The Amazing Spider Man 2 (2014)

[GodzillaSpawn]

Well don't keep me waiting too long please get on with it.

 

[Silrian]

That's really it's only intention? LOL I thought it was somehow a hint that they two franchises were coming together

Yeah that's why it's such a nasty move. Just shows ALL these studios care about is money.

@JAWS maybe when it's out on DVD I can appreciate it a little more, but as it stands I've given it a 6,0, a pass, mostly for a few brilliant scenes and an overall sincere intent by the filmmakers, I think. But even if I dod start liking it, can't see this ever getting a high grade from me.

 

[JAWS]

Yeah shot, whatever, I never watched bambi again, I suppressed that ****.

I read your entire post ftr, but quoting it seemed a bit too much. I do need a hug, that is true. In any case you raise some good points, but you also for a small part miss my point.

On a shallow level, yes a lot was indeed present. But my issues is in the deeper psychological level of it, and some can call this a kids film, but it obviously tried to be much more. To me it did already reach the point to be invested in Harry and Max enough to feel actual sympathy for them to the point where imo the world is TOO unjust toward them to just let that slide as ' but they're the villains'. So I guess it's agree to disagree there, guess that's personal too.

My main problem is that the surface looks, feels and acts very lighthearted the one minute, yet it depicts very gruesome realities without any compromise the next, Electro being tortured for instance. This guy was a very sad guy who had an accident. They could've just locked him up, but no he actually needs to be tortured even more on screen. That's a directing choice that just doesn't gel with the lighthearted tone it has in other places. It lays all the drama on so freakin thick, that to me isn't befitting of the highly lighthearted peaks in the film. It imo tried to have it both ways tonally, and no matter what happens 'practically', that's a form of directing that did not work for me in a film that is clearly out to work on multiple levels. No matter how easy anyone wants to dismiss criticism.

Many people are different of course, kids included, but to me the tone, the way this film went about it's material from a directing POV, just became bizarrely polarising.

Max, Harry but also Peter and Gwen, experience things of an immense gravity that the film does very purposefully seek out on a dramatic level that is akin to TDK. This isn't Iron Man, the drama is very hardcore, and yet it wants all the lighthearted beats from Iron Man. This film on a meta level constantly switches in whether it takes itself seriously. Sometimes it doesn't AT ALL. Sometimes it does so really hardcore. That just doesn't work imo. It's too inconsistent for me to buy into what happens and enjoy it.

Ultimately that's very personal I guess. And I don't hate the film but I am really disappointed in how much I dislike the way it presents its material. Apart from the imo very flawed writing, which I would've forgiven had it just chose to make itself a little less goofy and yet also a little lass dramatic, so the ends meet. The highs and lows felt bizarrely dis-attached from each other and it felt like I was constantly zapping between two versions of the film.

Regarding the 'sowing and reaping', ye, it was Peter's fault to some degree, Harry flipped because he had no one left to turn to, Peter left him in the cold and Harry exacted vengeance for it because his state of mind became amplified. That does bare a degree of consequence of the way Peter dealt with Harry, who imo has a solid reason to go insane. It's not exactly a light thing to be confronted with your own mortality in such a cold way, to then lose anyone to help you and then go crazy over a drug that's you last chance. Obviously it's wrong, but it is imo about the most understandable position for villainy to come from. And Peter had a hand in putting him in that position, factually. So yeah, I did feel ambiguous about it. I may have said it a little too one-sided just now, but ambiguous is what I meant anyway.

I don't know if it's Webb who just can't juggle the balance or if it's Sony who disturbs it but this film just did not stick together on a directorial level imo.


It's just too much nuance for him to handle.

half tens grading (6.0,6.5 etc) is very normal and very easy. I grade all films I watch like that. But I'm used to that grading system for almost everything here including all my school results etc.

One thing we defiantly agree on is that Electro did not need to be tortured.... Take that out and you also get rid of the German scientist lol....

