New
leads, new director... in that situation it makes sense to look back
to the source. That's pretty much what happened in the comics all the
time.
But
does that really warrant a fomalised reboot?
Of
course not! The whole retelling of the origin is completely
redundant. Anybody in the audience will either know all that already
or not be bothered. With every Tarzan film, did they keep going back
to his origin? James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, both have had reams of
films made about them over the years. Did either of them even
have an origin? Did anyone ask for one? Did anyone
look at Holmes and say “but how did he get the
deerstalker and the enquiring mind?” And not “okay, master
detective, enquiring Victorian mind, let's go.”
But
you're probably better off just going with it. They do come up with a
new take, with Peter finding out about his father now made the motor
of everything. (Okay, new to Spider-Man, if a direct steal from Harry
Potter.) The great weighting weakness of the first trilogy was their
insistence each new adversary had to be tied into Uncle Ben's
killings, with increasingly absurd and convoluted results. (Maybe the
Sandman did him in, with a gun lent by the Green Goblin, but under
the orders of Doctor Octopus, based on an original idea by Kraven the
Hunter... no, no, NO!) Here the killer is exactly who he
should be, a no-hope nobody who holds up
dimestores. The whole Daily Bugle strand is also unceremonially cut
out, and you find you don't miss it at all.
If
you're after a proper review you could do worse than check
out Roger Ebert, who correctly calls it - better than the
initial instalment of the first series, not as good as the second.
Which may be partly because they can use the first films as trial
runs. If, for example, their predecessors got into awkward fixes with
the all-over mask and audience identification, they can find good
reasons for him to remove it. (Well, most of the time.)
But
the scene where they show they actually get
Spider-Man is the one in the basketball court. Superheroes, a genre
all about wish fulfilment, right? Where you can suddenly get
super-strong, act cool and out-bully the bullies? Except Spider-Man
is all about a world where that doesn't work, where solving problems
are not as linear or straightforward as throwing a punch. What if you
got those coveted super-powers, and they just made the whole thing
worse?
And
while I'm no fan of romcoms, getting a director like Marc Webb in
shows nous. Spider-Man is a teenage romance story which ups the ante
on intruding teachers and interfering parents by bringing in raging
super-villains, the teenage romance is still very much at it's heart.
Even
the part of the film which doesn't quite work, the
villain, still feels like a stab in the right direcion. Fittingly,
the Lizard's bad deeds all stem from good intentions. But his
character's simultaneously too undeveloped and, in it's schizo
duality, too similar to what's already been done with the Green
Goblin.
But
then, right at the end, it has to bring in that
line. Where the English teacher all-so-metafictionally tells us
“we're told there's only ten stories in the world. But there's
really only one. Who am I?”
And
this is supposed to be an English teacher saying
this? An English teacher who has either never heard of 'Jason
and the Argonauts', 'Hound of the Baskervilles', 'Animal Farm', 'The
Maltese Falcon' and so many others, or who imagines they
can be reduced to that small-minded schema!
But of
course it's not an English teacher. It's a Hollywood scriptwriter,
fresh from reading all
that noxious New Agey Christian Vogler claptrap. Dude, it's
you who only knows one story! And just like you
confuse the world with yourself, you're taking your myopia for
insight.
And
that's why superheroes now have to be constantly
bound and re-bound to their origin stories. Because the world is now
just some backdrop, some adventure game scenario for you to carry out
your own personal ego mission. Because the idea of doing public good
can only be made sense of if filtered through the prism of some
self-discovering crusade.
It's
the most telling line from any of the modern superhero films. In some
ways its even appropriate that it comes from one of the better takes,
because that marks all-the-clearer that this is the point they all
reduce to.
Who
are you?
I'm
afraid I can't answer that question in polite company.
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