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.

Blu-rays We Love: Spider-Man (2002)

Last time we took a look at the excellent DVD for Rush Hour 2. Now we move on to the Blu-ray re-release of Spider-Man, a film we reviewed in the formative years of Code Redd Net, which at the time I boldly described as" the greatest super-hero movie I have ever had the privilege of seeing." Chicken Man said the film was "a totally rad experience if your sitting in the front row." Perhaps the movie doesn't hold up as well as  you might hope, but it's still fun to watch 11 years later, and there's plenty of bonus features on the disc to make it a worthwhile addition to your Blu-library.

The most obviously dated element in Spider-Man is CGI Spider-Man. It's not totally embarrassing or campy, at least not yet, but technological advancements in the technique have clearly come a long way since then. The blend of live-action and CGI is not terribly smooth when it comes to human imaging. For instance, the early scenes of Peter Parker's transformation into Spider-Man are particularly jarring in their transition from actor to computer avatar. Nevertheless, it's not too distracting. What I enjoyed about most about Spider-Man on this most recent viewing was its tone: a fine blend of humor and seriousness, in about equal measure. Unlike the recent Amazing Spider-Man, which unwisely hit fast-forward on the origin story, Spider-Man prolongs the first appearance of its properly-costumed crime fighter until just prior to the start of its second hour. When Amazing Spider-Man went straight to the crib sheet, it lost the emotional backbone of the story, what makes Peter Parker's personal tragedy so significant. Spider-Man does a fantastic job of  inviting sympathy for the awkward teenager, played with appropriate dorkiness by the inherently dorky Tobey Maguire. While Maguire does an admirable job in his dual role, it's the rest of the cast that really stands out. Particularly noteworthy is Willem Dafoe's turn as Norman Osbourne/Green Goblin, a role which gives the actor ample opportunity to pull faces. Even James Franco is pretty good as his spoiled son, Harry. Spider-Man may not have aged gracefully, but it's still a completely solid film that remains enjoyable on a second or third or even fourth viewing, which is why you buy something like this on Blu-ray, right?

Tobey Maguire as Spider-Lee

In terms of the Blu-ray disc, you get all of the bonus features from the initial DVD version, and there were plenty of those, plus some new things to go along with it: namely, a "Spider Sense Trivia Challenge" and the "Spider-Man Cutting Room Floor" feature, both of which add tremendous value to the disc. Most significantly, the Trivia Challenge is a game played over the film in which you must answer a series of multiple-choice questions. These questions range from plot details ("How much was the reward for lasting three minutes in the ring with Bonesaw McGraw?"), to production history, to questions regarding Spider-Man's comic book history. It's hit or miss with most of these questions, as they appear in a seemingly random order not at all tied to the plot of the film. Because the questions appear to be in a random sequence each time the trivia game is activated, I was often asked questions about plot details that had yet to be revealed (fortunately, they are not significant enough plot points to be considered spoilers). Also, since the questions are timed to appear every minute or so, they often appear over very exciting visual sequences. While this is not too much of a problem if you've seen the film before, it would've been nice if the questions were more plentiful during the film's more expository, and less spectacular, scenes and didn't distract me from a fight scene. Still, though, there's enough questions about the tensile strength of spider webs, for instance, to keep your interest while watching the film. The game keeps track of your score based on the number of correct answers and the amount of time elapsed in answering them, and rewards you with a ranking at the end of the film. I was given the rank of "Superhero-in-Training" and treated to a 15-second montage from the film of Spider-Man swinging around the city in his hokey wrestling outfit. Not much of a reward, but it's nice to be ranked based on your performance. Even though the questions do get repetitious at times, I think this is a decent first effort at integrating elements of Scene-It into a single film, something that I believe could immensely enjoyable when fully implemented.

There's also a "Cutting Room Floor" feature which allows you to clip segments of the film and re-edit them into a short sequence with new music and sound effects. I was able to splice together Spider-Man's cage match with Macho Man Randy Savage with scenes of Peter Parker crying in his room, punctuated by comical sound effects and a somber musical score. It's a lot of fun, even though the interface for cutting the scenes can be cumbersome, and making changes later in the process can be quite difficult. This is definitely a feature I would love to see on future releases of Jackie Chan or Jet Li films, for instance, so that I could cut together all the fight scenes into one montage, but it works well for Spider-Man.

Finally, as indicated above, the Blu-ray includes all the bonus features from the original Special Edition DVD release in 2002. Of the three commentary tracks, only the one featuring the VFX crew is of any interest: director Sam Raimi does too much narrating and too much talking about himself on his track, while Tobey Maguire and J.K. Simmons' track gets awfully quiet for long stretches of the film. HBO's making-of featurette and E! Entertainment's "Spider-Mania" are typical Hollywood puffery, though the "Spider-Man: Mythology of the 21st Century" piece is a nice and thorough historical look at the character's cinematic development. Besides these longer extras, there's also an archival selection of theatrical trailers, TV spots, webisodes, screen tests, cast and crew profiles, and an outtake reel. All in all, it's a swell package that's worth picking up if you, like me, somehow lost your old DVD copy of the movie.

