Who's gonna go see this movie?

Anyone besides me looking forward to it?

Not really my cup, I tend to like "cyberpunk" genre movies, or any movie with a kind or end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it dystopic kind of feel.

Cyberpunk Review

IMHO, the spiderman movies are incredibly badt, although I admit I am was never a big spiderman fan, or did i read many of the comics, I think Tobey Maguire plays an AWFUL spiderman, and i think most people would agree with me on that.

I also tend to dislike movies with such a polarized sense of "good guys" and "bad guys", especially if the "good guys" always win.

Ereshkigal wrote:

Not really my cup, I tend to like "cyberpunk" genre movies, or any movie with a kind or end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it dystopic kind of feel.

Cyberpunk Review

IMHO, the spiderman movies are incredibly badt, although I admit I am was never a big spiderman fan, or did i read many of the comics, I think Tobey Maguire plays an AWFUL spiderman, and i think most people would agree with me on that.

I also tend to dislike movies with such a polarized sense of "good guys" and "bad guys", especially if the "good guys" always win.

Hey, Spider-man is teh awesome, leave it at that.

I saw the first two Spider-man movies, but have not yet seen the third.

It was okay could've been better.

The only thing that kept it from being complete crap was the special effects.

If they gave Venom some more screentime and redid the ending, then it would've been perfect.

Haven't seen it yet but plan too. Will also see the new Harry Potter movie.

scpg02 wrote:

Haven't seen it yet but plan too. Will also see the new Harry Potter movie.

Oh I saw that just last Tuesday. Pretty good but pretty short too.

micfranklin wrote:

Oh I saw that just last Tuesday. Pretty good but pretty short too.

Yeah I've been told they did a good job considering how big the book was. The books have been better so far anyway. That's normal.

Haven't seen HP yet but I peeked in the theater once to get a glimpse and I liked what I saw so far.

Don't ruin for me please...

There might be some spoliers in here, so beware.

By Gregg Easterbrook

Quote :

TMQ didn't think "Spider-Man 3" was as bad as reviewers contended. Sure the plot was disjointed -- that's the life of a superhero, you just never know when the next runaway neutron beam will turn a store clerk into an evil super-being. But the flow of information in the movie seemed messed up. At the end, Sandman knows Spider-Man is Peter Parker and Uncle Ben was Peter's guardian. How does Sandman discover this? He doesn't have any special mental powers; he's just an escaped con who accidentally was transformed into a 40-foot-tall sand monster.

Meanwhile, the professor at the university where Peter takes his advanced physics class -- and where, inexplicably, the fashion model Blonde Bombshell is taking the same advanced physics class -- seems awfully blasé about discovering an extraterrestrial life form that alters human DNA. Somehow, I think the professor would have done a little more than call Peter to tell him the stuff he wanted tested was a sinister extraterrestrial life form, then put the extraterrestrial life form into a jar and gone home for the night.

Here are my two complaints about the transfer of Spider-Man from comic to cinema. First, Mary Jane. In the comics, M.J. is ballsy, independent, fun-loving and fast; in the movies, all she does is whimper and fall off skyscrapers. The comic book M.J. was sexually aggressive: She was one of the first female characters in popular culture to be presented as sex-loving but also well-adjusted and successful, rather than stuck in standard Madonna-or-whore stereotypes. In the comic books, Mary Jane and Peter have an interesting relationship because M.J. is an independent woman and sexually self-confident, whereas Peter is withdrawn and would rather study chemistry books than get busy.

In the movies, M.J.'s self-confidence is gone; the Mary Jane character is so passive and whiny, you wince whenever she enters the frame. Why did the producers of Spider-Man feel they had to enfeeble the Mary Jane character? (Note: Natural blonde Kirsten Dunst dyed her hair red to play Mary Jane, and natural redhead Bryce Dallas Howard died her hair blond to play Spider-Man's new love interest, Gwen Stacy.)

In the movies, Spider-man can fly! And just where are those webs coming from?
My second complaint is Spidey's web-slingers. In the comics, the spider bite gives Peter disproportionate strength and keen senses, but that's all. Using his knowledge of chemistry, he invents a spider-silk fluid, then designs mechanical shooters he wears on his forearms. The web shooters have limited range and are used sparingly because running out of fluid is a constant problem. These restrictions on Spidey's power mean that in the comic books he must outsmart foes. In the comics, he's a smart guy in a mask with really fast reflexes.

