BEFORE: They played this at the theater where I work, a special screening booked for the members of the Visual Effects Society, who then in turn open up their screening for the students of the Arts College. Everybody wins, the local SPFX masters get to see the film on a big screen, with a real audience, the college kids get to see a first-fun film for FREE, and so do I, as long as I'm not booked to manage the screening. If I'm not, I can also see the film for FREE, and even bring a guest. I've only done this a couple times before, like for "Superman" and one of the "Jurassic Park" films, I think "Dominion"?
I did have a houseguest that weekend, however he left before the screening, so my wife came along, even though the film was screening in 3-D and she'd have to wear the funky glasses, or risk getting a headache. So, surprisingly, she agreed to come and finally see where I've been working part-time for the past five years. Now, she has NOT seen the prior "Spider-Man" films with Tom Holland, but she has seen him in the "Avengers" films, so, umm, that's something. Look, I don't have time to explain to her what happened in "Homecoming" or "Far From Home" or even "No Way Home", so I'm hoping this turns out to be a good jumping-on point for her, and if she wants she can go back and see the other films with THIS Spider-Man in them, of course we know now there's a multiverse with a large variety of Spider-Men (Spiders-Men?) in it, but I can rant about that later.
Jacob Batalon carries over again from "The Wrecking Crew".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Spider-Man: No Way Home" (Movie #4,007)
THE PLOT: A forgotten Peter Parker lives alone as a full-time Spider-Man until mounting pressure triggers a dangerous change and a powerful new enemy emerges.
AFTER: I've been reading "Spider-Man" comics since about 1983, and really, the one thing that's been consistent is change. Peter Parker loves Gwen Stacy, no, wait, Mary Jane Watson, no wait, maybe Betty Brant, or maybe Black Cat, who is a villain. No, wait, now she's a hero and Mary Jane also has superpowers, of a sort, and she calls herself Jackpot. No, wait, now she took over the Venom symbiote after it was worn by Flash Thompson, and Eddie Brock before him. Jeezus, who can keep up? They've messed with Spider-Man's powers, too, usually he has the web-shooters but for a while he had webbing that came out of his body (from his wrists, not from where a spider's webbing usually comes from, because Ewwwww....) and sometimes his Spider-Sense is very strong and other times it's on the fritz, and I kid you not, for a while he mutated and had FOUR extra arms coming out of his body, so he really looked like a spider. And then some writer did a storyline where he went into a cocoon and apparently died, but then emerged like a snake from that skin with a slightly different set of spider-powers, and then another writer did an EXTREMELY similar storyline six months later, proving that the different writers don't talk to each other.
But now they're kind of doing the same thing with the MCU movie Spider-Man, he's got web-shooters like the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man, NO WAIT, he's got natural webbing like the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man did. Spider-Man loves MJ, NO WAIT, that's too dangerous for her, so he has to have Dr. Strange cast a spell so everyone forgets his identity, NO WAIT, he changed his mind and wants to get back together with MJ. Geez, I'm getting story whiplash here, but you know, it's a new director now so it's a bit like a new writer on the comic book, he can pick and choose what he wants to have in Spider-Man's life, and what he wants to change. This new guy wants to bring Ned Leeds back into his life. (Ned Leeds in the comic books, however, went through some changes, first he was married to Betty Brant, then he was apparently the villain known as the Hobgoblin, then the next writer says, NO WAIT, he was framed and never the Hobgoblin, but it was too late, somebody had already killed him for being the Hobgoblin, so he's dead - NO WAIT, he's alive again somehow, with little explanation. Well, it's not like the MCU didn't kill a few billion people with "The Snap" and then bring them back with "The Blip".
So now we have a Spider-Man who has tried to solve the equation of balancing being a superhero AND having a personal life by focusing on just one but not the other, which seems fine at first because he did make everyone forget his secret identity, and his friends MJ and Ned went off to college and he watched them succeed from far away. Only now Spider-Man is living alone, always on the neighborhood beat, focused just on being Spider-Man, but you know, is he happy? Not really, he's stressed out, always trying to undo the guilt of seeing his Aunt May die, which is impossible, and feeling like he's failing at life because no friends, no social life. Dude, just join the Avengers, be part of a team, those teammates count as friends! But no, he wants to stay in the city and help the police whenever he can, he's got his rogue's gallery of villains like Scorpion and Tombstone and Boomerang and Tarantula.
Spider-Man is a solo act, sure, like here while taking out a tank that's barreling toward Damage Control, he's not only trying to stop the tank by himself, but he's got to expend extra energy and time trying to keep The Punisher from "helping", because the Punisher only knows how to blow things up and cause more collateral damage. Hey, the Punisher could be a friend for Spider-Man, only Punisher really doesn't "do" friends, does he?