Spidey Varial

Said it before, but I'll say it again: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is the best PS1 game. There's so many reasons why, and I could list them all day, but one of the more novel features is the playable Spider-Man character, long before Amazing Spider-Man refashioned the superhero into a hipster poser photographer/skateboarder.

Looking a bit husky there, Spidey.

You can unlock the webhead in THPS2 by beating up on Career mode with your created skater. When that's all done, you're treated to this spectacular footage:

PS3 Review: The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

Remember all those hideous Spider-Man sidescrollers for the NES, SNES and Genesis? Except for Maximum Carnage, maybe (it was a decent beat-'em-up, though it was also helluva tough), it's clear that Spider-Man was a superhero property perfectly suited for polygonal gaming. Spider-Man for PS1 was the first one to truly get it, and as I've argued elsewhere, Spider-Man 2 for PS2 was the end-all be-all. The Amazing Spider-Man for PS3 is the first game in a while to return the series to the free roaming format that made Spider-Man 2 so delightful, and it more or less works here too. It's not perfect, nor is it as dynamic as its predecessor, but it's still a fine rental/used purchase for both casual and hardcore webheads.

Despite being based on the subpar film of the same name, Amazing wisely opens up a few days after the film's climatic battle. This time Spider-Man has to break the Curt Conners/the Lizard out of his jail cell in order to find an antidote to a rapidly spreading disease caused by Conners' experiments. In doing so, Spider-Man crosses paths with Alistair Smythe, sans mullet because the 90s are over*, and bitter because one version of Conners' antidote accidentally cripples him. Spider-Man has to run about the city, completing various tasks and fetching certain items so that Conners can concoct his antidote. Between missions, you are relatively free to dart about the city, web-swinging, fighting petty crimes, taking photos, and so on (alas, there's no rescuing balloons for children nor can you bounce at the disco anymore as you could in Spider-Man 2). For the most part, the story told here is engaging and pretty to look at, and for me this game is a much more entertaining product overall than its film counterpart. However, there is a major issue with the opening: things start out with an extended cinematic, from the first-person view of Peter Parker, but it goes on forever. I had time to do the dishes while it was going on. This is not much of an issue later on in the game, but it's a dreary opening if you're looking to pop the game for a reasonably timely thrill. I did, however, enjoy the in-game use of Spidey's blackberry to tell the story, a device which keeps you informed of the story while you dash around town punking out muggers and carjackers. Similarly, a version of Twitter pops up onscreen whenever loading the next mission, and the fake tweets of your fellow NYC denizens follow the main story. It's a cute device that adds another layer to the narrative.

* and not just any mullet, a green mullet, my goodness

The key to Spider-Man 2's success was not the free roam structure itself, but the ways in which you could move within that open city via webswinging. Whereas before swinging between buildings only required the push of a button, SM2 required a strategic understanding of the environment: in other words, your webs had to be attached to something in order to work. As a result, swinging through the city felt dynamic and required a certain degree of mastery. Unfortunately, Amazing does not emulate this and instead returns to a somewhat detached method of moving Spider-Man through the city. Though there is some concern placed on your surroundings (for instance, generally speaking you cannot immediately webswing without a building nearby, but this is only the case when falling from significant heights), webswinging nevertheless loses some of its novelty and can become tedious after a while. Still, though, the webswinging and combat animations are fantastic, much better than those in SM2, and the same goes for the voice-over work, which is actually quite excellent. Speaking of combat, Amazing manages to almost completely imitate Arkham Asylum/City when forcing you into rooms rife with thugs and mutants: right down to the abundance of ventilation ducks and stealth takedowns. This works fine except for the fact that the AI is clueless and unchallenging, even though taking them down with Spider-Man's arsenal of web-and-wrestling based slams is pretty fun.

Amazing suffers from the same problem that kept SM2 from true greatness: once the main conflict is wrapped-up, there's not a whole lot of interesting things to do. Well, there's a whole lot to do, but so little of it is actually worth doing. You can collect comic books from rooftops, which has the added bonus of unlocking full-length digital comics, and you can snap photographs for a local news reporter (but not for the vaunted Daily Bugle?), and you can always go back to busting lowly thieves on the beat, but so what? After you get done tangling with skyscraper robots, catching purse-snatchers makes for some really boring legwork. Nonetheless, I'm willing to endorse this game for a week rental or purchase at your local used games emporium. If you're looking for a free-roaming Spider-Man fix, Amazing should be enough.

The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises

In lieu of more formal reviews of these two summer blockbusters, Thrasher and Chicken Man got together for a little podcast to discuss the past and present movie versions of Batman and Spider-Man.

Podcast Powered By Podbean