The Amazing Spider-Man officially pisses me off - Page 2

Isn't that the problem with the character of Spiderman though? That there isn't much you can do with him, and it ultimately becomes a retread? The comics have been going in circles since the original run.

I don't  mean to undermine anyone else's anger about this (it is justified, to a point - Sony were dicks as soon as they unceremoniously gave Raimi and co. their walking papers) but it's already been said in this thread - it's their way of saying this is a cheaper Spider-Man. Didn't they go on the record saying it cost $80 million? That's about the cost of the entire train sequence in part two, I bet.

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Originally Posted by Mac 

Isn't that the problem with the character of Spiderman every comic book character though? That there isn't much you can do with him, and it ultimately becomes a retread? The comics have been going in circles since the original run.

Fixed.  Studio posturing aside, everybody described in this article makes too much money for me to care very much about their feelings.  Yes, I understand that's a non-sequitor and not logical.

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Originally Posted by Sebastian OB 

Dude, in the comics, sure. But we're talking movies here. We've seen three stories so far. We need to go back to the well already?

 

I would be a lot cooler with this as a soft reboot where we maybe get a little backstory in flashback, then pick up with Peter in college and go from there.

It would be even cooler if it was understood in Hollywood that the orgins of these characters are part of pop culture language at this point.  There's really no reason to show them.  At all.

But then again - Superman Returns.  Studios know that, for the most part, origin stories are the easiest and most bankable part of a superhero story arc. 

Yeah, SUPERMAN RETURNS was a roaring success. It comes out and BAM! Six years later there's a reboot.

SM3 is just as much of a mess as The Last Stand but it's a mess with at least it's heart in the right place.  The shoehorning in of Venom, the retconning of Marko as a previously unseen accomplice in the robbery/murder of Uncle Ben and the resolution of Harry's arc all just weigh the film down and make it way too busy for it's own good.  It honestly remind me of some of those comics that would have 8-9 pages of that issues main story and then 3-4 of a "backup" story.  While I loved the dance sequence because it was pure Raimi in context of the story and character it just totally takes me out of the film.  There's a great film in there in bits and pieces but it just fails under the weight of all these things it's trying to accomplish.

Personally, I just think it's too soon to go into full reboot mode with Spider Man and it reeks of trying to milk that cash cow for all it's worth.  And these comments themselves do nothing to allay my thinking.  Were Raimi's films the perfect cinematic embodiment of Spider Man? No, but overall they were far better (and in 2's case almost perfection) than they probably had a right to be and all the credit for that goes to Raimi. 

Or maybe if they had treated it like Bond instead of thinking we needed to go back to square one. Ok, Toby's out, Garfield's in, new story, and just go with it. Hell, they could've kept a good chunk of the creative groundwork that had already been laid out, just different actors in a few of the roles. At least that way we wouldn't have lost out on J.K. Simmons as Jameson, or Dylan Baker FINALLY getting his shot at The Lizard.

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Originally Posted by Andrew Merriweather 

Yeah, SUPERMAN RETURNS was a roaring success. It comes out and BAM! Six years later there's a reboot.

Yeah, that's what I meant.  Superman Returns, no origin (maybe a flashback or two), kinda dull action and plot.  Next reboot - total origin movie.

Do we need to see Superman's origin on the screen again?  No.  Is it going to make a bunch of cash?  A good bet.

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Originally Posted by Greg Clark 

Or maybe if they had treated it like Bond instead of thinking we needed to go back to square one. Ok, Toby's out, Garfield's in, new story, and just go with it. Hell, they could've kept a good chunk of the creative groundwork that had already been laid out, just different actors in a few of the roles. At least that way we wouldn't have lost out on J.K. Simmons as Jameson, or Dylan Baker FINALLY getting his shot at The Lizard.

One would think comic book movie studios could absolutely understand this concept given this is how their print model has run since, well, forever.  New creative teams=new casting and Stop.  Numbering.  Sequels.

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Originally Posted by Greg Clark 

Or maybe if they had treated it like Bond instead of thinking we needed to go back to square one. 

Or Batman Forever.

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Originally Posted by Matches_Malone 

Yeah, that's what I meant.  Superman Returns, no origin (maybe a flashback or two), kinda dull action and plot.  Next reboot - total origin movie.

 

Do we need to see Superman's origin on the screen again?  No.  Is it going to make a bunch of cash?  A good bet.

