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).

Comments

CG is great

[EvilAlien]

I'm no ludite. Technology is letting filmakers realize dreams that could only be slightly approximated back in tha day.

Fantastic stories and imagination should not be contrained by mere reality, computers let creative truly push the envelope.

Re:CG is great

[mccalli]

I'm no ludite.

I am.

Technology is letting filmakers realize dreams that could only be slightly approximated back in tha day.

Well...maybe. But then again, maybe not. These new CG thingies date really fast. Have you ever looked at some of the old games you used to worship, and think "huh?". Doom is a great example - stunning in its day, still playable today, but the graphics are now considered poor. That was only six or seven years ago.

You see, I'm of a school that still prefers models for special effects. Take the geek's bible of a film, Star Wars, as a great example. The rehashed Special Edition nonsense already had 'CG' leaping out at you from every turn, and it's so blindingly obvious when it appears. The original, apart from one bad 'airfix' moment when Luke skims over the Death Star, has barely dated. The models and machines look better than the easily-spottable CG bits.

There are other examples. Last Starfighter anyone? Fantastic graphics for the day, awful for today. Babylon 5? Same thing (plot rescues it, but look at the obvious animated texture mapping particularly in the pilot). Terminator 2's reflective surface morphing? Lost its shine a bit, hasn't it? Titanic? Hmm...an awfully straight ship, wasn't it? Those railings must have been aligned with laser sights.

Entirely self-contained CG films, like Toy Story or Shrek, have a much better chance of long-term survival in my opion because there's no point of reference to the real world. However, for me real world+CG dates faster than real world+model.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:CG is great

[EvilAlien]

Personally, I feel much the same way about the models and puppets you prefer. The stiff movements and lack of (approximately) realisitic body language in the Yoda puppet is dissapointing today given the range of communication CG can produce. Models and puppets date themselves just as quickly as CG.

Everything gets old and passe, this shouldn't be a surprise. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't support innovation just because it won't stay top-of-the-line forever. Nothing does.

I really don't understand the aversion to CG when models and puppets are used as a "timeless FX" defence. Something which lacks the dynamics of a living being, such as a mere puppet, gets old quicker than current CG, IMO.

Life is change, we have to cope with that.

What about the 1970's live action series?

[mikosullivan]

Spidey had a short-lived live-action series in the 1970's. Overall it tunk, but it had its points. In the series his spider-sense was more developed: he could actually envision the bad goings on (which he saw in a cheesy but somehow effective negative camera image). Sometimes the shots of him on the ceiling actually looked quite realistic. However, most of the shots of him wall-crawling were horrible: you could plainly see that they put a wall prop on the floor and he attempted to crawl across it on his fingers and toes. The weight distribution clearly looked wrong to the eye. It also suffered from the mask thing: when you put a mask on an actor, the actor has to hold his/her head all weird to see. This was clearly apparent in the series. I'm happy to notice that it doesn't appear in the movie trailers.

But hey, I was a fifth grader. I caught every episode.

How about the really old spiderman movies?

[fireboy1919]

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...