The Amazing Spider-Douche
I'm sorry I've been posting so much. ACTUALLY, YOU KNOW WHAT, NO I'M NOT. I need to fucking force myself to write more even if it's just shitty stream-of-consciousness livejournal entries. I've been creatively constipated for months now and IT'S AFFECTING MY SELF-ESTEEM.
And the new Spider-Man movie came out.
Okay, so I don't know if you guys knew me in eighth grade or whatever, but I fucking loved the first Spider-Man movie. lol I just looked back in my archives to see if I wrote a review of it, but it came out in May 2002 and my LJ started in November 2002!!!! FUCK!!!!
I DID REVIEW SPIDER-MAN 2 THOUGH and lol it's so cute reading old stuff I wrote! I was kind of sexist and a jerk, but you can tell like a sixteen-year-old wrote that! MY PAST SELF IS AN ALIEN!
Anyway, during my younger years (and still lingering in my adult years), Spider-Man was just like one of my favorite things ever. I bought a calendar with pictures from the first movie, and May was a picture of Tobey Maguire post-spider-bite-roids shirtless...let me see if I can find it:
Something like that idk. I know people think he is a derp but idc I love him always. Katie photoshopped him into my prom photo, like that's the level we're talking here.
Anyway the point is, it's still May 2002 in my Wisconsin bedroom calendar.
So I REALLY, REALLY like the first Spider-Man movie. The second one is better, but the first one is great. I love all of it. And that movie is particular in the history of all movies I've seen and adored, because I feel like that's when my love of movie scores really came into its own, too. I remember buying like the pop-soundtrack for Spider-Man, and the last two tracks on that CD were parts of the score. And I remember listening to those two tracks pre-iPod, on my Walkman with G protection, for long car rides down to Gurnee for Six Flags. Just constantly. Over and over and over.
Here they are, if you're curious:
Like, this was the inception of what will surely be a lifelong hobby or interest. These two tracks, in a weird way, marked the beginning of a huge part of my entire music taste profile.
I mean, I liked movie music before these. And I liked other movie music more than these later. But that's important yo!
Anyway, this may just be a long way of saying that, going into this review, I am super partial. I already think remaking the first Spider-Man movie is redundant. Not only did it come out ten years ago, but it didn't do anything wrong. It's like how they're remaking Total Recall now--why? That movie is fucking flawless in that weird, exploitative, three-titted Paul Verhoeven way. You know what they should do is quit remaking good movies and just rerelease them, fuck.
So I admit that this review is not going to be entirely impartial.
But the new Spider-Man movie fucking sucked, and I think there are actually a few kind of deep-seated reasons why.
Let's talk about the Spider-Man origin story for a second. It's a pretty well-executed origin story. Origin stories are not things that really give you a lot of wiggle room. All the notes have to be hit, and they have to be hit in a way that resonates with the audience. Tragedies have to carry that specific element of like, I don't know...in the Spider-Man origin story I guess, like, he's *kind of* responsible for Uncle Ben's death, but not directly. That whole Oskar Schindler-moral quandary--I can be good, but never good enough. Even one little indiscretion of not-goodness and terrible things can happen. The forces of good can never buckle, never relent, because evil and chaos will never stop pushing against them.
So in the first Spider-Man movie, I think they did this really well. Peter is desperate for cash (so he can buy a car to impress Mary Jane and honestly that motivation is kind of petty, but I think the petty nature of the motivation actually kind of works in this case), so he signs up to basically cause physical harm to himself in this wrestling match. And it's a scam, the guy never intended to pay him, but when he righteously wins, the guy finds a loophole so he can get out of holding up his end of the deal.
Peter was actually wronged in this. The guy withheld what was promised, put Peter in pretty much mortal danger, and then didn't even have the decency to deliver a really high-risk payday that Peter legitimately earned.
Here's that whole scene; some student dubbed it for a final but WHATEVER you get the idea:
Also the whole fucking movie is on Youtube? What?