The stress of saving NYC is getting to him, though, and so is the stress of knowing that his ex-best friend and ex-girlfriend (who don't remember being his best friend and girlfriend) have moved back to town, and she's seeing somebody. This is all causing his powers to mutate - yep, they basically send him into a cocoon and when he emerges, he's got the organic webbing and heightened senses, basically his powers are in overdrive, however his first impulse is to contact Bruce Banner and learn about his inhibitor device that keeps him from being the out-of-control Hulk for a while, to see if he can learn enough to design one for himself, using a form of RNA to suppress his new mutation - sure, what could POSSIBLY go wrong when you start gene-splicing yourself? At the same time, he learns that there is a telepath that can control other people, kind of jumping from person to person, who's got some kind of a vendetta against the Department of Damage Control, a government agency that basically does clean-up work after super-heroes fight super-villains. Marvel Comics had a mini-series titled "Damage Control", but it was sort of a spoof comic, not meant to be taken seriously, like in this movie.
The telepath tries again, but by mind-controlling Mac Gargan, the Scorpion, and Spider-Man's new mutations cause him to beat up Scorpion very badly, and he also injures a police officer in the process. Spider-Man does take MJ to stay with the Punisher for her own safety, and to keep her out of range of the telepath, who turns out to be Jean Grey. Man, this is a LONG way to go just to finally introduce the future X-Men into the MCU, I have to say. Jean attacks the Damage Control one more time, but this time she's got the Hulk under her mind control. This to me was probably the best part of the movie, getting Spider-Man and Punisher and the Hulk all involved in one big epic battle. This is really the point of having guest stars, like why have them and not use them? Like the new White Widow (or is she Black Widow now?) is also in this film, and they don't really use her much at all.
Of course, there's another twist - Jean Grey's not really a villain, of course, we all knew that going in, they just kept us from learning her name for the longest time because then we'd know she's not really a villain. But, then who is? Well, my wife called it correctly from the jump, and I didn't, I really should have because I've read WAY more comic books than her. But that works both ways if they want to hide the villain inside of something that was never villainous in the comic books, instead it was a spoof comedy. But this is yet another example of those constantly shifting sands - this is a helpful person, NO WAIT, this person is a villain, and the same goes for the ninja organization called The Hand, which is an evil group in the "Daredevil" comics, but NO WAIT, here they're on the good side and they're being rehabilitated, but NO WAIT, they're still villains after all. Can we just have a little bit of consistency here, please? It's not like the next writer is changing everything around, this is everything changing back and forth, again and again WITHIN THE SAME STORY! Spider-Man has new powers, and that's a good thing, NO WAIT, it's bad, we have to build a device to inhibit them, but NO WAIT, they're really a good thing that he should totally lean into. Make up your damn minds!
I want to point out that Wikipedia suggests that the movie "Brand New Day" is based on the Spider-Man comic book storyline of the same name and, well, nothing could be further from the truth. The only thing the two storylines have in common is that they were both essentially reboots for the character, in the comics it was a new writer trying to start fresh without all of the things that the previous writer had added during his tenure. Also, both storylines took place some time AFTER the world was made to forget Spider-Man's identity, but really, all of the other details are vastly different. In the comic book "Brand New Day", Aunt May is still alive, Harry Osborn is alive (again) and Peter Parker goes back to work getting Spider-Man pictures for the financially struggling Daily Bugle newspaper. Mary Jane Watson comes back after an absence (more on that in a second) but might also be the new goverment-registered superhero known as Jackpot. Peter Parker starts dating Carlie Cooper, a forensics expert who seems like a perfect love match, at least until the next writer takes over. Spider-Man then faces new villains like Overdrive, Mister Negative, Freak and Paper Doll.
In the comics, "Brand New Day" followed an extremely unliked and confusing storyline titled "One More Day", in which Aunt May was dying from a gunshot wound and Spider-Man sought help from Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Doctor Strange, Doctor Octopus and even Doctor Doom. I mean, Reed Richards said to take her to see a "doctor", and I guess Peter Parker got confused. The only entity, hero or villain, that can really help is Mephisto, Marvel's version of Satan. Mephisto offers to save Aunt May's life is Peter is willing to give up his marriage to Mary Jane Watson, poof, change the timeline, the marriage never existed and Peter TAKES THAT OFFER. Narratively speaking, it's not a good idea to make a deal with the devil, there is always a cost or a trick involved, but here Spider-Man says, "Nah, I think the devil is a straight shooter, I can't see how he benefits from this, so sure, make my aunt well and you can undo my marriage." No, no, NO, this is NOT what a hero does, make a deal with the devil. Just because you, Joe Quesada, as a writer do not LIKE a particular aspect of a character's story, does not mean you can order the book's writer to just "undo" it. That's not fair to all of those fans who read the book for years, watched Peter and MJ fall in love and get married, only to have someone start unraveling the whole story like a sweater with a loose thread. A writer should be able to find a better way to split this couple up, maybe they argue, maybe they have a trial separation, which is something that adults do, nope, the devil's going to just make the whole marriage disappear, and he doesn't even have the reality stone. This doesn't even FIT with what we think of as the devil's powers, sure he can tempt people and offer them fame and fortune and convince them to sign away their souls, but does the devil have the power to just change the timeline? This has not been established in previous stories.