I tend to look at the fact that there just was not much for Spidey to do for Harry.... I think he would have liked to help and in fact said he would but time was not on his side.... Harry went odd the deep end... He wanted Spidey's blood and that was it. Peter did not see that as an option. He said he would try to find another way to help him but Harry then went for the quick fix with the spider Venom his assistant told him still existed.

I think the film had some heavy themes but because they were handled in a fantasy movie it took some of the impact off. I never once got the feeling that this was too much for my boys and I have very caring and loving children so it's not like I have to little serial Killers in training lol...

TDK has some very dark themes also but it is handled in such a serious way. Take the transformation of Electro and two face... You can't get much more different then how both of those were handled.

Anyways I won't argue and say that without a doubt that this is for kids... If it was just a kids film I think many of us "fans" of the film would not enjoy it as much. The only lighthearted tone I notice in the film is when Spidey is cracking jokes but that is part of his personality.

I would say that this film is just fine for kids who are 10 and up. Then it depends how your kids are with films after that. I have raised my boys to know the difference between fantasy and reality. We watch "making of" docs all the time. I made them watch Ray Harryhausen films before they ever watched Jurassic Park (I am proud to say that they like Ray Harryhausen and Godzilla more then the Jurassic Park films) I wanted them to appreciate what came before and how it all is done. It is easier to explain men in suits and stop motion then it is CGI so they have always understood F/X and things on screen not being real. So they are pretty well grounded. But like I said... I won't argue that this might be a bit too intense for children under 9 or 10..... Hence the PG-13 rating

 

[Uncanny Web-Slinger]

I haven't been keeping up with this thread but can anybody tell me what the **** was up with the after-credit scene?

That's really it's only intention? LOL I thought it was somehow a hint that they two franchises were coming together

Yeah that's why it's such a nasty move. Just shows ALL these studios care about is money.

Actually Webb was contracted to fox for a movie but they let him out of the contract to do ASM2, all they asked in return was that one clip from DOFP to be attatched.

 

[Khev]

I'm game!!! Lets throw Godzilla in there also.... So far this has been a great summer.... I love TWS and ASM2. Godzilla looks to continue the trend and XMen DOFP looks to entertain also. So much better then last summer.

Can I bring my kids?? Can't watch Godzilla without my boys


Thousands of miles be damned

I'd love to bring the kiddos, I've got a couple pretty close to yours in age (daughter 7 and son 4) but we've been careful with which superhero movies we let them watch. They can handle pretty much all the MCU films but ASM's Lizard *freaked* them out. So no Godzilla on the big screen. I'm planning on GotG being the first live-action film my son sees on the big screen. Who knows, if it's great it might get to be his "Star Wars."

 

[Silrian]

@JAWS Okay mate, just wanted to let you know I've read your post and I see your points. I don't entirely agree with all of it but there's not much more too it.

I can't shake my view that the dramatic lows were too low and the lighthearted peaks were too high for them to meet within the same film. And that just took me out of the entire experience.
From one end of the spectrum where Rhino and some other stuff is goofy as hell to the other end where there's intense human drama in all 4 main characters, I just can't mesh the styles in which those two things were handled – or better said I don't think the film fuses them, at all really. It's completely subjective in a way, and yet it's, to me, genuine criticism on this film, as I just don't think this 'bi-polar' approach is solid directing.

Which eventually comes down to nothing but taste in filmmaking.

 

[a-dev]

Regarding the 'sowing and reaping', ye, it was Peter's fault to some degree, Harry flipped because he had no one left to turn to, Peter left him in the cold and Harry exacted vengeance for it because his state of mind became amplified. That does bare a degree of consequence of the way Peter dealt with Harry, who imo has a solid reason to go insane. It's not exactly a light thing to be confronted with your own mortality in such a cold way, to then lose anyone to help you and then go crazy over a drug that's you last chance. Obviously it's wrong, but it is imo about the most understandable position for villainy to come from. And Peter had a hand in putting him in that position, factually. So yeah, I did feel ambiguous about it. I may have said it a little too one-sided just now, but ambiguous is what I meant anyway.

Absolutely agree. Maybe it was their intention but I thought that scene where Peter visits him AS Spiderman seemingly just to say ''I'm not giving you what you need'' was a bit of a kick in Harry's gonads and a bit questionable on Peter's part. Harry's reaction should hardly have been a shock to anyone.

