The one thing I expected when I ventured back in to the old world of Marvel films was an improvement in the special effects as the years clicked forwards. By 2007, the third and final of the first Spider-Man trilogy had arrived, hot on the heels of the first X-Men trilogy (which we come to in a bit).
Spider-Man 3 - If you read the first instalment you'll know I thought Spider-Man 2 was overlong, a little boring and needed more to happen in it. The third part was far too busy and dispensed with logic, yet again, to make a blockbuster film. There is actually a lot to like about this film, unfortunately there's considerably more about it to hate.
The plus points: special effects are much better. In the 7 years since the first film, Sam Raimi had changed the entire way the films looked, while keeping that same 'out of a comic book' feel. Thomas Haydn Church as the Sandman - what a cracking likeness, it was just a shame everything else about the character was wrong and how it was shoehorned into the story - needlessly - to try and circle the entire thing off. Having a jazz club seemed to be an odd idea that almost worked. There really isn't much else to be positive about.
Some negative points: Tobey Maguire stopped being a decent Spidey about 10 minutes into the first film. James Franco isn't a good actor and his bit part cameos felt like so many other elements of these films, of contractual obligation rather than strong narrative. I'm still not convinced why we had James Cromwell as Captain Stacy and then have him appear in about 45 seconds of scenes and have one line, nor Bryce Dallas Howard as Gwen Stacy when all she was was a plot device. The hip Parker montage thing - which actually lasts less than 3 minutes just feels much longer! Eddie Brock and Venom - not so much the idea as the execution and the fact Brock is portrayed as a spoiled arsehole, when he was never that. There were so many contrived elements of this film it was like they used the second film to test a few theories out and when they got away with them they loaded this one to the hilt.
Yet again very little made any sense; why would Sandman even consider teaming up with Venom; there is little or no motivation or sense in it, especially as Flint Marko (who becomes one of the best villain/anti heroes Marvel has ever created in the comics) had never met the symbiote prior to their best buddies act. It's just an awful bunch of ideas stitched together much like the second film and leaves me wondering if Sam Raimi is actually capable of making a proper half decent film, because this is a mawkish, bombastic load of tripe with a degree of silliness - much like pretty much every other film he's made.
In conclusion, while this film is awful, so are the other two in the grand scheme of things. Blaming all this film's woes on the bizarre 3 minute section where the Venom symbiote influences the distraught Parker is a cop-out because there's loads more to really dislike about this film.
[Digression #1: Before we get onto the next couple of films, I wanted to make a point about the most recent MCU film I've watched - The Eternals. If you read part one of this, I placed the throwaway line about the X-Men having already been attempted by the existing MCU in both the Inhumans and the most recent Eternals film. I think the reasoning behind that statement is that X continuity, which I used to be the oracle of, is akin to being more about how a database works rather than what's listed in said database. When you become obsessed with X-Men/mutant continuity, it stops being about quality and quickly becomes a bug hunt - a box ticking exercise. The Eternals had to cover so much in its 2½ hours and be entertaining you can be forgiven for thinking it was just a exotic PowerPoint explainer, and then realise that Eternals 'history' and 'story' is a fraction of the Mutant Story.
One of the things that Eternals suffered badly from was the little time the audience had to really get to know the characters, not in the way we have with single, solitary heroes. The only non-singular or team Marvel film other than the Avengers has been Guardians of the Galaxy and the cast of that were small and moulded well enough to get away with it. People could get a human, a green woman, a racoon, a tree and a stupid strong guy - there was enough there to totally get. But... the Eternals are just not iconic enough outside of the minds of certain nerdy Kirby fanatics and there are too many of them and the powers that most of them possess are variations of the powers that the X-Men will eventually have.
Also, when you compare 2022 Marvel films with earlier ones in the MCU, you have to wonder what's been going on in the minds of the people who design these films. Eternals is visually stunning in places, none more so than the scenes around the birth of a Celestial, but having just watched Thor: The Dark World for the third time all I can say is the word grandiose isn't quite as grand is it once was? The second Thor film, while not even as spectacular as Kenneth Branagh's opener, is quite brilliant in its scope and where the first Thor film didn't do a lot in terms of character development, the sequel does an outstanding job of fleshing out the characters we met a couple of years earlier. The Eternals special effects seemed similar to a clutch of recent superhero films, too much going on making you realise it is an effect rather than just cool. I also felt there was something a little wrong about it and like it should have been set much earlier in the MCU's history or possibly not even been made...]
X-Men 2 or X2: X-Men United - whatever you want to call it, it desperately needed to improve on the first film. Bearing in mind I have zero directing experience, barely know how to use a camera and am not particularly artistic, I now think I could have made X-Men better. It was always going to be interesting seeing if Bryan Singer could fix his own mess...
It certainly seemed that way; the opening 25 minutes is probably the best sequence in any X-film to date. Nightcrawler's special powers leant themselves to visuals and because there was a degree of vague familiarity it felt slightly fuller and more rounded. Everything that was slightly plastic and forced about the first film was missing from the second, but despite feeling more like a structured story it starts to fall apart a lot towards the end. The majority of the 'mutants displaying powers' scenes feel almost staged managed and there isn't the free-flowing visual composition of the fights or the choreography of them - watch an MCU film and the fight scenes have a balletic quality; nothing in either of the first two X-films feels structured; they're all individuals, they're not a team.
