Entry posted by Jean Valjean
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Pros:
- Michael Keaton as Birdman really rules this movie. Absolutely amazing. I related to his character a lot. Working man, has a team of guys in a special garage with him. Enjoys his job. Good stuff. I sympathized with him. This is truly the first time since Loki that Marvel Studios has put a good villain in its film. YES!
- Spiderman fought the villain on multiple occasions before their climactic final fight. I like that. So often, heros and villains don't meet each other until the climax, and it's underwhelming. It takes away from the tension and rivalry building up between the two. That, plus watching heroes with special powers fighting villains with special powers is, you know, fun.
- Instead of getting into an origin story, they create a "coming of age" story.
- Like most everyone else, I love the expressiveness of the new Spidey-eyes.
- The other movies have put him in high school, but this is the first to legitimately go full-blown John Hughes. Kudos for bringing out a quintessential aspect of Peter Parker.
- The trailers didn't spoil everything. A lot of people were saying that they did before the movie came out.
- Great job of capturing contemporary New York City in ways that the first two series didn't. They managed to capture a lot of the diversity that's in the city.
- The bully, Flash, happens to be a fellow nerd. Which is cool, because you don't necessarily have to be a jock in order to be a bully.
- Good character development.
- Again, this movie revels much more than the others in the high school setting.
- This hands-down has one of the better film scores to date. Michael Giacchino came up with an actual, memorable theme that I found myself humming after the movie theatre. And he also did something that I loved, which was make the entire end credits interesting and have some genuine fun building up to the perfect final note.
Cons:
- I always feel that something is missing if a hero is introduced without an origin story, even when we all already know the origin. Origin stories just ground them, and I like to see the characters at the very beginning of their journey. I know people have seen it all before, but I miss Uncle Ben. I miss Harry Osborn. I miss "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility".
- Wait a minute, where did he go to get bitten by a radio-active spider? Was it Oscorp? So far, they haven't been mentioned anywhere in this universe.
- One of the most fun parts of a superhero film is when the hero first discovers what he or she can and cannot do with his or her powers. That's something that the first Spiderman film did well, and also the first Iron Man movie. You have a lot of him discovering powers in this film...but all of the powers that he's discovering aren't his, but Tony Stark's. This is actually incredibly frustrating for me. It seems to me that Spiderman isn't his own hero, but an experiment of Tony Stark's. Almost all of his powers in the movie are Iron Man powers.
- In fact, not only are all of his new powers Iron Man powers, but they even get rid of one of his most classic abilities: Spider-senses.
- Artificial intelligence speaking to him in his suit? No thanks. I hated it. I really did. The only good thing that I have to say about that is that it was voiced by the transcendent Jennifer Connelly. I like Spiderman when he's on his own.
- I'm not sure what to think of Zendaya's character. She has a name that's very similar to another character from the comics, but her character is nothing like that character. According to Feige, she's just an homage to that character. I hope that the actual character shows up sometime in the movies. Otherwise, I'm not too fond seeing that character's role in these movies replaced by a similarly-named character with a completely different personality.
- It doesn't have the same, amazingly cinematic three-act-structure of the original Spiderman. It doesn't feel quite as quintessential a big-screen experience. There's something so mythic about the original Spiderman.
Final thoughts:
There are pros and cons. I definitely think that it's a good movie and manages to do some things that the other ones haven't managed to do as well. They also manage to make this distinctly the "shared universe" Spiderman. I'm not one of those guys who wants every property to go back to Marvel. I'm perfectly fine with Fox, for example, making their own X-Men movies, since I don't see how they would benefit from the MCU. Spiderman, however, definitely fits into this universe.
That having been said, I don't think that this is an improvement over previous Spiderman series. The first two films are still my favorite, and I actually rather liked The Amazing Spider-Man, so I'm not jumping on-board with the people who all think that the MCU "saved" Spiderman and that Marvel Studios is the only studio that can be trusted with superhero characters. In my opinion, the character was doing well before, and the only reason why he "needed" Marvel Studios was in order to branch out and do new things that haven't been tried before in a Spiderman movie.
It's a decent film. I can't call it the definitive Spiderman film. If I were to pick out one, I'd say that that would be the original, simply for how it's the quintessential big screen, mythic, three-act experience that also revels in the relative freshness of the genre without feeling that it has to "mix things up" in any way (later superhero films would include sub-genres). I can see any one of the three Spiderman series being someone's favorite, since they all do certain things better than the others.
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