LOL SO IS SPIDER-MAN 2
and spider-man 3 but who cares. Fuck if sixteen-year-old me had known...well, she would have been mad impatient for sure.
ANYWAY, let's compare that whole scene to the analogous scene in the Amazing Spider-Man.
Peter is buying milk at a convenience store. It costs $2.07. He only has $2.05. He goes to take two pennies from the take-a-penny tray, but the cashier says he's not allowed. You have to spend $10 in the store for access to the take-a-penny tray. Peter gets mad, as anyone would, starts to leave in a huff. The guy behind him in line distracts the cashier, robs the register, and tosses Peter his milk. Then he makes a run for it.
Peter's outside the store, the cashier runs out and asks for help, Peter says "it's not my policy."
Now, this a very subtle difference, but I think it's huge, and it's a kind of thematic or substantial thing that gets carried through the rest of the movie.
Peter wasn't wronged by the cashier the way he was wronged by the wrestling honcho. Yeah, the guy was a dick, but we have to deal with dickhead policies all the time in real life. I mean, there's still that element of THE MAN, BRINGING YOU DOWN, and sure there was probably a clause in the contract Peter signed that stipulated he had to keep the guy in the ring for three minutes, but consciously duping someone with a phony contract is different than not doing the nice thing and selling them something for two less cents than it costs. Peter knew what he was getting into when he bought the milk. The rules of buying things didn't suddenly change because he was duped. That DID happen with the wrestling match, and on a larger scale.
So really, in the Amazing Spider-Man, Peter was just being a douche.
Like I said, this pattern holds. So obviously I mean SPOILER ALERT if you're seriously not already familiar with the Spider-Man origin story, but the guy Peter lets go ends up killing his Uncle Ben.
This is kind of the self-inflicted tragedy element I was talking about. You let one bad guy go, he could kill your father-figure.
So maybe it was just the actors, maybe Tobey could sell this "holy shit what have I done" regret/angst better than Andrew Garfield could (I really didn't like him. I didn't realize he was British, but when I did I realized that how he speaks in Spider-Man and The Social Network is his American accent, which is like a nasally parody of an American accent, and then I kind of hated his skinny ass), but honestly when it happened in Amazing Spider-Man I was kind of like, "well, what did you think was going to happen? Didn't you see the first Spider-Man movie?"
BUT WHEN IT HAPPENED IN SPIDER-MAN I WAS DEVASTATED! IT WAS SO UNFAIR! YOU CAN'T STAND UP TO BAD GUYS BY BEING BAD YOURSELF, THE ONLY WAY TO COMBAT EVIL IS BY BEING GOOD, EVEN WHEN IT BENEFITS OTHER BAD GUYS! The moral conundrum just wrecked my brain heart and body, I loved it.
Anyway, Uncle Ben had left Peter a voicemail that he saved and listened to *for inspurashun* a few times after he died, which like I felt that, I've done that. Then Peter starts fighting crime.
And the only guys he goes after are the ones that look like the guy who attacked his Uncle.
So at this point in the first movie, Peter recognizes his charge. The hero's quest. He has to fight evil *for everyone* so something like this can never happen again. And they show this! There's that montage of him catching bad guys with the people-on-the-street interviews, and that part with Lucy Lawless WHICH I JUST REALIZED WAS A RELEVANT CAMEO B/C SAM RAIMI DID XENA FUCK
Peter-Prime in Amazing Spider-Man doesn't. He's still on a quest for vengeance. That episode doesn't teach him anything, he doesn't learn or grow. It's empty, vapid, hollow, and even though I love Martin Sheen I did not mourn his passing.
It's a subtle thing, but it really, really made a difference in the movie. Peter doesn't ever fight any bad guys for the sake of helping people, or stopping bad guys. He's ONLY trying to catch the guy who killed his uncle. That guy has a tattoo on his wrist, and ever single guy Peter stops gets his wrist checked.
Maybe that's the difference. In the first movie, Peter catches the guy right away, so that whole angst is put to rest. In this movie, he never does! The guy is still at large!
