Marvel Double Feature: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

We never reviewed The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), but I thought that the video game was much better than the movie. In my mind, this is a franchise that was unnecessarily rebooted, and as a result that first film was meandering, uneventful, and tonally schizo. However, now that the origin story has been established once again, hopefully this series will settle for spectacle rather than hammy drama. Amazing 2 is a much better film than its predecessor. I suppose it makes somewhat less sense than the first one, and dramatically it's flawed; there's way too many villains in this one, and as a result the film struggles with developing the characters of both Electro and Green Goblin. It's never particularly clear, convincing, or believable why either bad guy wants Spider-Man dead, or why they're working together, or why anything is happening. Peter Parker and his girlfriend Gwen are the only characters given any room to breathe between the special effects. They're the only ones who need it, actually. Their relationship provides just enough of that emotional stuff to make the skyscraper battles and so on meaningful. And without the origin story in the way, Amazing 2 has time for some otherwise meaningless set pieces, meaningless in the sense that they lack pretensions to anything other than visual novelty. Put another way, this is a solid action film that doesn't try to be anything else. Its too long, and there's too many characters in it, but it delivers just the same.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

This one doesn't, however. I like the X-Men series, mostly because the concept is at least kinda relevant socially and politically (also because the mutants' powers are neat), but Days is one of the series' weakest films. It has moments, but like many blockbusters it's neither fish nor fowl, neither action nor drama, but some unwieldy and weak thing in between. Days suffers from a great generic compromise. The action sequences, particularly those at the beginning and end of the film, really work; unfortunately, it's the dramatic stuff in the middle that really doesn't. Outside of Wolverine and maybe Professor X, I had no real inclination to care about these people. That would be fine if the film was all spectacle and no character, but there's too much half-hearted, emotionally empty drama, and it stretches out the film to a painfully long runtime. In other words, most of Days is boring. It gives too much screen time to boring, uninteresting, and unimportant characters. I suspect this is a fundamental problem with the X-Men franchise, as the numerous characters require a great deal of balancing and prioritization in order to build interest in them. A few X-Men films have successfully found this balance, but Days isn't one. The promise of the opening sequence is lost on the rest of it. This film could be a decent 90 minute action film, but the melodrama drags things on unnecessarily for an additional 40 minutes. Could be worse, I suppose, but I recommend The Wolverine (2013) instead.

Game Industry Becomes More Fascist

I thought this was a pretty interesting video about how various state governments around the country have provided subsidies to video game companies. From the economist's perspective, these subsidies would result in games being made that would not have been created without the subsidy, most likely of lower quality. But I wonder which game companies are receiving the bulk of the subsidies: large companies, indie companies, or are they spread around more evenly? (I think to ask the question is to answer it.) I've long been disappointed, perhaps until recently, in the state of gaming, where it seems that most of what is produced plays things safe, following the successes of first-person shooters, GTA open-world type games, etc. But other developments that have made game making more democratic give me hope. (You can see Indie Game: The Movie on Netflix for a taste of this, though it's a rather boring documentary).

Honestly, I don't think subsidies have or will result in a better gaming industry, but will simply send more money to the largest game companies. Indeed, it may even result in worse games since companies will receive money, not from pleasing gamers by creating wonderful games, but from their ability to lobby governments to extract wealth from taxpayers. It might be the case that game companies will be able to make a higher return on their money by paying for lobbyists than they would investing in new technology or more employees to make games better. Economically, this activity is called rent-seeking and is a dead weight loss to the economy. Gaming-wise, this may result in shoddier games from the subsidized companies. Hopefully developments like Steam and other outlets will remedy this, but the ultimate remedy would be getting rid of the subsidies entirely.

#StopCronyGaming