The Amazing Spider-Man

read: The Redundant Spider-Man

The Amazing Spider-Man tries oh-so-valiantly to hit all the plot points of its predecessor while obfuscating them just enough to make them seem new. Well, guess what. They don’t. The whole process is a study in tedium as we get re-fed the old, all-too-familiar “Nerdy Peter Parker gets bit by a spider” story line.

That isn’t to say there aren’t ANY differences between this version and the original. This time the green villain is a deranged scientist trying to re-grow his missing arm by injecting himself with lizard DNA (which works, until he ends up as, whoops, all lizard). This sets us up for some pretty great Godzilla jokes when our hero tries in vain to tell the police chief about the reptilian menace terrorizing the NYC sewers (because apparently the writers went to the 90’s kids-are-smarter-than-adults writing school). That is, we almost get some Godzilla jokes, apparently the rights to use that exact word were just outside of this production’s budget, so we just get a couple references to ‘going back to Tokyo’ (keeping with the movie’s theme of unnecessarily muddling the obvious). But don’t worry, we still get the villain’s split-personality, arguing-with-self monologue that seems to be lifted word for word from the Green Goblin.

Mary Jane/Gwen Stacy shows up with a nice dye-job and an internship with the villain. She falls in love with Peter Parker at the appropriate time in an appropriately nerdy/quirky fashion thus cueing the classic love/heroic duty inner struggle that has all the novelty (and excitement) of rush-hour traffic. Speaking of heroic duty, we do get the classic “With great power comes great responsibility” but rewritten in such a way as to make it sound like we don’t get “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Also speaking of heroic duty, there is a significant lack of it in this version. As amazing as the Spider-Man is, he doesn’t save anyone. Well, he does save some kid from a spontaneously combusting car, but for the most part his powers are reserved for avenging his Uncle’s killer (which he is less successful at here). In fact, Peter’s first act as super-mutant/(ostensible) hero is to rip off a woman’s shirt and then beat the crap out of some bystanders on the subway (thus cueing the CLASSIC ‘oh-I’m-so-not-used-to-my-new-super-strength’ visual gag montage).

Ultimately, this is a hot, steaming pile of deja-vu wrapped in a web of just-barely recognizable characters (see what I did there?). But, luckily for the lady that does the ‘countdown-to-device-activation’ voice-over, I sense that there will be a lot more Spider-Man in our (and this blog’s) future.

The Dark Knight Rises

to a position just below entertainingly mediocre

SPOILER ALERT: THIS IS ABOUT THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.

Exposition, exposition, Anne Hathaway, football, explosion, ANNE HATHAWAY!, androgynous child, sexy french betrayal, the ending to the Iron Giant. That is about all I remember about the Dark Knight Rises, the ending (maybe?) to Christopher Nolan’s cultural juggernaut Dark Knight trilogy. The whole thing plays out like, well, a Dark Knight movie with some familiar characters (Batman! Cat Woman! Robin!) and one of the most uninteresting villains in recent memory. I mean, Bane? Really? With the voice of a deranged radio announcer and the most generic ‘bad guy plan’ to come out of super villain-dom Bane is ready to, wait for it, destroy Gotham City! With a nuke! That, get this, BATMAN DESIGNED HIMSELF! OH THE IRONY! Batman creating the one thing that threatens to destroy the entire city! Will the metaphorical symbolism (thats a thing, right?) never cease!

And what is with Bane’s high-tech mask thing? I am supposed to believe that a blind guy in the bottom of a pit had the resources to build that? Apparently the writers of the Dark Knight Rises think that the extent of criminal punishment in the Middle East is to be lowered into a giant pit and then repeatedly given the opportunity to climb out (social commentary on the War on Terror, am I right??). Which, surprise, Batman does! And then promptly walks all the way to Gotham City.

We also get a nice anti-Occupy Wall Street through-line. Apparently if the 99% were to be given control over Gotham, they would promptly kill all rich people, and police. If you had any doubts that this is a fictional story that has implications for our actual world, Nolan is clear that Gotham city IS New York. We repeatedly get nice aerial shots of such landmarks as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building indicating absolutely no attempt on the side of the filmmakers to try and, oh, I don’t know, construct a fictional city that uppity pretentious film critics can draw comparisons to for years and years to come.

In the end, this film isn’t the end. This franchise is the golden goose laying golden eggs and you better believe the studio execs are not ready to give up on their golden omelets. However, I sincerely hope that they weren’t hinting at a solo Robin movie. How would that even work? Robin’s entire identity is being Batman’s bitch. Without Batman, he’s just a bitch. And there is enough bitching in the Avengers franchise already. For now we will just have to sit contented with the fact that Batman has delivered Gotham from immediate vaporization and into the more prolonged suffering of radioactive fish and weird cancers that come with blowing up an atom bomb immediately offshore of a major metropolitan center (at least the Iron Giant had the sense to take the thing into space).

suuupppeeerrrmmaannnnnn