![]() Watching Raimi and his writers cut between the story threads, I savored classical workmanship: The film gives full weight to all of its elements, keeps them alive, is constructed with such skill that we care all the way through. The special-effects triumph in the film is the work on Doc Ock's four robotic tentacles, which move with an uncanny life, reacting and responding, doing double takes, becoming characters on their own. This time, as he swings from one skyscraper to another, he has more weight and dimension, and Raimi is able to seamlessly match the CGI and the human actors. In the first movie I thought Spider-Man seemed to move with all the realism of a character in a cartoon. There are special effects, and then there are special effects. And he has to deal with his friend Harry Osborn ( James Franco), who likes Peter but hates Spider-Man, blaming him for the death of his father (a k a the Green Goblin, although much is unknown to the son). ![]() Peter has heart-to-hearts with her and with Aunt May ( Rosemary Harris), who is given full screen time and not reduced to an obligatory cameo. She has finally given up on Peter, who is always standing her up she announces her engagement to no less than an astronaut. Peter Parker, meanwhile, has vowed that he cannot allow himself to love Mary Jane, because her life would be in danger from Spider-Man's enemies. We hear him coming, hammering his way toward us like the drums of hell. ![]() ![]() To handle the dangerous materials of his experiments, Octavius devises four powerful tentacles that are fused to his spine and have a cyber-intelligence of their own a chip at the top of his spine prevents them from overriding his orders, but when the chip is destroyed, the gentle scientist is transformed into Doc Ock, a fearsome fusion of man and machine, who can climb skyscraper walls by driving his tentacles through concrete and bricks. Otto Octavius ( Alfred Molina), whose laboratory on the banks of the East River houses an experiment that will either prove that fusion can work as a cheap source of energy, or vaporize Manhattan. "Spider-Man 2" gives Spider-Man an enemy with a good nature that is overcome by evil. The seasons in a superhero's life are charted by the villains he faces (it is the same with James Bond). His inspired 2000 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay chronicles the birth of a 1940s comic book superhero and the young men who created him he worked on the screen story that fed into Alvin Sargent's screenplay. One of the keys to the movie's success must be the contribution of novelist Michael Chabon to the screenplay Chabon understands in his bones what comic books are, and why. Sam Raimi, the director of both pictures, this time seems to know exactly what he should do, and never steps wrong in a film that effortlessly combines special effects and a human story, keeping its parallel plots alive and moving. I was disappointed by the original " Spider-Man" (2002), and surprised to find this film working from the first frame. When a bum tries to sell the discarded Spidey suit to Jonah Jameson, editor of the Daily Bugle, Jameson offers him $50. He's on the edge of a breakdown: He's lost his job as a pizza deliveryman, Aunt May faces foreclosure on her mortgage, he's missing classes, the colors run together when he washes his Spider-Man suit at the Laundromat, and after his web-spinning ability inexplicably seems to fade, he throws away his beloved uniform in despair. Parker ( Tobey Maguire) is in college now, studying physics at Columbia, more helplessly in love than ever with Mary Jane Watson ( Kirsten Dunst). It wasn't that Spider-Man could swing from skyscrapers that won over his readers it was that he fretted about personal problems in the thought balloons above his Spidey face mask. Peter Parker was an insecure high school student, in grade trouble, inarticulate in love, unready to assume the responsibilities that came with his unexpected superpowers. It succeeds by being true to the insight that allowed Marvel Comics to upturn decades of comic-book tradition: Readers could identify more completely with heroes like themselves than with remote godlike paragons. "Spider-Man 2" is the best superhero movie since the modern genre was launched with " Superman" (1978).
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