It's a worse decision imho! Peter has to come into his own as a superhero, and the movie doesn't really let him.
So that's my first point. My second point is a FEMINIST THING! YAY!
Now this may only be a problem now because sixteen-year-old me didn't know what the fuck feminism was, or that I should care about how women are portrayed in movies, even ones as mainstreamy and populist as Spider-Man. And Kirsten Dunst does her fair share of staring slightly off-camera and screaming. I'm not going to hold those movies up as an example of feminist filmmaking, because they're not. She is straight-up pointless, purposeless, useless Damsel-in-Distress and it's pretty bad.
But fuck I hated Gwen Stacy.
They tried, which I should acknowledge. But they tried with the same level of self-awareness and good intentions that a 12-year-old girl fanfic writer has. And maybe this is a mistake even bringing this up, but fanfic, and thus a lot of print media, has really grown and started to understand a very, very important concept when trying to write a well-constructed female character:
Being artificially good at everything, except actually doing anything in the plot, does not make a female character a strong female character.
It's like that one blog thing I can't find right now. People think we want strong characters, female, when we want female characters, strong. Or something like that.
BASICALLY, giving your female character a bunch of impossible traits no one could ever actually have just to artificially elevate her relevance or awesomeness in the story is a favor to no one. No one wants to see characters they can't possibly identify with or emulate. Gwen Stacy in this fucking movie is first in her class, somehow, an intern at the foremost science labs in all of New York (she's 17 mind you) with privileges and responsibilities they probably wouldn't give a post-doc.
IT MAKES NO SENSE.
Maybe this whole movie would have worked better if they put them in college. MAYBE I could buy her having some actual duties at this lab that didn't include cleaning the beakers and feeding the mice if she had actually matriculated somewhere. And it would have to be Columbia, no where else would make any sense.
But when you give a high school kid this magical, unattainable persona, you're not actually doing anything good for the portrayal of women in film. You're saying, "the only reason a woman could be relevant to our story, and kind of by extension real life, is if she's a fucking unattainable, unrealistic Mary Sue that no one could ever actually be. There you go, ladies! That's the offer!"
Like, fuck that.
And even despite this, she does pretty much nothing in the plot. It's the third millennium, so she has to get her stupid pointless shot in against the bad guy. Mary Jane had a couple of those. We can't have our women COWERING IN FEAR, even though that's realistic, they have to TRY to fight back. So she hits the Lizard with a trophy, and Peter throws her out the window.
That's the message you're sending, filmmakers. Try to do something good and your boyfriend will throw you out a window to keep you out of harm's way.
I don't know. It really bothered me. The climax was like, a LITTLE better but not really. They give her something to do (she has to make the antidote to this poison that makes no sense. I'll get into it later), and the only way they can keep her in danger is to apply this arbitrary ticking clock to the process. No, a lab that's producing weaponized mutation agents wouldn't have any antidotes just LYING AROUND. And synthesizing one takes a plot-perfect length of eight minutes, that she has to stand around for.
So she does the equivalent of microwaving a pizza while she waits for back-up. And we're supposed to be impressed by her bravery for, you know, standing there and waiting for it to be done. Oh wait, she also "gets everyone out." By pulling the fire alarm.
I don't know. It just made me mad. Peter comes later and they wrangle her downstairs and into a squad car to keep her out of trouble. Then her fucking DAD rides in at the eleventh hour and gets the heroic sacrifice.
FUCK.
The very worst part of her storyline, and I have no proof of this but I feel it in my bones like an old lady with a thunderstorm, is that they're setting her up to be stuffed in a fridge. I just fucking know it. As her dad lies there dying, he makes Peter promise him to leave her alone to keep her out of trouble. This theme, of course, has been explored before, and better, in the first two Spider-Man movies. And Peter gives him one of these kinds of deals:
And then in the end, Aunt Sally Field assures him he is a good person, because she, like Gwen, is all but entirely removed from the plot and doesn't do or know anything except idly worry about Peter coming home every day looking like he got hit by a truck and go "Oh, Peter!" And then the very last scene of the movie is Peter saying he doesn't intend to keep the promise and date Gwen anyway.