Returns failed because it was boring as shit and woefully miscast.  Synder may love him some hyper reality, super charged filmmaking but he also seems to love spectacle. That's what Superman needs...spectacle.  Punching holes in giant robots, fighting hordes of alien lizard people using a street lamp as a battle axe and heat visioning space ships till they explode.  I don't mind sitting through an origin just give me some payoff when you have a film about a flying superhuman demigod who can burn shit with his eyeballs.

The same goes with Amazing Spiderman: We get the gist of it, re-introduce the characters and let's get down to it.  But I have a feeling what we're going to get is a bunch of angsty, Twilight-ish teen drama with two or three action beats sprinkled in. 
 

Origins are also built-in character arcs. As has been said already, once these superheroes become superheroes, it's just fight fight fight. If you realize these things in live action, you have to address reality. Changes. Aging. All the stuff that makes good story, but also all the stuff that suggests AN END. And the studios are TERRIFIED at this possibility.

It also means the character has to EVOLVE with an audience. And audiences, for the most part, don't evolve.

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Originally Posted by Bancroft Agee 

Returns failed because it was boring as shit and woefully miscast.  Synder may love him some hyper reality, super charged filmmaking but he also seems to love spectacle. That's what Superman needs...spectacle.  Punching holes in giant robots, fighting hordes of alien lizard people using a street lamp as a battle axe and heat visioning space ships till they explode.  I don't mind sitting through an origin just give me some payoff when you have a film about a flying superhuman demigod who can burn shit with his eyeballs.

 

Exactly.  But the studio could give a giant, spectacular Superman movie with robot-punching, alien lizard-burning action, without going back to the origin well.  But instead, when the franchise tentpole underperforms, studios opt for the origin.  I think it's flawed from a storytelling perspective, but can't really blame the studios for spamming the reset button.  As always, I blame Mr. Nolan.

The Spiderman series is a unique animal.  3 did great business - it broke records.  The decision to reboot seems completely rooted in the politics of the situation with Raimi and the studio, and thus this PR blitz.  I agree it's shitty, but this isn't any different than the last 100 years of Hollywood history.

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Originally Posted by Sebastian OB 

Dude, in the comics, sure. But we're talking movies here. We've seen three stories so far. We need to go back to the well already?

 

I would be a lot cooler with this as a soft reboot where we maybe get a little backstory in flashback, then pick up with Peter in college and go from there.

This is why I have said from the start I am boycotting this shit. The fact that they have now said all this disrespectful nonsense in print has just secured that I won't even watch it on DVD.
 

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Originally Posted by Gabe T 

Origins are also built-in character arcs. As has been said already, once these superheroes become superheroes, it's just fight fight fight. If you realize these things in live action, you have to address reality. Changes. Aging. All the stuff that makes good story, but also all the stuff that suggests AN END. And the studios are TERRIFIED at this possibility.

 

It also means the character has to EVOLVE with an audience. And audiences, for the most part, don't evolve.

I disagree with this thinking especially when you're looking at a character like Batman. It's only going to end with his death and Nolan could very well do that but realistically how would that change anything? There's still going to be crime and having a dead Batman being the impetus for some grand societal shift isn't realistic.  Crime's never going to be ended as long as we have poverty, greed, racism, etc in our or any society.  I sometimes think Nolan's take on Batman is flawed because I don't think he truly understands how psychologically scarred the man is from witnessing the murder of his parents.  It's not so much about a war on crime as it is a war against anyone going through what he did as a child.  Everything else is a byproduct of that one moment.  If I'm going to wrap up Batman's arc in these films I'm going to do it by him accepting that he can never stop being Batman. 

But yes, studios when dealing with properties like these have other concerns like profit motivations and merchandising revenue that they consider more important than thematic resolutions or endings.  To be honest, the audience is coming for the character because that's the draw, the hook.  Is anyone going to be showing up for The Amazing Spiderman because of the guy who directed 500(Days of Summer) and Andrew Garfield ?  Maybe the audience doesn't want to evolve but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing or prevents exceptional or interesting work being done.  Closure and finality aren't the same things in my humble opinion.

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Originally Posted by Bancroft Agee 

I disagree with this thinking especially when you're looking at a character like Batman. It's only going to end with his death and Nolan could very well do that but realistically how would that change anything? There's still going to be crime and having a dead Batman being the impetus for some grand societal shift isn't realistic.  Crime's never going to be ended as long as we have poverty, greed, racism, etc in our or any society.  I sometimes think Nolan's take on Batman is flawed because I don't think he truly understands how psychologically scarred the man is from witnessing the murder of his parents.  It's not so much about a war on crime as it is a war against anyone going through what he did as a child.  Everything else is a byproduct of that one moment.  If I'm going to wrap up Batman's arc in these films I'm going to do it by him accepting that he can never stop being Batman. 