At the same time though, and maybe someone addressed this and I've forgotten what they said, why did Harry's condition appear to be so much more accelerated than Norman's? Norman was a 50/60 year old man when he 'died' of this same condition.

 

[Khev]

Absolutely agree. Maybe it was their intention but I thought that scene where Peter visits him AS Spiderman seemingly just to say ''I'm not giving you what you need'' was a bit of a kick in Harry's gonads and a bit questionable on Peter's part.

Peter's friendship was already fractured with Harry when he said that he couldn't ask Spider-Man for the blood. Harry didn't buy it. So Peter had a choice. Giving him his blood was NOT an option. So he had to decide if it would be better for Harry to be pissed at Peter or pissed at Spider-Man. Peter decided that their actual friendship was of a greater worth and so he appeared as Spider-Man so Harry could vent his frustrations at an anonymous superhero and they could still be friends. Yes Harry was furious, but at SPIDER-MAN. That still theoretically gave him and Peter an opportunity to continue their friendship.

 

[Silrian]

That is a good point A-dev, they play up the 'it starts around your age' angle. I think Norman scares him a lot though, that scene was brutal. Doesn't he like say that the disease is a horrible slow death? Fear can make you do crazy things man.

Honestly, the film is fine for me with some great stuff up to Times Square. That's where it starts to break down. The whole thing unthreads itself really. The way spider-man... is... just doesn't gel with the characters they put in front of him. And vice-versa, obviously.

And that's kinda where my ambiguity comes from. Why doesn't spider-man try to visit electro for example? Why doesn't he go in to apologise for letting Max down? Or check up on Harry? I'll tell you why, because there was no time for it in this film. It needed to do too much for one film and ended up doing nothing truly solidly.

 

[a-dev]

Peter's friendship was already fractured with Harry when he said that he couldn't ask Spider-Man for the blood. Harry didn't buy it. So Peter had a choice. Giving him his blood was NOT an option. So he had to decide if it would be better for Harry to be pissed at Peter or pissed at Spider-Man. Peter decided that their actual friendship was of a greater worth and so he appeared as Spider-Man so Harry could vent his frustrations at an anonymous superhero and they could still be friends. Yes Harry was furious, but at SPIDER-MAN. That still theoretically gave him and Peter an opportunity to continue their friendship.

Hmmm, plausible enough I guess. It didn't work out too well of course.

 

[a-dev]

And that's kinda where my ambiguity comes from. Why doesn't spider-man try to visit electro for example? Why doesn't he go in to apologise for letting Max down? Or check up on Harry? I'll tell you why, because there was no time for it in this film. It needed to do too much for one film and ended up doing nothing truly solidly.

Same problem as Spiderman 3 basically. And many saw it coming when it became known how many villains they were putting in it.

And yeah I thought the situation with Max was recoverable if Spiderman had tried. He didn't, he seemed to give him no further thought in fact. Maybe that was deliberate and that was to be the reason why Electro suddenly wanted Spiderman dead but I'm not sure it's a good idea to make your hero the reason why your villains are villains. I dunno.

 

[Silrian]

Spider-man is the whole reason this entire world exists. They're clearly building a whole world based on one character and the way I see it after this film it's gonna come crashing down horribly painful.

They literally designed a macguffin that makes spider-man a hero and makes everyone else a bad guy who gets it. Boom done, that's every villains arc in a nutshell. They ran into Oscorp. Done. How did the Rhino get there? Spider-man stepped on his toes and he ran into Oscorp done. Electro? Same deal. Goblin? Same deal. Lizard? Guess what? He ran into Oscorp too.

Honestly... It's a really cheap commercial shared universe building to me.

And the worst thing is they've pre-established this same arc for the entire Sinister Six. Webb literally says it 'All of this is gonna come out of Oscorp." How is that interesting!?

They might as well call Oscorp Sony and call Spider-man Boxoffice-man.


Oh well, "I should go."