What's worse is that there NEVER was a follow-up story to explain what Mephisto had in mind. Like, perhaps Mary Jane was pregnant and that baby would have grown up to be Spider-Girl or some other powerful hero, but now I'm doing the writer's job for him. What was his goal, what did Mephisto get out of this deal by dissolving Spider-Man's marriage? It's unclear, I guess nobody cares except for one comic-book fan in Queens, NY, so we don't ever need to explain this. Thanks, guys, you really know how to make me lose interest, and also you totally broke the fourth wall by imposing your personal inclination to write Spider-Man as a "single" character and that spilled over into a nonsensical story that most of the fans hated. Great, you kept the series fresh by changing things up, but you only exposed how weak your writing is because you couldn't come up with a believable way of getting there. You know, Aunt May had a long run, she was quite old (at least in the comics) and lived a good life, sometimes people just die and you can't magic them back to life, and that would be a powerful lesson not only for Spider-Man to learn but also the audience.
That's one big advantage that the MCU Spider-Man has over the comic-book one, at least after they kill a character in the movies, they stay dead. (Umm, except for all those people Thanos un-existed). But Aunt May is so far still deceased, at least until the next reboot. Yeah, I'm not really looking forward to the upcoming "Doomsday" and "Secret Wars" films, which are kind of teased here at the end of "Brand New Day". It's all going to be multi-verse stuff, and it looks like they're going to bring together characters from the main MCU, the X-Men universe (seen briefly in "The Marvels") and the Fantastic Four universe from "First Steps". No good can come of this, as I suspect that we're going to see so many variant characters from other timelines that it's just going to be one rug pulled out from under us, followed by another one, and another one, etc. The whole Robert Downey Jr. cast as Dr. Doom thing feels more and more like a fake-out, and I'm expecting evil Captain America from another timeline (they call him "Stevil Rogers" in the comics) and so many more bad ideas in a giant failure pile. Like they JUST introduced Jean Grey in this Spider-Man film, why not just build from that instead of doing a complicated cross-over between the current MCU and the old X-Universe? Are the writers just not talking to each other again?
I know, I know this "Brand New Day" movie is super popular right now, everyone loves it and it's made more money than any other movie ever, but obviously I've got reservations about it. Still, it's a (somewhat) well put-together Spider-Man movie and that goes a long way, so I'll give it a score that's a little better than "No Way Home" and a little worse than "Far From Home". OK?
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (director of "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" and "Just Mercy")
Also starring Tom Holland (last seen in "How I Live Now"), Zendaya (last seen in "Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion"), Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "Mickey 17"), Jon Bernthal (last seen in "We Are Your Friends"), Sadie Sink (last seen in "The Whale"), Florence Pugh (last seen in "Thunderbolts*"), Liza Colon-Zayas (last seen in "Cat Person"), Tramell Tillman (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"), Marisa Tomei (last seen in "Untamed Heart"), Michael Mando (last seen in "72 Hours"), Marvin Jones III (last heard in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), Olivia Booth-Ford (last seen in "The School for Good and Evil"), Taryn Marie Butler, Johnny Myers (last seen in "Laws of Attraction"), Billy Clements (last seen in "Deep Cover" (2025)), Zabryna Guevara (last seen in "She Said"), Nina Galano, Maikol Roque, Jamel Davall Rodriguez, Ethan Sokontwe, Tariye Peterside, Phoenix Di Sebastiani, Vivien Keene, Camila Lopez, Eman Esfandi (last seen in "King Richard"), Shannon Young Cho, Niyi Akin, Daisy Sequerra, Nezar Alderazi (last seen in "The Mauritanian"), Fan Xiaoshuang, Elvis Carlos,
and the voices of Naomi Watts (last seen in "The Friend"), Keith David (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London")
RATING: 7 out of 10 photos on Ned's Spider-Man secret identity vision board
No comments:
Post a Comment