 

But yes, studios when dealing with properties like these have other concerns like profit motivations and merchandising revenue that they consider more important than thematic resolutions or endings.  To be honest, the audience is coming for the character because that's the draw, the hook.  Is anyone going to be showing up for The Amazing Spiderman because of the guy who directed 500(Days of Summer) and Andrew Garfield ?  Maybe the audience doesn't want to evolve but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing or prevents exceptional or interesting work being done.  Closure and finality aren't the same things in my humble opinion.

I wish the 70's mentality was alive and well during this superhero boom.  These characters, as you said, sell themselves.  And they are so archetypal that almost any story can be told within their conceptual frameworks.  One thing Milius's (vastly underrated) take on Conan did so well.  What was, on the superficial layer, a Campbellian hero's quest with a tinge of revenge fantasy developed into a very decent philosophical exploration of Nietzchean philosophy.
 

There's exceptional cinema to be mined from these characters, and I think if the studios trusted the character to sell tickets and gave directors much more freedom, some great things could happen.  Apply that to any genre of filmmaking.

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Originally Posted by Bancroft Agee 
I disagree with this thinking especially when you're looking at a character like Batman. It's only going to end with his death and Nolan could very well do that but realistically how would that change anything? There's still going to be crime and having a dead Batman being the impetus for some grand societal shift isn't realistic.  Crime's never going to be ended as long as we have poverty, greed, racism, etc in our or any society.  I sometimes think Nolan's take on Batman is flawed because I don't think he truly understands how psychologically scarred the man is from witnessing the murder of his parents.  It's not so much about a war on crime as it is a war against anyone going through what he did as a child.  Everything else is a byproduct of that one moment.  If I'm going to wrap up Batman's arc in these films I'm going to do it by him accepting that he can never stop being Batman.

But there can be nuance in that approach. If we're to view the comics as one continuing story, I always saw it as his (sometimes futile) attempt to surround himself with a surrogate family. It's HIS story, and I'd like to think we're rooting for his basic survival as a human spirit under the (false) impression he cannot be broken. It feels like, if Nolan is making an arc, that that happy ending does not exist for this possessed, deluded man.

But either way, that's a dangerous prospect for movie fans, because they don't want a dead Batman and yet they probably don't want a happy, semi-retired older Batman either.

In a way, Raimi is actually lucky not to have made the fourth. This way, most people will keep thinking that 4 (without a studio-forced character like Venom) would have been a great comeback, a return to roots. Raimi would have shit the bed with 4. The casting of Malkovich as the Vulture sounded genious, but you would not have wanted the Vulture Raimi intended to show. And don't let me start on the Vuturess, a role straight out of an Elektra sequel. It would have been the On Stranger Tides of Spider-Man movies, being awful and making the awful predecessor look okayish. And planned in 3D, it'd probably also have become the most successful one.

Now this? I like the cast, but the costume sucks. I do not like the idea of major downsizing to under 100m and the pr that they do it have more character.

And fuck if this Spider-Man turns out to be brooding and serious. Spidey needs to enjoy his stuff and have fun. He's not Batman. And Maguire was pretty good with the fun moments.

One thing that was planned for Spidey 4 that I actually sort of wanted to see happen was Peter becoming a father. There was a huge fanboy uproar when this was rumored, because nobody wants to have babies in their Spidey movies I guess, but the great thing about Raimi's films is that the dilemmas and choices Parker confronts in the movies are reflective of what most people encounter as they grow older (and the SM movies are basically one big bildungsroman anyway). If you're gonna refuse to let your character become a father or make similar choices that would threaten the status quo of the series, then how is he ever gonna keep growing?

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Originally Posted by Chris Myers 

In a way, Raimi is actually lucky not to have made the fourth. This way, most people will keep thinking that 4 (without a studio-forced character like Venom) would have been a great comeback, a return to roots. Raimi would have shit the bed with 4. The casting of Malkovich as the Vulture sounded genious, but you would not have wanted the Vulture Raimi intended to show. And don't let me start on the Vuturess, a role straight out of an Elektra sequel. It would have been the On Stranger Tides of Spider-Man movies, being awful and making the awful predecessor look okayish. And planned in 3D, it'd probably also have become the most successful one.

