Amazing Spider-Man 2 To Explore Themes of Repetition, Creative Exhaustion, and Contractual Obligation

I was one of the unhappy few to see the Amazing Spider-Man, a reboot occurring just a few years after the previous sequel. It was terrible.

The new one looks like it was made with the same spirit as the first, which is to say, it also looks terrible. That's the trailer. It looks like an epileptic cartoon. Enjoy.

The main villain is... Electro, a villain even mild geeks have heard of, but who just isn't that interesting. So they've juiced him up with a lot of new CGI superpowers, and he looks even dumber here than he does in the comic. And that's a neat trick, because in the comics, Electro's costume is that of an... angry daffodil.

But no one expects Electro, of all people, to carry a movie, so apparently Spider-Man is fighting the Sinister Six, an Avengers-style team-up of Spider-Man's rogues gallery. Apparently Doctor Octopus is somewhere in the trailer (though I missed him), and they show the Rhino a lot. Green Goblin shows up, Forbes says.

Six villains? Great, you know what that means: More origin stories! And I just can't get enough of origin stories in comic book movies.

At this point, would the audience mind at all if the movie just opened up with a fight between Rhino and Spider-Man, and then didn't bother explaining How the Rhino Came to Be? Would anyone care at all if the film didn't include that critical information? Or if the movie just covered it with a single line of dialogue ("his advanced nano-hydraulic armor gives him incredible strength!")?

Would anyone be upset if the movie just presented all six villains and didn't bother at all explaining their magical powers?

Eh. In this one, it looks like the plot is something about "making humans powerful or something," so they're going to attempt to explain the villains via the same magic serum, which doesn't really make sense, because at least two villains get their magic powers from magic armor, rather than getting their magic strength or magic electricity from from a magic potion.

This might also be the one where Gwen Stacy dies. If you care. I don't. And I actually used to care.

Apparently they're making so much money with bad Spider-Man movies they've already greenlit sequels for 2016 and 2018. I guess that's the ultimate in movie properties -- if you can make $750 million with a bad movie, then why the hell not just keep making them forever?

Anyone can make money with a good movie. It's a special kind of franchise where you make money with bad ones.

So we all have this continuing Cartoon Nightmare for Adult Children to look forward to for some number of years, until they start losing money and the license either reverts back to Marvel or Disney buys it back or something.

Okay, I'm officially done with comic book movies. It took a while to get here, but now I'm agreeing with the cranky guys who've been saying "What the hell is this stupid crap?" for eight years.

posted by Ace at 12:54 PM

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