Showing posts with label Peter Parker. Show all posts
The Amazing Spider-Man - 2 – PG-13
The Story
“Make your life count for something,” says high-school valedictorian Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone). “No matter how bad it gets or how lost you feel, promise me you’ll hold on to hope.” Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield), arrives just in time to get his degree and have serious conversation with Gwen about their future together. He’s been dealing with a runaway 18-wheeler with Russian bad guy (Paul Giamatti) behind the wheel. That’s how it goes in “The Amazing Spider-Man – 2” (TASM2), fifth film in Spidey’s 12-year career on screen: bad guys (four, by my count) to battle and young-adult angst to sort out. Peter enjoys being Spider-Man, but his other life, as he says, “is complicated.”
Will Spider-Man defeat Electro (Jamie Foxx), Green Goblin (Dane DeHaan), Dr. Kafka (Marton Csokas), and Rhino (Paul Giamatti)? Can Gwen and Peter stay together? Does kindly Aunt May (Sally Field) ever discover Peter’s alter ego? For answers, see TASM2.
The Actors
Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone return as high-school sweethearts Peter Parker and Gwen Stacey. Peter, as Spider-Man, fights crime in NYC (“You know what I love about being Spider-Man? Everything!” he says). She, as fatherless Gwen Stacey, is smartest in her class. She knows Peter’s secret and, luckily, aced physics, remembering, just when she needs to, how to reset Manhattan’s electric grid. Sally Field returns as ever-patient Aunt May who wonders why Peter’s wash — when he does it — always turns red and blue.
Others in the cast include Jamie Foxx, Dane DeHaan, Marton Csokas and, unrecognizable, Paul Giamatti. They play, respectively, Electro, Oscorp industrial-accident creation, Harry Osborn, aka Green Goblin, Dr. Kafka, mad scientist, and Rhino, Russian mafioso in a one-man tank. Colm Feore plays duplicitous Donald Menken. Chris Cooper and Martin Sheen appear briefly as fathers of Harry and Peter. Stan Lee is a graduation guest.
Other Comments
TASM2 is comic-book action, conflicted super-hero and multiple bad-guys entertainment. Good news, if you’re a fan, but still diverting for the rest of us. Written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci from characters created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, it’s directed by Marc Webb who keeps the action going and its many plot lines more or less clear. Father-son themes prevail, especially Peter and Harry’s absent-father issues. Peter’s discovery of his father’s last testimony (“People will say I’m a monster for what I’ve done. Maybe they’re right,” his father says.) is one of the movie’s coolest scenes.
Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action and violence, TASM2 runs 144 minutes. Parts 3 and 4 are in the works for 2016 and 2018, so plan ahead.
Final Words
Reboot number two —
Good news if you’re a fan!
Peter, Gwen, four bad guys —
“Amazing Spider-Man”!
Source:
'The Amazing Spider-Man 2' Director And Producer Explain Why Shailene Woodley's Mary Jane Was Cut Out Of Film
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| Director Marc Webb (L) talked about his upcoming movie "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" after a short screening of the film. (Photo : REUTERS/Choi Dae-woong )
"The Amazing Spider-Man 2" director Marc Webb and producer Matt Tolmach recently revealed in an why they decided to cut out scenes with Mary Jane Watson, played by Shailene Woodley.
In the interview with the Los Angeles Times, Webb said that it was too hard to bring in a different love interest for Peter while Gwen was in the picture.
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"Shailene is a brilliant actress, and she did a great couple days of work. But it was very difficult to introduce someone as a competing love interest when so much is on the table with Peter and Gwen."
Tolmach also agreed with Webb and added that they would end up overdoing it by having scenes with Mary Jane.
"We bit off more than we can chew. We had a superhero opera, and as great as Shailene is, she didn't really co-exist with the bigger story we were telling. You can't have Peter thinking about Gwen every moment and then there's this girl next door who's suddenly there. We weren't ready for it."
After a screening of the first 30 minutes of "TASM2" a month ago, Webb talked to Superhero Hype about various aspects of the film.
Webb was first asked about the usage of classic "Spider-Man" elements like the newspaper, The Daily Bugle, which was used a lot in the film's marketing.
"Obviously, you're going to get a little hint of Norman Osborn in this film. The Daily Bugle is part of it. The big thing that I wanted to nail this time was the suit, you know? I wanted to return to the iconography that we knew from the comic books and the Daily Bugle is an emerging force to be reckoned with," Webb said. "That's one of the fun things about delving into a universe like this. You can take more time with these things. We really did think about this in a longer format. As far as things like the Daily Bugle and Norman Osborn's story, we were very selective about how to tease that out."