Gwen, remember, is the Spider-Man girlfriend that died when Peter tried to save her. She fell off a bridge and he tried to web her back up but it snapped her neck. That death was ALL about Peter, his issues, his actions. Nothing she did. She was a prop, not an actor. So I fucking KNOW the next plot of the movie is that plot. Gwen's not going to be able to sacrifice herself, or choose to fight. She's going to be collateral in a fight between Peter and Whatever Generic Bad Guy so Peter gets to angst about the impact his choice is having on the people he loves.
Woman, meet fridge. It fucking pisses me off.
Okay, little things now, just little irritations--like I was saying about the antidote. So the villain-plot in this movie is that Dr. Curt Connors lost an arm, somehow, and wants to genetically engineer a solution by using Lizard DNA, because they can regrow lost tails. Not a terrible idea. He does this, injects himself with the serum, grows a new arm, but then turns into a huge terrifying lizard-creature.
Here is where things get unclear.
1) Does the Lizard DNA he injected into himself actually impact his personality, or is he becoming a power-hungry megalomaniac just because?
2) Later in the movie, he reverts to his human form, except for patches of weird lizard skin. He needs to inject himself again to turn back into huge Lizard creature. Does this mean that the serum only has a temporary effect? Or are these "human" periods just like, molting until he can regrow into huge Lizard creature, and the extra serum injections are just because he doesn't want to wait?
3) Why does he lose his arm each time he reverts back to human form?
4) In the third act, he weaponizes the serum and unleashes it onto some police officers. They start to turn into lizards. Won't they just turn back into humans later, like Dr. Connors does? Why do they need an antidote?
5) The antidote, which Gwen made (yay feminism) and Peter released, turns them back into humans. It also turns Dr. Connors back into human, but he still has the reptile skin.
I DON'T GET HOW THIS SHIT WORKS AT ALL.
Finally is Peter's webbing. I know a bunch of nerds were pissed in the first movie that Peter's webbing was organic and not artificial. The fact that Peter created the webbing, and the apparatus that fires it, is character-building. He's a science geek, and that's not just an auxiliary part of his character--it directly impacts how he is as Spider-Man, too.
They changed that in this one. Except the way they expressed it made it just as useless as the organic webbing in the first movie.
Apparently, Oscorp had been studying spiders, because Peter's dad did or something, and they'd been inventing a synthetic form of spider-webbing that was really strong and powerful or whatever.
Peter fucking ordered that shit out of a magazine and then made his own shooter.
I don't know, it's not a big thing, but it just made it so pointless. Have him invent the webbing, and the shooter. Make him work for it. It makes no difference to his character if you do 90% of the work for him so you can spend more time on one of the most vanilla, predictable, white-people love stories that the movies have given us in decades.
Love unconventional love stories, but conventional ones should be banned from modern Hollywood cinema.
ALSO OKAY ONE MORE THING: In the first movie, they very deliberately said there were 15 genetically-engineered spiders. One was missing. That was the one that bit Peter. There was really no way anyone else could have been bitten and turned into The Amazing Spider-Background-Character.
In this movie though, Peter walks into a room full of genetically engineered spiders making super-strong webs. He touches something and they all come CASCADING DOWN ON HIM.
YOU REALLY EXPECT ME TO BELIEVE THAT'S THE FIRST TIME, IN A ROOM ANY IDIOT CAN JUST WALTZ INTO, SOMEONE GOT BIT BY A SPIDER?
Now, maybe Peter himself has been genetically engineered to interact with spider DNA. They were toying with the plot of *who are Peter Parker's parents* in this movie, but they don't go into anything. I don't know the comics, and that guess is pure speculation.
idk, every little change they made from the first movie was inferior. This is the worst of what remakes can be because it just serves to remind you that not only is Hollywood completely out of ideas, but they're getting worse at expressing the ones they know work.
tl;dr, Peter Parker is a dick in this movie and I hated him and hated it.
