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Spider-Man 2002 vs. Spider-Man 1992
Surly Robot writes "Do you like your Spider-Man CG or non-CG? Here's an article that I wrote for the Baltimore City Paper about the guy who made his own Spidey flick ten years ago, and what he thinks of the new movie." Another submitter sent in a link to view Green Goblin's Last Stand (Microsoft format unfortunately, but it works with Codeweavers).
Fantastic stories and imagination should not be contrained by mere reality, computers let creative truly push the envelope.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
But hey, I was a fifth grader. I caught every episode.
Miko O'Sullivan
You know, we have to put this stuff in perspective. They're doing movies based upon comic books. The way I see it, there are two options: make something that doesn't make much sense which won't sell as well (like Dick Tracy), or completely alter the mood and how everything works (like TMNT, Incredible Hulk, Batman) to suit the time and place.
Comic books are rather like books: they can be timeless. Movies have a much harder time with that because your imagination can't fill in details that make the characters seem to fit in your present time - things like how they walk, what their clothing would look like if they where real, how they sound, etc.
Have you seen any spidey movies from the seventies? They are...VERY 70's. You almost expect Shaft to bust in and help Spidey out with the bad guys.
One final note: Organic web shooters? Raimi's on crack. Spiderman was Marvel's answer to Batman: a character who used his mind to figure out how to defeat his enemies. Nowhere is there a better reminder of that than in the fact that the webshooters where an invention.
Plus, I could totally see that going awry: Peter gets all hot 'n bothered by MJ, and, completely distracted, he shoots webbing all over the place, random-like. Of course, I've always thought that Wolverine would have similar problems with his lovers, except instead of accidentally getting everything sticky, he'd probably destroy everything. Comics creators and movie directors just don't think much about those kinds of things...
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Ok, you do know that Spiderman often wore his Web shooters under his street clothes (and also often the whole costume except the mask.)
The "organic Web shooters" thing is implausable too. How come the Web shooters are conveniently located in his wrists? In those Spider-Goats they created, the spider silk protein is only produced by their genetically engineered mammary glands when they lactate. (Note, they are female spider-goats.) I mean this is a still the story of a young photographer who gets bitten by a radioactive spider, right? It isn't even remotely plausable that he would get "spider powers" from that. So, why are we worrying about "plausibility?"
So, if it doesn't bother me that it isn't plausible, why does it bother me? Because it was pretty cool that Parker could come up with cool technology when he needed to. What about the spider tracers that he could track via his spider sense? How are they going to explain those? More convenient organic tech? Raimi has boxed himself into a version of Spider-Man that has to become more and more divergent from canon.
Now, despite my disappointment with certain details of the plot, I'm not saying it is a bad movie. Sam Raimi has done pretty well with other stories. It'll be "his" Spider Man (as opposed to "the" Spider Man), but I worry that the evil suits had some influence on the film. I won't see it, of course, until one of my friends or family inevitably rents it (or worse, buys it). MPAA bad, Sony bad, after all.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Wait until you see it. I got my first Spidey comic when I was about 6 (27 years ago), and have been a fan my whole life. Going into the movie, I was sure there was no way it could live up to my hopes/expectations. I was bummed about the whole organic webshooters versus mechanical.
I watched the movie this afternoon. I had some little nits to pick here and there, but overall as a whole, the movie was way better than I expected.
They did so many things right. The bit with "the burglar that changed his life" was done perfectly, and that's what I most expected them to do poorly. That whole section of the movie, as he was figuring out who he was and what he could do, was very well done. There were some scenes you could tell were computer-generated, but the for the most part, the excitement of the movie made it easier to tolerate. And the movie would have been worse without those scenes, or if they had tried to do them physically with stuntmen.
The main characterization I felt was missing was that it would have been nice to have seen more background of the relation between Spidey and his Uncle Ben. Although I guess even in the original comics, we never really got that (although we heard about it plenty over the years).
Anyway, I loved it. I can't wait for the DVD. I'll probably bring my dad to watch it this weekend, since he used to be a bit of a Spidey fan too.