 

[JAWS]

And that's kinda where my ambiguity comes from. Why doesn't spider-man try to visit electro for example? Why doesn't he go in to apologise for letting Max down? Or check up on Harry? I'll tell you why, because there was no time for it in this film. It needed to do too much for one film and ended up doing nothing truly solidly.

So Spidey is just going to walk up and sign into the prison to meet Max??? If there was 3 hours to this film I would have hated seeing that. Spider-man while liked by the public and some police he is not Batman... Who gets a pass by the commissioner.

I did not think the Max story had to go any farther... It was told just fine in the time they had. Harry could have been built up more but that was about it. As is I thought he was fine.... Having said all of this... If I did not know the plans for the next Spider-man film then perhaps I would have been let down by how little the Goblin was in it. But it was fine for me overall.

 

[Jokes & Bats]

Same problem as Spiderman 3 basically. And many saw it coming when it became known how many villains they were putting in it.

And yeah I thought the situation with Max was recoverable if Spiderman had tried. He didn't, he seemed to give him no further thought in fact. Maybe that was deliberate and that was to be the reason why Electro suddenly wanted Spiderman dead but I'm not sure it's a good idea to make your hero the reason why your villains are villains. I dunno.

Yeah - villains can just be villains with their own agenda. They don't always have to hate / want to kill the hero.

 

[Silrian]

Part of the cool thing about being spider-man imo is that he is a spider: he can infiltrate a LOT of places. If the writers had wanted him in there, he'd have been in there.

How this film was written is blatantly not just about the characters or the story, it has meta-motives dealing with Sony wanting to compete with Marvel Studios.

 

[DarkAngel]

Yeah - villains can just be villains with their own agenda. They don't always have to hate / want to kill the hero.

 

[Khev]

I thought the way this film juggled multiple villains was well done. It really suggested that Spidey just deals with tons of crazies. There's so many in New York that he doesn't have time to take them all out to dinner and really take a deep dive into their psyche to see if he can steer them down a good path. He obviously had a system of fighting bad guys that worked but even the opening fight against Rhino suggested that he was starting to develop a little bit of a casual approach to fighting bad guys. But up until then it worked.

He tried to diffuse Electro (no pun intended) by doing his best to remember his name and talk him down but once tons of people almost got electrocuted he obviously decided that Max made his own bed and would have to lie in it. He's the superhero equivalent of a fireman. He puts out live fires. Once a "fire" (villain) is put down it's time to move on to the next one because that's what he does.

 

[Silrian]

^Except that the film ITSELF doesn't deal with it that casually. Had it done so in a consistent way, I would've at least enjoyed it more. Which is exactly why I don't think the film works. What you just mentioned is mostly how Iron Man deals with his **** and whether you like that style or not, they at least do it consistently – 'it' being playing fast and loose with your characters.

But you can't have spider-man go through tons of dramatic ****, try to establish villains that you care about in real grounded and dramatic way, approach them tonally with a heavy amount of weight, and yet whenever it's convenient to move the plot along, spider-man just rolls with it and suddenly it's a casual lighthearted superhero flick again.

That's having your cake and eating it too, writing-wise. This film should've chosen to be either Iron Man or The Dark Knight, either Avengers, or Man of Steel. You can't mix those two types of approaches to the material imo.

Yes there is a middle ground, in a way that the 90s TAS clicked for example, or Winter Soldier for example, which is really impressive in how it balances comedy and drama, both of them looking for this balance in a different spot, you gotta dial both tones back to a real balance that flows fluently and in which both tones 'respect' each other. That connect to each other. Instead we got Mr. Freeze (Rhino) in the same film as that kid from Chronicle (Harry). That's bizarre to me.

I'm sorry I don't buy into something that's that inconclusive in how it wants to approach the world it presents.

 

[Silrian]

If you mix Batman & Robin with The Dark Knight into one film, constantly switching, that's how this film felt to me.

Okay that's overstating it, but tonally it came close to both these films at times, to me.

 

[Silrian]

I'm being repetitive and I'm in here way longer than I meant to. I'll read the replies but I don't think I'll respond any further. I should really shut up about this film.