And the new Spider-Man movie came out.
Okay, so I don't know if you guys knew me in eighth grade or whatever, but I fucking loved the first Spider-Man movie. lol I just looked back in my archives to see if I wrote a review of it, but it came out in May 2002 and my LJ started in November 2002!!!! FUCK!!!!
I DID REVIEW SPIDER-MAN 2 THOUGH and lol it's so cute reading old stuff I wrote! I was kind of sexist and a jerk, but you can tell like a sixteen-year-old wrote that! MY PAST SELF IS AN ALIEN!
Anyway, during my younger years (and still lingering in my adult years), Spider-Man was just like one of my favorite things ever. I bought a calendar with pictures from the first movie, and May was a picture of Tobey Maguire post-spider-bite-roids shirtless...let me see if I can find it:
Something like that idk. I know people think he is a derp but idc I love him always. Katie photoshopped him into my prom photo, like that's the level we're talking here.
Anyway the point is, it's still May 2002 in my Wisconsin bedroom calendar.
So I REALLY, REALLY like the first Spider-Man movie. The second one is better, but the first one is great. I love all of it. And that movie is particular in the history of all movies I've seen and adored, because I feel like that's when my love of movie scores really came into its own, too. I remember buying like the pop-soundtrack for Spider-Man, and the last two tracks on that CD were parts of the score. And I remember listening to those two tracks pre-iPod, on my Walkman with G protection, for long car rides down to Gurnee for Six Flags. Just constantly. Over and over and over.
Here they are, if you're curious:
Click to viewLike, this was the inception of what will surely be a lifelong hobby or interest. These two tracks, in a weird way, marked the beginning of a huge part of my entire music taste profile.
I mean, I liked movie music before these. And I liked other movie music more than these later. But that's important yo!
Anyway, this may just be a long way of saying that, going into this review, I am super partial. I already think remaking the first Spider-Man movie is redundant. Not only did it come out ten years ago, but it didn't do anything wrong. It's like how they're remaking Total Recall now--why? That movie is fucking flawless in that weird, exploitative, three-titted Paul Verhoeven way. You know what they should do is quit remaking good movies and just rerelease them, fuck.
So I admit that this review is not going to be entirely impartial.
But the new Spider-Man movie fucking sucked, and I think there are actually a few kind of deep-seated reasons why.
Let's talk about the Spider-Man origin story for a second. It's a pretty well-executed origin story. Origin stories are not things that really give you a lot of wiggle room. All the notes have to be hit, and they have to be hit in a way that resonates with the audience. Tragedies have to carry that specific element of like, I don't know...in the Spider-Man origin story I guess, like, he's *kind of* responsible for Uncle Ben's death, but not directly. That whole Oskar Schindler-moral quandary--I can be good, but never good enough. Even one little indiscretion of not-goodness and terrible things can happen. The forces of good can never buckle, never relent, because evil and chaos will never stop pushing against them.
So in the first Spider-Man movie, I think they did this really well. Peter is desperate for cash (so he can buy a car to impress Mary Jane and honestly that motivation is kind of petty, but I think the petty nature of the motivation actually kind of works in this case), so he signs up to basically cause physical harm to himself in this wrestling match. And it's a scam, the guy never intended to pay him, but when he righteously wins, the guy finds a loophole so he can get out of holding up his end of the deal.
Peter was actually wronged in this. The guy withheld what was promised, put Peter in pretty much mortal danger, and then didn't even have the decency to deliver a really high-risk payday that Peter legitimately earned.
Here's that whole scene; some student dubbed it for a final but WHATEVER you get the idea:
Also the whole fucking movie is on Youtube? What?
LOL SO IS SPIDER-MAN 2
and spider-man 3 but who cares. Fuck if sixteen-year-old me had known...well, she would have been mad impatient for sure.
