Great Disposability

By now there's really no point in discussing whether The Amazing Spider-Man was "necessary" or not; "necessary" has never been and will never be a core consideration of Hollywood studio execs, except insofar as it is necessary they continue to make huge piles of money from their property investments – and Spider-Man is nothing if not a lucrative property. There's no arguing against the fact that the new Spidey is redundant, of course, but if that were an unforgivable fault we should have to discard every major superhero tentpole film of the past decade not directed by Christopher Nolan. Let's not pretend, for instance, that CGI technology has not advanced in leaps and bounds since 2002, a time when even the most ardent accolades of Raimi's work were willing to admit that Spidey's visual incarnation rather more resembled a transplanted cartoon than a tangible character, particularly in the embarrassing street fight sequences.

That said, I come to bury The Amazing Spider-Man, not to praise it. Raimi's was and is the definitive version of the friendly neighborhood web-slinger, capturing every ounce of Lee and Kirby's larger-than-life sense of super-powered fun and "gee whiz!" comic pizazz. Certainly, it had it flaws, none the least of which was a perpetually torpid Tobey Maguire who could never quite make believable the transition from pitiable Parker to spectacular Spider-Man, but as a blockbuster based on a beloved American myth it was as complete a package as anyone could have asked for, fan or no, and the fact that at least one of its sequels was every bit as compelling an addition to the genre is of no small note by Hollywood standards of property decay.

The Amazing Spider-Man, on the other hand, is every bit as turgid as Spider-Man was frenetic, and as bloated in its own self-importance as its predecessor was lackadaisical. Of course, to compare the premier studio work of a novice independent film and music video director like Marc Webb (thrown here into an exceptionally cynical production even by Hollywood reckoning) with the loving craft of a B-movie veteran like Sam Raimi is to invite such contrasts, and I suppose we all knew from the first trailer exactly what we were getting here. TASM is a mess, plain and simple, a textbook example of exactly how not to successfully transcribe a comic to the silver screen, from its painfully familiar opening scenes of Peter's childhood and parental separation (especially now that aping Nolan's Batman saga has become the modus operandi for the genre) to its interminable origin sequences that insist upon gorging a solid half of the film's running time with heavy-handed character development for a character with whom everyone watching the film is already intimately familiar. Granted, Andrew Garfield is better and more rounded in the role than Tobey "walking-lopsided-grin" Maguire ever was, but even his nuanced work is so hampered by the insipid screenplay and shoddy editing as to render him ridiculous in moments that should have been poignant (the entire theater erupted in laughter at his reaction to a certain inevitable family death) and creepy when the camera was clearly going for cute (how many lingering shots of lecherous grins do we really need per love scene anyway?). Emma Stone fares a little better as a Gwen Stacy literally written for her talents, though at times her character seems shoehorned into the narrative by the demands of the inevitable saga-to-be.

After ten minutes of this, trust me when I say
 the "erotic medical treatment moment" is way more awkward than it sounds on paper.

In that regard, she's not the only victim. I've already used the adjective "bloated" to summarize the movie's major issues, and I can think of no better term to invoke again in comparing it to the disastrous third entry of Raimi's original trilogy. Criminally stupid dialogue aside, TASM's script is stuffed beyond capacity with sideplots within sideplots within sideplots, all packed between pell-mell introductory cuts of characters intended for recycling at a later date while largely ignoring the superhero aspect of what is, ostensibly anyway, a superhero film. Parker finally does don the darker-and-grittier suit, but only after a short eternity of tedium culminating in a so-bad-it's-hilarious moment of epiphany that, in ripping off both its predecessor and Batman Begins simultaneously, exemplifies exactly how much TASM is not either of those films and has no hope of being anything comparable. By then it's too little, too late anyway, and we are treated to but a few brief moments of costumed crime-fighting that manage to make a blazing car cliffhanger sequence tedious before being thrust into the showdown with Rhys Ifans's Dr. Connor/Lizard "homage" to both the Jekyll/Hyde story and Defoe's infinitely superior schizophrenic turn as the Green Goblin.

TASM feels like every second of its 136-minute running time, offering reprieve only in a few moments of satisfying arachnobatics and a glut of unintentionally humorous one-liners punctuated by some seriously dedicated mugging. I've already forgotten every note of James Horner's soundtrack (which I'd wager he probably has too), and I have nothing to say about the cinematography except that the team would have done better to have gone for broke with the camera work and filmed all the web-slinging scenes with tracking over-the-shoulder shots; it would have at least carried more of that Cloverfield-esque theme park appeal, because Lord knows TASM has nothing to say for itself as a film qua film.

About the only other thing I can say in its favor is that it avoids recycling Ben Parker's "With great power comes great responsibility" speech, instead substituting a remedial philosophy course summation of Kant's Categorical Imperative peppered with a heavy pinch of Peter Singer's ethics of duty, as peculiar an espousal of morality in a mainstream American movie as I can ever recall having heard. And even that manages to sound pretty insipid in context. The film ends with the now-compulsory mid-credit "bonus" sequence, and the questions this one raises are nowhere half so important as the one on everyone's mind right now: is The Amazing Spider-Man worse than Spider-Man 3? Apples and oranges, I tell you. Granted, a worm-ridden apple and an underripe orange, but at the end of the day I wouldn't recommend eating either unless you're on the brink of starvation. And even then you're likely to get sick off it.

