venom who feels 'superfluous', but James Cromwell's Captain Stacy and Bryce Dallas Howard's Gwen Stacy, neither of whom actually needed to be in the movie at all and seem to have been stuck in there just because they were recognizable 'name' characters.
In fact, it's not Eddie/Venom who feels 'superfluous', but James Cromwell's Captain Stacy and Bryce Dallas Howard's Gwen Stacy, neither of whom actually needed to be in the movie at all and seem to have been stuck in there just because they were recognizable 'name' characters.
I thought Gwen was the best thing about the Webb movies. She was so awesome that I'd have preferred if they'd skipped her "inevitable" death.
And as a rule, adaptations aren't based exclusively on one incarnation of a character. Most superhero adaptations pick and choose elements from across the entire history of the character, or at least a significant portion of it, and combine them into a new interpretation. For instance, Batman: The Animated Series was a distillation of the best bits of everything from the Denny O'Neill era in the '70s to the contemporary comics of the early '90s, along with plenty of original characters and concepts of its own (Harley Quinn, Montoya, Roland Daggett, Summer Gleeson, Veronica Vreeland, etc.). Heck, most Marvel movies over the past decade have been a mix of elements from the 616 and Ultimate universes -- which makes sense, because the Ultimate universe was created with much the same goal as the movie adaptations, namely to rework the characters and concepts of the Marvel Universe for the sensibilities and expectations of a modern audience, and to distill and streamline the messy continuity of the original comics into something more unified.
And of course, they've drawn on elements from other versions, too. Spider-Man 3's symbiote/Venom story was based more on the '90s animated series' version of the story than the comics' rather more unfocused version. It was the animated series that established Eddie Brock as a rival for Peter and Spidey before the symbiote arrived, rather than clumsily retconning him into existence in Venom's debut appearance, and that established the idea of the symbiote changing Peter's personality and making him more aggressive, rather than simply draining his energy as in the comics. The iconic shot of Peter waking up and seeing his black-costumed reflection in the skyscraper windows was from the TV version as well.
I pretty much agree with this. In fact, since I've never much liked Venom anyway, I liked it that SM3 kept his role fairly constrained. And teaming up Venom and Sandman did work insofar as it gave Spidey and Harry a reason to team up, which made for a satisfying resolution of their story arc over the three movies.
And you're right -- SM3's version of Gwen didn't really work that well. It seemed like an afterthought.
I've often told my wife I would love to see Garfield's Spider-Man and Emma Stone's Gwen with a Raimi made Spider-Man plot and villain. I think that would just be the best of both worlds.
To be honest, I didn't think that scene worked well period. Part of it was I wasn't able to get into the relationship or like the characters (which I blame on my own biases and the writing), but also that it was crammed in at the last moment for no real good reason.
Fair enough. I mean, the ASM movies using Gwen as the love interest is not what the Ultimate comics did (they put Mary Jane in that role with no viable alternatives). However, the ASM movies did borrow a lot from the Ultimate comics, down to specific plot points and scenes.
I actually like SM3's Venom a lot in terms of design and the characters. I'd also say that, as a one-shot retelling of the whole story, I think it worked better than other attempts to do that.
As I understand it, she was going to have a bigger role, but that got changed later down the line. She was going to be the victim that Venom kidnapped at the end. Personally, while having Mary Jane be caught again was an overused idea by this point, I think it might've been needed; for the ending to work, there needed to be something between it and the jazz club scenes that showed Mary Jane that Peter had resolved his demons and that he still loved her. The rescue at the construction site, while a little inelegant, did that.
Maybe, but if Venom has any overt presence, then it'll raise questions about why S.H.I.E.L.D. hasn't intervened.
You could say that about a lot of things in the MCU. Why didn't they do anything about Kilgrave or the Hand? For that matter, why doesn't Superman clean up crime in Gotham City? It's the way shared universes work. You just have to accept that everyone's too busy dealing with their own problems.
Agreed--the driving force behind the films appeared to be selling Parker/Spider-Man as some sort of cross between circus sideshow and someone in desperate need of psychological counselling--not at all like the source.
Then, there was the horrible casting of Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy--aside from her physical appearance (looking nothing like the source to any degree save for a dye job), her every moment in the film was like a bad biopic of a historical figure: constant direct or indirect suggestion of her ultimate fate. The character was never developed because she--or others around her--made some kind of comment that (to the audience in the know) points to the fact she will die.
In other words, she was dead while she was alive, and that was terrible screenwriting.
Its unfortunate that the MCU did not blossom until after the end of the Raimi movies, as the handling of that series was of a level that its performers would have migrated without a hitch to the MCU...unlike the Garfield films. So far, with only a few minutes of screen time in Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland has already erased the misfit misfire that were the Garfield films.
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Casting an attractive woman as an attractive woman seem right to me.
..if only Stone was attractive.
Subjective.
In general, I do agree with that notion. However, I think Kilgrave and the Hand (as well as Daredevil and Jessica Jones) are rather small potatoes for S.H.I.E.L.D. The only time during the four Netflix shows that I thought S.H.I.E.L.D. should have shown up was after Luke Cage survived having a building fall on him. Iron Fist would draw attention, too, but other than breaking the door off the hospital, he doesn't really draw attention to himself with his power.
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