ANYWAY, let's compare that whole scene to the analogous scene in the Amazing Spider-Man.
Peter is buying milk at a convenience store. It costs $2.07. He only has $2.05. He goes to take two pennies from the take-a-penny tray, but the cashier says he's not allowed. You have to spend $10 in the store for access to the take-a-penny tray. Peter gets mad, as anyone would, starts to leave in a huff. The guy behind him in line distracts the cashier, robs the register, and tosses Peter his milk. Then he makes a run for it.
Peter's outside the store, the cashier runs out and asks for help, Peter says "it's not my policy."
Now, this a very subtle difference, but I think it's huge, and it's a kind of thematic or substantial thing that gets carried through the rest of the movie.
Peter wasn't wronged by the cashier the way he was wronged by the wrestling honcho. Yeah, the guy was a dick, but we have to deal with dickhead policies all the time in real life. I mean, there's still that element of THE MAN, BRINGING YOU DOWN, and sure there was probably a clause in the contract Peter signed that stipulated he had to keep the guy in the ring for three minutes, but consciously duping someone with a phony contract is different than not doing the nice thing and selling them something for two less cents than it costs. Peter knew what he was getting into when he bought the milk. The rules of buying things didn't suddenly change because he was duped. That DID happen with the wrestling match, and on a larger scale.
So really, in the Amazing Spider-Man, Peter was just being a douche.
Like I said, this pattern holds. So obviously I mean SPOILER ALERT if you're seriously not already familiar with the Spider-Man origin story, but the guy Peter lets go ends up killing his Uncle Ben.
This is kind of the self-inflicted tragedy element I was talking about. You let one bad guy go, he could kill your father-figure.
So maybe it was just the actors, maybe Tobey could sell this "holy shit what have I done" regret/angst better than Andrew Garfield could (I really didn't like him. I didn't realize he was British, but when I did I realized that how he speaks in Spider-Man and The Social Network is his American accent, which is like a nasally parody of an American accent, and then I kind of hated his skinny ass), but honestly when it happened in Amazing Spider-Man I was kind of like, "well, what did you think was going to happen? Didn't you see the first Spider-Man movie?"
BUT WHEN IT HAPPENED IN SPIDER-MAN I WAS DEVASTATED! IT WAS SO UNFAIR! YOU CAN'T STAND UP TO BAD GUYS BY BEING BAD YOURSELF, THE ONLY WAY TO COMBAT EVIL IS BY BEING GOOD, EVEN WHEN IT BENEFITS OTHER BAD GUYS! The moral conundrum just wrecked my brain heart and body, I loved it.
Anyway, Uncle Ben had left Peter a voicemail that he saved and listened to *for inspurashun* a few times after he died, which like I felt that, I've done that. Then Peter starts fighting crime.
And the only guys he goes after are the ones that look like the guy who attacked his Uncle.
So at this point in the first movie, Peter recognizes his charge. The hero's quest. He has to fight evil *for everyone* so something like this can never happen again. And they show this! There's that montage of him catching bad guys with the people-on-the-street interviews, and that part with Lucy Lawless WHICH I JUST REALIZED WAS A RELEVANT CAMEO B/C SAM RAIMI DID XENA FUCK
Peter-Prime in Amazing Spider-Man doesn't. He's still on a quest for vengeance. That episode doesn't teach him anything, he doesn't learn or grow. It's empty, vapid, hollow, and even though I love Martin Sheen I did not mourn his passing.
It's a subtle thing, but it really, really made a difference in the movie. Peter doesn't ever fight any bad guys for the sake of helping people, or stopping bad guys. He's ONLY trying to catch the guy who killed his uncle. That guy has a tattoo on his wrist, and ever single guy Peter stops gets his wrist checked.
Maybe that's the difference. In the first movie, Peter catches the guy right away, so that whole angst is put to rest. In this movie, he never does! The guy is still at large!
It's a worse decision imho! Peter has to come into his own as a superhero, and the movie doesn't really let him.