Grade: C-

"Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?"

In the past few months I've partaken in several discussions on Ridley Scott's career decline and the possibility of redemption Prometheus represented – quite appropriately, metaphorically speaking – for his directorial reputation. Certainly all the elements seemed to be there: a return to a beloved universe of his own creation, a cast of some of the most brilliant actors working in film today, and a viral campaign to re-infect even the most immune of the old fan base. Tragically, the whole amounts to significantly less than the sum of its parts, and I would rather spend an eternity chained to a cliff whilst eagles daily devour my liver than sit through his bloated wreck of a might-have-been-masterpiece again.

Obviously I hyperbolize, but it's no more than this self-proclaimed titan of a film deserves. The true tragedy is the amount of potential evident in every mishandled moment; beyond the aforementioned elements of promise, there is enough quality footage on display that any half-decent creative team could have made something twice as coherent, three times as watchable, and – most importantly – half as long. Because, sweet Jesus, does Prometheus feel long despite its modest 124 minute running time, the pain of which could have been greatly alleviated by removal of virtually all expository scenes. As it stands, the Prometheus now playing in cinemas should never have left the editing room floor, and frankly I'm not sure whether to blame editor Pietro Scalia, Scott himself, or the two of them in unholy collusion. 

But getting back to those expository scenes, they are some of the most intellectually insulting I've ever been subjected to in scifi, and god is that saying something. Not only do they fail in forty five minutes to convey any more useful information than even the most maladroit member of the viewing public could have gleaned in four minutes from any of the already overlong film trailers, but they stumble about that redundant task in the most ham-fistedly reprobate manner possible. Somewhere between 1979 and 2012, Scott apparently converted from a position of cautiously skeptical humanism in the face of a dark and overwhelming cosmos to, of all things, a blatant evangelism for vague Mulderian religiosity and, believe it or not, Intelligent Design. Yes, you heard right, folks: the man who brought us the most abject realism in scifi horror history with a creature terrifying precisely for its unmatched evolutionary sexual adaptability has now released a two-hour polemic on the Search for the Great Questions of Life That Everyone Must Secretly Want to Ask Our Creator(s). Not that the ID crowd is likely to be pleased to see the Answer portrayed as something as insipid as "humanity originated as a result of failed bioweapon experimentation by a race of giant blue...humans (but bald!)" and now look, I've gone and spoiled something revealed in the first two minutes of the film yet that we are supposed to regard as mysterious for the ensuing 122 minutes of "revelatory" exploration. 

The screenplay is as every bit as stupid as its it seems to think its audience is, and god bless the cast for trying so damn hard to make the most out of every. awful. line. they are expected to choke out with a straight face and good conscience. Fassbender as the Symbolically Named android David steals the show with his O'Toole-inspired performance, and Noomi Rapace does an admirable job trying to fulfill the ersatz-Ripley expectations saddled upon her by the miserable script, but neither they nor anyone else are up to the task of saving a ship as lost as Prometheus' direction. Charlize Theron is uncharacteristically awkward in her ordinarily apt role as the resident ice queen, no doubt struggling to find the slightest element of believability in her character's forced Elektra complexes. And I won't even bother to guess what Scott was thinking when he put Guy Pierce in the least-convincing old man suit this side of a theatre freshman makeup class.

But I digress. Unlike Avatar, a big dumb summer blockbuster that also took itself far too seriously yet still managed to entertain, Prometheus cannot fall back on gorgeous CGI spectacle or breathtaking world-building to carry the day. The planet – or moon? – in question is grey, cratered, and, like the too-shiny CG creatures eventually on display, nowhere near as tactile or convincing as its iteration in Alien. Gone is the iconic used-future aesthetic of the Nostromo, replaced by a generic Trekkian interior (think DS9) complete with requisite holodeck and cocktail bar, made frightening only for a few brief seconds of invasion in the final moments of the film's meandering. As for the alien temple/ship whose cavernous corridors never even come into play, there is little to be said of its over-lit passages save that they hold not even a candle's flame to the perturbing otherness of their predecessor. It hardly helps that the camera crew seems to have nothing more interesting to do than to sit back and stare through static, IMAX-friendly frames with all the visual ingenuity of a C-SPAN recording.   

Surely, one might ask, Prometheus could still in some way be worthy of its horror legacy if it were at least horrifying, even a little? No such luck, my friends. Prometheus is about as scary as a Scientology lecture and only half as well plotted. Where Alien was all slowly-mounting tension climaxed with psychosexual revulsion and sheer nightmare survival instinct, Prometheus is an exercise in the worst kind of Syfy Channel tedium, lacking even in the cheap "gotchas!" that give those campy creature flicks some reason to exist. Even the inevitable appearance of the xenomorph itself is a total letdown, forced as it is by some misguided attempt at continuity-bridging that, with a stinging slap to the face of every fan, still somehow manages to break continuity in the most egregious way imaginable. As with all else in this wreck I blame Scott's ever-mounting incompetence with age. Harsh, perhaps, but if his growing slew of less-than-palatable mass-market garbage over the past decade is not enough to make everyone wonder whether he isn't completely out of creative ideas, then I don't know what is. How many more Hannibals will it take before we stop letting him near beloved thriller franchises? Prometheus, sad to say, deserves not even that sequel's sad legacy.

Grade: D+ for fans, C for general audiences.