Ah, but this is also misleading. Raimi had that script rewritten four or five times. In the end, it was early 2010, and they had a cast, a director, and a release date only a little more than a year away. As I recall, Raimi essentially said, "We need another re-write, here's what we have so far and it doesn't work." And THAT was what leaked. So what we THOUGHT was going to be Spider-Man 4 (Vulture, Vultress, death of Mary Jane (?)) was part of a general idea so iffy that even Raimi said, "We have to scrap this script AND the release date." It was then when Sony revealed that James Vanderbilt had already penned and submitted a reboot script and they went with that.

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Originally Posted by JMulder 

One thing that was planned for Spidey 4 that I actually sort of wanted to see happen was Peter becoming a father. There was a huge fanboy uproar when this was rumored, because nobody wants to have babies in their Spidey movies I guess, but the great thing about Raimi's films is that the dilemmas and choices Parker confronts in the movies are reflective of what most people encounter as they grow older (and the SM movies are basically one big bildungsroman anyway). If you're gonna refuse to let your character become a father or make similar choices that would threaten the status quo of the series, then how is he ever gonna keep growing?

I didn't hear about Spidey having kids in a fourth (and, again, I recall there be chatter about a first-act MJ death), but I was most looking forward future adventures in the Raimi universe because of the potential of the Lizard. Not because of the character, but because there's always been a tense relationship between Connors and his family, with overlap between the budding relationship between Parker and Connors. As such, I would have liked to have seen Parker grow into a surrogate father role for these kids when their own dad snaps, learning about the power and responsibility of family. But that's a little fanwanky, I guess.
 

The Bond model is outdated for sure. Cool as well. Thing is that model is expensive in how it went down with the same actor. Connery became too big for his britches and eventually they went with Moore and etc etc.

It will be interesting to see the fallout of these Marvel 9 film contracts when all is said and done.

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Originally Posted by Bancroft Agee 

 

The same goes with Amazing Spiderman: We get the gist of it, re-introduce the characters and let's get down to it.  But I have a feeling what we're going to get is a bunch of angsty, Twilight-ish teen drama with two or three action beats sprinkled in.
 

I think that is probably what we are going to see, but I actually don't mind that.

I'm not saying the Raimi films didn't do character work, but I was so underwhelmed by Maguire and Dunst that I'm pretty convinced I would have hated them if they were 'smaller films'. The cast in this is pretty excellent, the three main 'emotional' centres of the story, Parker, MJ/Gwen and May (Rosemary Harris may make a better screen Aunt May, but Sally Field is the better actor) are all better actors than their Raimi equivalents, and the books have always been great when they focus as much on personality as action.

Now the script could be horrible and they waste the good parts they have in place, but I'm pretty hopeful.

Me, personally?  I still can't get over those new silver Spider-Bootys and the Winter Olympics luge costume.

Seeing those most recent shots of Garfield in costume was a weird feeling. I'm not into the design, but he looks good in it, and I'm a big fan of Garfield, yet I'm moderately depressed that he's even in this. I was not a huge fan of Raimi's Spider-Man films (though 2 and 3 have many moments in them that I quite like), so I don't feel any real loss, nor any vitriol toward this picture, just a general neutrality sliding into indifference. 

At the end of the day, I'm not a big enough Spider-Man fan to get worked up about it, I only hope that the movie works for the sake of Garfield's career, and that he continues making good choices outside of this would-be franchise.

The main thing that puts me off about the new costume is the reflective eyes.  It makes the eyes (which I'm used to looking simply white) look dark.  The lack of contrast to the costume is weird.  Otherwise, it looks ok.

All of the really long slim vertical accents just seem incredibly inappropriate for a Spider-Man costume. It's "alien", it's "sexy", it's just not really Spider-Man. 

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Originally Posted by JacknifeJohnny 

Seeing those most recent shots of Garfield in costume was a weird feeling. I'm not into the design, but he looks good in it, and I'm a big fan of Garfield, yet I'm moderately depressed that he's even in this. I was not a huge fan of Raimi's Spider-Man films (though 2 and 3 have many moments in them that I quite like), so I don't feel any real loss, nor any vitriol toward this picture, just a general neutrality sliding into indifference. 

 

This indifference hits me as well, and I'm a lifelong Spidey fan who enjoyed Raimi's vision. Whenever you do a sequel/prequel/sidequel/remake/remakequel/whatever, you really need to bring a new and fresh element to the table. Here, we have Spidey facing the Lizard, a character I am not in love with, played by Rhys Ifans, an actor I actually really dislike. It's an origin, though I've seen that done before (quite excellently). And there's Gwen Stacy, but she's signed for many movies, and there's no Green Goblin, so they won't be doing the classic Stacy story. Do they assume 3D will be what brings people back to this series?
 