So that's my first point. My second point is a FEMINIST THING! YAY!
Now this may only be a problem now because sixteen-year-old me didn't know what the fuck feminism was, or that I should care about how women are portrayed in movies, even ones as mainstreamy and populist as Spider-Man. And Kirsten Dunst does her fair share of staring slightly off-camera and screaming. I'm not going to hold those movies up as an example of feminist filmmaking, because they're not. She is straight-up pointless, purposeless, useless Damsel-in-Distress and it's pretty bad.
But fuck I hated Gwen Stacy.
They tried, which I should acknowledge. But they tried with the same level of self-awareness and good intentions that a 12-year-old girl fanfic writer has. And maybe this is a mistake even bringing this up, but fanfic, and thus a lot of print media, has really grown and started to understand a very, very important concept when trying to write a well-constructed female character:
Being artificially good at everything, except actually doing anything in the plot, does not make a female character a strong female character.
It's like that one blog thing I can't find right now. People think we want strong characters, female, when we want female characters, strong. Or something like that.
BASICALLY, giving your female character a bunch of impossible traits no one could ever actually have just to artificially elevate her relevance or awesomeness in the story is a favor to no one. No one wants to see characters they can't possibly identify with or emulate. Gwen Stacy in this fucking movie is first in her class, somehow, an intern at the foremost science labs in all of New York (she's 17 mind you) with privileges and responsibilities they probably wouldn't give a post-doc.
IT MAKES NO SENSE.
Maybe this whole movie would have worked better if they put them in college. MAYBE I could buy her having some actual duties at this lab that didn't include cleaning the beakers and feeding the mice if she had actually matriculated somewhere. And it would have to be Columbia, no where else would make any sense.
But when you give a high school kid this magical, unattainable persona, you're not actually doing anything good for the portrayal of women in film. You're saying, "the only reason a woman could be relevant to our story, and kind of by extension real life, is if she's a fucking unattainable, unrealistic Mary Sue that no one could ever actually be. There you go, ladies! That's the offer!"
Like, fuck that.
And even despite this, she does pretty much nothing in the plot. It's the third millennium, so she has to get her stupid pointless shot in against the bad guy. Mary Jane had a couple of those. We can't have our women COWERING IN FEAR, even though that's realistic, they have to TRY to fight back. So she hits the Lizard with a trophy, and Peter throws her out the window.
That's the message you're sending, filmmakers. Try to do something good and your boyfriend will throw you out a window to keep you out of harm's way.
I don't know. It really bothered me. The climax was like, a LITTLE better but not really. They give her something to do (she has to make the antidote to this poison that makes no sense. I'll get into it later), and the only way they can keep her in danger is to apply this arbitrary ticking clock to the process. No, a lab that's producing weaponized mutation agents wouldn't have any antidotes just LYING AROUND. And synthesizing one takes a plot-perfect length of eight minutes, that she has to stand around for.
So she does the equivalent of microwaving a pizza while she waits for back-up. And we're supposed to be impressed by her bravery for, you know, standing there and waiting for it to be done. Oh wait, she also "gets everyone out." By pulling the fire alarm.
I don't know. It just made me mad. Peter comes later and they wrangle her downstairs and into a squad car to keep her out of trouble. Then her fucking DAD rides in at the eleventh hour and gets the heroic sacrifice.
FUCK.
The very worst part of her storyline, and I have no proof of this but I feel it in my bones like an old lady with a thunderstorm, is that they're setting her up to be stuffed in a fridge. I just fucking know it. As her dad lies there dying, he makes Peter promise him to leave her alone to keep her out of trouble. This theme, of course, has been explored before, and better, in the first two Spider-Man movies. And Peter gives him one of these kinds of deals:
And then in the end, Aunt Sally Field assures him he is a good person, because she, like Gwen, is all but entirely removed from the plot and doesn't do or know anything except idly worry about Peter coming home every day looking like he got hit by a truck and go "Oh, Peter!" And then the very last scene of the movie is Peter saying he doesn't intend to keep the promise and date Gwen anyway.
