why i didn’t like spider-man 2
Spider-man 3 hits theaters today, have you heard? Rendered powerless by this fully operational battle station of a marketing campaign, I will of course, be seeing it, if not this weekend then certainly the next. I’m sure it will be a lot of fun, and exactly the kind of movie one should see on the big screen. Yet I can’t say that I’m optimistic about Spidey the Third’s story prospects.
I’ve never been overly familiar with the Spiderman mythology. I was more of an X-Men fan. Still, I know the basics. You know, Spiderman, Spiderman. Does whatever a Spider can. Etcetera. My investment in the character was never huge. That’s why I liked the first Spider-man movie so much. It made me really like Peter Parker and his alter ego. It might have hit you over the head with the moral of the story, but it worked.
The second movie, though? Yikes. I liked it in the theater, but it fell apart for me the first time I watched it in a living room. I’m not sure what kind of alchemical transformation took place between the two viewings, exactly, but without the darkened theater and SnoCaps coursing through my veins, all the movie’s flaws just leaped off the screen. I haven’t watched Spider-man 2 a third time. I realize that disliking Spider-man 2 puts me in a small and desolate minority, but let me explain why I feel so strongly about this.
The aforementioned moral of the first Spider-man, the one that they absolutely beat you over the head with, is that “With great power comes great responsibility.” In Spider-man‘s final scene the message is hammered home in an exchange between Peter and Mary Jane. At this point she undoubtedly suspects that Peter is Spiderman, even though she doesn’t say it. She wants the hero. Even though Peter is finally in a position to get the girl of his dreams, he walks away from the chance, knowing that it would only endanger her as it endangered his aunt earlier. Power, responsibility, self-sacrifice. Solid.
So what happens in Spider-man 2? Peter and Mary Jane go for it anyway, even after being around Spiderman endangers Mary Jane’s life yet again. It totally negates the message of the first movie. In Spider-man 2, Peter is supposed to be struggling between his desire to live a normal life and his moral obligation to be a suffering superhero. The message of the first movie is that self-sacrifice for the greater good is the only way he, because he is irrevocably Spiderman, can live. The message of the second movie is that once again, Peter is irrevocably Spiderman, but he can have it all anyway. I cannot abide such a blatant disregard for the first film’s message.
There are smaller things that I disliked about Spider-man 2. The giant spiderweb that comes out of nowhere, upon which Peter and Mary Jane confess their love. The fact that the writers contrived to keep Mary Jane away from Peter via some astronaut we’ve never heard of and don’t care about. You know what would have been better? If she’d gone back to a self-involved and now drunk and angry Harry Osborn. He certainly had the resources and money to further her career, and it would have tortured Peter all the more. It would have made a kind of tragic sense. Instead, we get an astronaut. You want more? I’ve got more. Peter’s identity is revealed to a packed train of New York subway riders, and they all just decide to shut up about it. Every single one of them. Men who shoot webs out of their wrists and criminals made of sand, I can buy, but not that (incidentally, there is no way that Spiderman is supposed to be strong enough to do what he did to that subway car). Lastly, you had the introduction of Harry as the New Goblin, which was so artlessly tacked onto the end of the movie that I almost thought I was watching a trailer for the next one.
Initial reviews of Spider-man 3 tell me I’m probably going to have similar problems with this movie. I can only hope that Peter and MJ’s relationship falls apart, thus giving me the dual satisfactions of restoring the trilogy’s moral theme and watching Kirsten Dunst suffer.
I’m a hundred percent with you on Spider-Man 3, but I really enjoyed the second movie. Spider-Man’s always been my favorite superhero, especially the classic 60′s comics. I felt like Spider-Man 2 did pretty much everything right that the first movie did, but did them even better. It had most of the same problems but for me, the quality of Doctor Octopus, both in Alfred Molina’s performance, in the special effects and character design, and the kick-ass fight scenes, made up for its weaknesses.
My take on the first two Spider-Man movies is that, emotionally, they got the broad strokes right, but the actual dialogue was mostly terrible. They weren’t great when people were talking to each other, but they really shone when doing Spider-Man stuff, and they seemed to appreciate on some level the heart and soul of the Spider-Man concept.
That all went off the tracks in the third movie, which was just abysmal and unredeemably horrible. But I could watch Doc Ock fighting Spider-Man on the train or the side of that building many many times.