Still Don't Get the Spider-Man reboot
You know, I'm actually really confused as to why there's going to be a Spider-Man reboot at all.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I like origins and comic movies and there are some times when a reboot's preferable. For example, Superman Returns would have, I think, been better as a reboot, so I don't have to imagine Kate Bosworth as a child bride of Superman and so Brandon Routh would have been able to play Superman a bit more his way than as the second coming of Christopher Reeve.
But the Maguire movies weren't that long ago. And except for Spider-Man 3, they were pretty good. It's not like Batman Begins which had a very long gap between movies to justify it. And well, rubber nipples DO merit a reboot. It's also not like Captain America, which...is best left forgotten. Spider-Man 3 was crap, but salvageable, if they MUST make a new Spider-Man movie.
This just seems repetitive. What will this reboot bring that Spider-Man didn't?
I'd have rather they jumped into the future and did a Spider-Girl one. It might suck, but it'd be new.
Of course, much as I gripe, I'll still go see it. It just seems weird.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I like origins and comic movies and there are some times when a reboot's preferable. For example, Superman Returns would have, I think, been better as a reboot, so I don't have to imagine Kate Bosworth as a child bride of Superman and so Brandon Routh would have been able to play Superman a bit more his way than as the second coming of Christopher Reeve.
But the Maguire movies weren't that long ago. And except for Spider-Man 3, they were pretty good. It's not like Batman Begins which had a very long gap between movies to justify it. And well, rubber nipples DO merit a reboot. It's also not like Captain America, which...is best left forgotten. Spider-Man 3 was crap, but salvageable, if they MUST make a new Spider-Man movie.
This just seems repetitive. What will this reboot bring that Spider-Man didn't?
I'd have rather they jumped into the future and did a Spider-Girl one. It might suck, but it'd be new.
Of course, much as I gripe, I'll still go see it. It just seems weird.
posted by kalinara @ 3:03 PM
2 Comments:
At May 28, 2010 11:12 PM,
Marshall Ryan Maresca said…
I know part of it is just the studio-politics of it-- allowing Sony to retain ownership over the Spider-man franchise, while not being beholden to anything built by Raimi et al. I think also there is a lot of Spider-Man mythology built around his young days-- Ultimate Spider-man exploited that idea well, as did the Spectacular Spider-Man show. The Raimi films start with Peter in high school, and then move past it as quickly as possible. The movies lost any sense from the comics of Peter-as-Peter in a large group dynamic-- his "group" was only MJ and Harry. One of the things that made Spider-Man work so well originally was his constant balancing game of the responsibility of being Spider-Man with the normal tolls of being Peter. SM1 and SM2 really didn't show that much-- in fact, the point of SM2 was how out-of-balance he was.
I mean, I'm not saying it's a great idea, and there's plenty of ways to mess it up... but I can see why they would want to do it.
At May 29, 2010 11:03 AM,
Menshevik said…
Marshall -
really have to disagree with you there. The Peter in a large group dynamic is something that really only emerged after Peter left high school, and which I'd say really only took off in the 1970s, when the various mini-groups to which he belonged (school pals, college pals, Bugle pals) began to coalesce into one. When you look at the Lee/Ditko era, they rushed through high school in about three years, and all the time there were basically only two recurring characters at Midtown High apart from Peter - Flash and Liz - the rest was effectively an anonymous background crowd scene. Most of Peter's classmates did not even have names until they were retroactively given decades later (in various stories involving class reunions and Untold Tales of Spider-Man) by Tom Busiek and other "lesser gods". But throughout Stan Lee's original tenure, Peter tended to be part of very small groups (at college it was mostly just Gwen, MJ, Harry and Flash, and Flash was away in Vietnam for quite some time). And this was in a comic series over several years, where there was time and space enough to accomodate more supporting characters in a two-hour movie where you have to weigh what each addistional character you include adds to the plot or the characterization of the main characters. I'd say one of the big problems with Spider-Man 3 was that they simply brought in too many characters. Even in "de-compressed" Ultimate Spider-Man the number of recurring characters with proper speaking parts is surprisingly low.
Kalinara -
I'd love to see a Spider-Girl movie rather than a rebooted Spider-Man also.
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