Webb was also questioned about Electro, the film's main antagonist, who wants to be needed by the rest of society.
"To understand Electro is to understand Max Dillon, as Jamie [Foxx] has said. Jamie's been a really great component of this and he was a great partner in trying to generate this in the movie. Max Dillon's character has been sort of ignored by the world, forgotten by people," he said. "He's an outcast, much in the way that Peter Parker is an outcast, and he chooses to react to that in a little bit different a way. There is a wonderful pathos that Jamie enables at the beginning of the film. You haven't seen that part yet, but you really feel for him. But there's also a psychosis. There's something mad about him and that eventually gets the better of him."
Another highlight of the interview was Webb explaining his decision to have Peter and Gwen graduate during the film.
"Listen, our actors are getting a little bit older. To play around with that for too long would get to be absurd. We’re also trying to find stations in life and important moments for them to emerge from. We did spend the whole first movie in high school. This is not that much further in their future. To be honest, there’s a thematic resonance with people moving on, with graduation, which felt really potent to us," he said. "The graduation speech was a way to introduce the universe and the themes of the movie in an interesting way and that just felt right. They were getting to that age and it’s about a gradual teasing of information. It felt appropriate to watch that important moment in their lives."
For other highlights check out the rest of the interview HERE.
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The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Swing low, sweet Spiderman
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| The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is in many ways a lavish and technically splendid production
The success of the superhero formula—both in comics and on film—rests on the utterly fantastic premise of the hero’s invincibility. Freakishly evil enemies may be plotting to undo them in diabolical ways, but it’s an immutable law of this genre that the hero, untainted by the faintest wisp of self-doubt, always triumphs. Tinker with that elemental simplicity, and you mess with the minds of our caped superheroes and show them up to be all too fallible. Like the rest of us lesser mortals, in fact.
In the latest edition of the Spider-Man franchise, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, director Marc Webb advances that cardinal error—so manifest in a few earlier outings too—and ‘humanises’ the masked do-gooder to the point where, for all his superhero swagger, he effectively stands de-iconised and perhaps in serious need of psychological counselling to redress his existential, schizoid, arachnid angst.
Worse, Webb overreaches himself and packs in way too many sub-plots and villainous characters, so that he becomes hopelessly ensnared in the elaborate web of his own narrative. The plotline, at its simplest, would have sustained sufficient interest. Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) relishes his Spider-Man call of duty, but it’s murder on his relationship with Gwen Stacy (an adorable Emma Stone). Added to which, he’s anxious to unearth the back story of why his parents abandoned him as a child.
These and other strands — including the re-entry into Parker’s life of old friend-turned-foe Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) and the advent of new ‘friend’ Max Dillon (a sub-par performance by Jamie Foxx) who, after an encounter with electric eels (I’ll say no more), metamorphoses into the villainous, ‘power-hungry’ Electro — bind Parker fatefully to Oscorp Industries, the evil corporate empire.
But Webb’s treatment of that plotline doesn’t quite have the tautness and tensile strength of, say, Spidey’s web. Perhaps some of this is born of the nature of the medium: whereas comic books lend themselves to episodic treatment where the narrative can (and does oftentimes) stretch for years, Webb has to condense them into two-hours-plus of non-stop action. But because he over-ambitiously appears to have gone all in, the appeal is less than spectacular.
Which is a pity, because The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is in many ways a lavish and technically splendid production. The CGI special effects are so stunningly real that when Spider-Man leans over a skyscraper ledge or swings through Manhattan, you feel vicariously vertiginous. And the scene in which Electro blacks out Times Square is masterful in milking its mayhem quotient. And although Webb occasionally takes permissible liberties with the plotline, he remains faithful to the comic book effect, right down to Spider-Man’s classical bug-eye contours.
But while there’s enough and more in the film to keep confirmed Spidey fanboys gushing with adoration, it is unlikely to net a new following.
In the final analysis, it may not be Spider-Man, torn though he is by searing internal conflicts, who needs counselling. It’s the franchise itself that needs to be put on the couch.
Genre: Superhero action
Director: Marc Webb
Cast: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Dane DeHaan, Sally Field
Storyline: Spider-Man battles the baddies, goes through more existential angst, and proves that even superheroes have limits
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