Gwen, remember, is the Spider-Man girlfriend that died when Peter tried to save her. She fell off a bridge and he tried to web her back up but it snapped her neck. That death was ALL about Peter, his issues, his actions. Nothing she did. She was a prop, not an actor. So I fucking KNOW the next plot of the movie is that plot. Gwen's not going to be able to sacrifice herself, or choose to fight. She's going to be collateral in a fight between Peter and Whatever Generic Bad Guy so Peter gets to angst about the impact his choice is having on the people he loves.
Woman, meet fridge. It fucking pisses me off.
Okay, little things now, just little irritations--like I was saying about the antidote. So the villain-plot in this movie is that Dr. Curt Connors lost an arm, somehow, and wants to genetically engineer a solution by using Lizard DNA, because they can regrow lost tails. Not a terrible idea. He does this, injects himself with the serum, grows a new arm, but then turns into a huge terrifying lizard-creature.
Here is where things get unclear.
1) Does the Lizard DNA he injected into himself actually impact his personality, or is he becoming a power-hungry megalomaniac just because?
2) Later in the movie, he reverts to his human form, except for patches of weird lizard skin. He needs to inject himself again to turn back into huge Lizard creature. Does this mean that the serum only has a temporary effect? Or are these "human" periods just like, molting until he can regrow into huge Lizard creature, and the extra serum injections are just because he doesn't want to wait?
3) Why does he lose his arm each time he reverts back to human form?
4) In the third act, he weaponizes the serum and unleashes it onto some police officers. They start to turn into lizards. Won't they just turn back into humans later, like Dr. Connors does? Why do they need an antidote?
5) The antidote, which Gwen made (yay feminism) and Peter released, turns them back into humans. It also turns Dr. Connors back into human, but he still has the reptile skin.
I DON'T GET HOW THIS SHIT WORKS AT ALL.
Finally is Peter's webbing. I know a bunch of nerds were pissed in the first movie that Peter's webbing was organic and not artificial. The fact that Peter created the webbing, and the apparatus that fires it, is character-building. He's a science geek, and that's not just an auxiliary part of his character--it directly impacts how he is as Spider-Man, too.
They changed that in this one. Except the way they expressed it made it just as useless as the organic webbing in the first movie.
Apparently, Oscorp had been studying spiders, because Peter's dad did or something, and they'd been inventing a synthetic form of spider-webbing that was really strong and powerful or whatever.
Peter fucking ordered that shit out of a magazine and then made his own shooter.
I don't know, it's not a big thing, but it just made it so pointless. Have him invent the webbing, and the shooter. Make him work for it. It makes no difference to his character if you do 90% of the work for him so you can spend more time on one of the most vanilla, predictable, white-people love stories that the movies have given us in decades.
Love unconventional love stories, but conventional ones should be banned from modern Hollywood cinema.
ALSO OKAY ONE MORE THING: In the first movie, they very deliberately said there were 15 genetically-engineered spiders. One was missing. That was the one that bit Peter. There was really no way anyone else could have been bitten and turned into The Amazing Spider-Background-Character.
In this movie though, Peter walks into a room full of genetically engineered spiders making super-strong webs. He touches something and they all come CASCADING DOWN ON HIM.
YOU REALLY EXPECT ME TO BELIEVE THAT'S THE FIRST TIME, IN A ROOM ANY IDIOT CAN JUST WALTZ INTO, SOMEONE GOT BIT BY A SPIDER?
Now, maybe Peter himself has been genetically engineered to interact with spider DNA. They were toying with the plot of *who are Peter Parker's parents* in this movie, but they don't go into anything. I don't know the comics, and that guess is pure speculation.
idk, every little change they made from the first movie was inferior. This is the worst of what remakes can be because it just serves to remind you that not only is Hollywood completely out of ideas, but they're getting worse at expressing the ones they know work.
tl;dr, Peter Parker is a dick in this movie and I hated him and hated it.