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.

PS1 Review: Spider-Man (2000)

Here's another entry in our unofficial"Classic Games We Never Got Around to Reviewing" series. You may recall earlier parts of the series, including reviews of TimeSplitters 2 and NBA Street Vol. 2, two classics we never reviewed because we were lazy teenagers. But Thrasher is back at it again, taking a look at Spider-Man for PS1.

The 2D era was not kind to the wall-crawler, and at the time it probably couldn't be otherwise. To me, Spider-Man for the PS1 proved that the franchise belonged in all three polygonal, blocky dimensions. There's many commendable elements at work in this one, but first and foremost is the presentation. Though the story is a kind of comic book "greatest hits", structured as more or less a slew of cameos from villains and heroes of the Marvel Universe, it's culled together nicely as a narrative, in fact quite similar to the ways in which the recent Arkham Asylum and Arkham City have managed their respective rogues galleries. In Spider-Man, Peter Parker witnesses an impostor Spider-Man stealing one of Doc Ock's experiments: not only is Spidey framed for the theft and hunted by the police, but he must also fend off the challenges of villains such as Venom, Rhino, Scorpion, Mysterio and Carnage. It's a somewhat episodic approach that keeps the game from becoming repetitive. However, what's really worth recommending here is the superb voice-over work, particularly the voices for Spider-Man, Venom and J. Jonah Jameson. The writing is strong as well, effectively capturing the comic book's balance between humor and seriousness.

Faithful also is the translation of Spidey's powers from comic panel to Dual Shock. Playstation web-swinging was in its very infancy here, only to find a kind of perfection a few years later in Spider-Man 2 for the PS2, but the foundation built with this this game is a solid one. Unfortunately, it's not as tight as it could be: though you can manually aim when swinging from building to building, too often your web-shooters will be unresponsive when leaping out impulsively. Same goes for wall-crawling, as the controls occasionally go a bit haywire when changing direction, particularly on ceilings. Part of the problem is unquestionably the camera angles chosen by the game. You have limited control over what you see around Spider-Man, which can compromise your ability to engage in combat by obscuring your enemies with obtrusive angles. In terms of controls, Spider-Man is clearly a first try as there's quite a few kinks and glitches to work around, but there's also more than enough novelty here to keep things amusing. Also, the game is a bit short, but I suspect that's almost always the case when a game is this much fun to play. There's a shocking amount of replay value on this disc too, provided you don't just enter in the cheat codes:  vintage comic book covers collected throughout the game, unlockable costumes (each with unique abilities and enhancements), training simulators and a "What If?" mode that makes playing through the game a second time highly entertaining. Nowadays it may seem a bit crude and basic in comparison with current generation superheroes like Arkham City, or even in comparison with later games in the Spider-Man franchise, but Spider-Man for the PS1 is still a fantastic game in its own right, well worth taking out for another spin on your backwards-compatible PS3.