The trailer's going to have to go a long way to show 1) Andrew Garfield's Peter Parker is DRASTICALLY different, or 2) The effects are really cool and unusual or 3) There's going to be an appealing romance at the center of these films that takes precedence over superheroics.

Also, do we know who is scoring this? I was hot and cold on Elfman's theme, but I thought Young's additions were pretty cool. I just don't want to end up with a Mark Isham or a Tyler Bates or something. This should sound completely different from the last. Would it be entirely that weird to stuff this film with pop music? Pete's a young guy, right? The other movies had those blockbuster soundtracks, but the movies seemed almost ashamed to play those songs.

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Originally Posted by Timothy Q 

All of the really long slim vertical accents just seem incredibly inappropriate for a Spider-Man costume. It's "alien", it's "sexy", it's just not really Spider-Man. 

The costume just makes me think this should have been set in Chicago or something, and the character's name should have been Ben Reilly, and no one should have said ANYTHING ELSE.

If they did make The Clone saga into a movie, internet boards would never run out of material.

So has anyone seen the bootleg trailer that somewhat predictably showed up online?

They are telling the origin story again, are you fucking kidding me? Apart from a nice POV sequence the teaser was BORING

The POV sequence is cool but has been obvious since it was announced in 3D, everything else looks a joke trailer version of THE DARK SPIDER.

Yeah, that trailer is leading me to maybe rent this. I hope it flops.

It certainly won't bomb but I doubt it'll reach the box office heights of the other three. Then again, this doesn't have as large a budget. Was the 80 M budget for real?

I think the worst thing I can say about this trailer is that I felt bored by it, thats not a good indication that your 'teaser' has done its job...

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Originally Posted by Clarence Boddicker 

 I hope it flops.
 

Ah, fanboys.  Sigh.

Ugh, that trailer. Gone, it seems, are the heart and optimism and humanity of the Raimi films. Instead we get a tonally dark, brooding Spider-Man in a dim grungy New York, looking more like Gotham than anything, and set to ominous electric guitars straight out of the Twilight soundtrack. And no, the video-game HUD sequence at the end of the trailer does not in any way improve the situation.

It looks that along with Raimi they also lost their hold on makes Spider-Man a unique and compelling character. I would be very surprised if this movie ends up satisfying anybody, with the exception of people who don't actually have any idea (or any concern for) why this character is so enduring.

*shrugs* I'll stick with the excellent, sadly cancelled Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon (from Greg Weisman, the creator of Gargoyles), which is still my favorite non-comics incarnation of Spidey and his rogues. This just looks OK.

That's it. It just looks OK. And Evi's The Dark Spider seems to be 100% accurate.

Where's the fun? It looks so damned serious.

The pov thing was kind of boring. I already played a lot of Mirror's Edge so I get it.

Dammit.  I was going to drop in here and go, "MIRROR'S EDGE!!!!"

Yeah, not much of interest here.

I...kinda liked it.

Granted, it's hard as hell to get enthused about another origin story Spidey flick but it's a little disingenuous to say that the trailer didn't look anything but solid. Raimi's flicks were like the early John Romita comics & this new one with it's gritty David Fincher/John Romita Jr take looks pretty damn good.

Why are comic book movies forbidden from being fun anymore? I don't get that sense of excitement from the teaser at all-- just an unrelenting and overwhelming sense of gravity and dourness, two things that don't really belong in a Spider-Man film.

Garfield and Stone still have me invested because I'm a fan of both, but after Webb's dipshit comments in EW and this teaser, I'm not confident that this will turn out to be anything other than a heartless and limp dud.

I liked the teaser in that it looks like it has potential. I do think it's funny that the one unique moment in the trailer, the POV stuff, immediately brought (to my mind at least) the POV stuff from The Evil Dead. Garfield looks like he could be a great Parker, although I was weirded out by how old Parker's parents were (same thing happened in the Potter films for some reason), but I hope he's got a distinctive voice. His Parker sounds REALLY like Maguire's Parker.

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Originally Posted by Sebastian OB 

 

Yeah, it looks solid, as in well made. I wouldn't expect less from Sony's major summer tentpole. But what it doesn't look, at this point, is fun. Which really isn't the right approach for Spider-Man, IMO.

 

I know it really seems like I'm gunning for this movie, but honestly, I'm willing to let it win me over. This trailer ain't doing it though.

 

Yeah, "well made" is what I was goin' for. As if the filmmakers may have actually given a crap unlike, say, the makers of Green Lantern. Even with that first trailer you knew that something might be fundamentally amiss.