In the movies, Spider-Man has become Superman plus webs. He's constantly depicted as, in effect, flying by leaping off skyscrapers -- although we never see how he gets to the tops of the skyscrapers in the first place! -- then shooting a web hundreds or thousands of feet to snag on another building. Making Spider-Man fly introduces into the Spidey movies a disregard for the laws of physics that drives TMQ crazy in the era of computer-generated special effects. If Spider-Man actually leaped off a 60-story building, then shot a web up to the top of another just as he as about to hit the ground, the web would need to travel away from his body at thousands of feet per second. Then, even if we assume some perfectly efficient binding substance that sticks the web to the top of the building, when the angular momentum of Spidey's fall was transferred up the silk to the building, the force would rip apart whatever the web stuck to. That is, even if we assume superpowers for Spidey and his web fluid, the buildings of Manhattan are still made of normal materials that would fail if used the way the movies depict Spider-Man using them.

More annoying is that in the movies, Parker does not design the web-shooters -- webs just come out of his arms. The spider bite gave him a web-shooting power, and apparently a power to make openings in his arms that instantly appear and instantly heal, although we never actually see this. In the movies, there is no limit to the amount of webbing Spidey can shoot, which allows him to swing across buildings like crazy and engage in lengthy special-effects battles. This renders a lot of the movie action really silly.

Peter Parker's paramours suffer hair-color confusion issues.
And where is the mass of the web fluid coming from? Spider silk is strong for its weight -- industrial chemists continue to study the stuff -- but in some of the lengthy battle scenes of "Spider-Man 3," Peter shoots what must add up to dozens of pounds of fluid. This mass must originate somewhere: Are we to believe the spider bite gave Spider-Man the ability to materialize mass? If the webbing is made biologically within Peter's body, not chemically in a lab as in the comic books, Peter would need to eat an amount of mass at least equivalent to the weight of webs he shoots. So, if he shoots 10 pounds of webbing in a dustup with Little Goblin, he would need to consume at least 10 pounds of food -- probably quite a bit more. Even if he has a spider stomach that can hold and digest 10 pounds of food, Peter would be eating constantly, in huge quantities, if his body were generating a substance he expelled in large amounts. The comic book reality for Peter Parker avoided this problem, and thus was believable as long as you accepted the spider bite premise. In the movie reality, even if you accept the premise, what happens still makes no sense on a physical law basis.

Spider-Man-as-Superman, his powers far greater in the movies than in the comics, mirrors what Hollywood did to Supe himself. In the original Superman stories (up to the "infinite crisis" and "reboot" versions of D.C. Comics; since then, continuity has gone out the window and nothing adds up), Clark Kent was very strong, could leap such long distances he appeared to fly, had X-ray and heat vision, and could exert a hypnotic power on those within his field of view. By the television show, Supe's hypnotic power had disappeared, but he had acquired the ability to just plain fly.

Still, Superman needed to breathe and eat -- he was, after all, a carbon-based biological being. Clark had other restrictions, such as needing regular exposure to sunlight. Krypton orbited a dying red star; radiation from our solar system's young yellow sun gave Kent his super-strength. Supe's television super-strength had limits, and he couldn't fly in space any longer than he could hold his breath. In the movies, Superman is so ultrastrong he can reverse the rotation of the Earth, and he's able to even more than fly faster than the speed of light. In "Superman Returns," the 2006 remake of the first "Superman" movie, Supe can remain in space for two and a half years without breathing or eating as he travels an enormous distance at warp speed.

Power at this level makes Superman invincible, which is why all four Superman movies involve some tedious variation on the Man of Steel losing his powers -- otherwise he couldn't be threatened. In the comics, Superman did not need to lose his powers constantly to set a plot in motion because he was not invincible. The movie version of Spider-Man now faces the same problem as the movie-version Superman. In the movies, Spidey has become so Superman-like that it's inconceivable any villain could defeat him, and thus there is no tension.

That sounds more like someone bitching about the movie than an actual review. I actually didn't think the movie was that bad, aside from Peter Parker going emo.

rohrya wrote:

That sounds more like someone bitching about the movie than an actual review. I actually didn't think the movie was that bad, aside from Peter Parker going emo.

Bitching about bad writing.

bringbackwigs wrote:

rohrya wrote:

That sounds more like someone bitching about the movie than an actual review. I actually didn't think the movie was that bad, aside from Peter Parker going emo.

Bitching about bad writing.

Well the writing to the movie was actually okay and so was the acting.