Oddly enough, I remembered a lot more about this film than I did about the first; probably because it's arguably the best film of the three even if that's really condemning the other X-Men films to an ignominious fate. However, the moment they arrive at Alkaline Lake in pursuit of William Stryker it descends into a jumbled up mess, with no real opposition to the X-Men apart from a slightly lame Yuriko and only towards Wolverine. I should also point out the dialogue is atrocious, unbelievable and so so melodramatic. There's also this injected subplot about Jean's powers growing exponentially stronger; apparently hinted at at the end of the first film; this is a deux ex machina ploy that I'd hoped most superhero films had dispensed with by 1990. It is also obviously setting up the third and final film, which was [looking like] an adaptation of the Dark Phoenix Saga from the comics; one of the most controversial Marvel comics series. I have that to 'look forward too' in the next couple of days.
If ever an X-Men film needed a proper antagonist it was this one, because at a fraction over 2 hours it ultimately had less interesting action sequences than the shorter first film. It is also clear there was never an awful lot of love for Cyclops or James Marsden by the film makers; his position as angular plot device and boring cypher continued. It's like no one can think of anything decent for him to do apart from unintentionally blow shit up. The same has to be said of Rogue; in the comics she's a pivotal super strong hero capable of flying whose power isn't just the ability to steal life forces from others; maybe the producers thought she'd be a bit too 'Supergirl'? The main thing I take from the first two X-Men films is how much of a wasted opportunity there was to do something different, but they opted for blockbuster and fell well short...
[Digression #2 - Why haven't I included the Fantastic Four films in this round-up? Good question and I suppose I have to wade in there and watch them - including the third film - and report back here with my findings. What about the first Hulk film? Nah, not fussed about watching that again for a while.]
Back to the next incarnation of everybody's favourite webslinger...
The Amazing Spider-Man - it's rare that the wife and I will sit and watch a film and literally not remember a single thing about it. I know we've seen it because I wrote a review of this film - and I wasn't particularly complementary about it. The review I wrote in 2012 essentially said, 'Okay film, but simply not my Spider-Man' and 10 years later I'm struggling to understand why I thought the film might possibly be okay.
This is reimagining Peter Parker in a totally different way and Andrew Garfield's take is more skater boy outcast rather than science nerd; in fact there's little to like about Garfield's Parker (and very little to like about Marc Webb's film) - he's not really like the character Tobey Maguire portrayed (in the first three films) and again they opted for an actor pretending to be much younger than he really is, meaning you already have a situation of slight disbelief from the offset.
I used the expression 'a curate's egg' on something else recently and it's an expression that seems to pop up in pairs; if you use it once then something else will come along to warrant the description. Everything from the slightly revamped Parker family set-up to the slightly risky origin scene and the Parker-as-an-outcast-rather-than-a-science-geek fit in nicely with the need to 21st Century-ise the franchise, but there was something else at play here, almost like the director wanted to remake Spider-Mans 1, 2 & 3 into a single film - in this case a bit of retro-continuity fiddling with the main antagonist's relationship with Spidey and similar themes from those first three films being... re-explored. At least Garfield's Spidey costume manages to stay relatively in one piece; Maguire was unmasked so often you started to wonder why he wasn't just known as the Amazing Peter...
My main problems with this film are the villain really is a bit shit and there isn't another one to balance things out. The other problem is, yet again, you don't really give a toss about Peter or his friends and this time his 'outcast' image means he doesn't even have geek mates, he's a proper loner. The film is also remarkably long for something that covers less ground than a one-man tent. The story is forgettable; it doesn't feel as though anyone is having a good time, the big sequences felt... insignificant (bear in mind this film was made four years into the MCU breathing new life into their superheroes). There's a good sequence where he uses his webs like a spider to track someone, but everything else about this film feels contrived, but we did have our first, brief, mid-credits scene.
Onwards and downwards...
X-Men: The Last Stand - seems to have a reputation that somehow it's much worse than the first two films. I think this is unfair - all the films are crap and in many ways this one is no more crappier than the others. With no Bryan Singer, the director's job fell at the feet of Brett Ratner who did the very sensible thing and killed off Cyclops really early on. I vaguely recall being somewhat aghast at this in 2006, over 15 years later and it feels like one of the calls they got right.
The problem with this X-Men film isn't how it looks; there's nothing too wrong with most of the SFX (well, apart from the 'flying' beast), or even the fact that like the first two films there seems to be a certain 'well, you know the characters so we won't bother telling you anything about them' attitude about the new or unusual. It's how they'd veered way off the course of the mutant comics by X2, by this finale of the trilogy the background story didn't even feel like it was remotely mutant; the entire raison d'être and ethos of the comic stories had disappeared. The later Fox X-films have limitless faults, but at least they sort of tried to adapt some of the greatest X-Men tales ever told, these old films show everyone how badly ideas can be adapted.
I actually thought the death of Cyclops was treated like some throwaway line - no dignity there - and Prof X's death was truly pointless and the way they changed characters' abilities and tinkered with the underlying 'mutant' story totally unnecessary - there's an unevenness about the way the three films sit together; almost like they're not quite in each others' universes. There's a distinct nastiness permeating in the film too; from Magneto's casual disregard for fallen friends to the way Rogue's character was treated. There's nothing nice about these films...
And that brings us to the final film in this clutch of old Marvel films. There are very few big superhero films I have never got around to watching, there are a couple of Batman films that I've never bothered with - the fourth film in the 90s franchise and the last of Bale's outings. I feel about as much affinity with Spider-Man as I do with Batman and that's one of the reasons we think we haven't seen the second Garfield film, that and the fact we didn't enjoy the first one.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 - Well... we'd never seen it. It was literally a brand new film for us. It is also arguably the best of the pre-MCU/Sony films. We enjoyed it, but that might have been because we'd never seen it. We also enjoyed it because it felt more like a proper Marvel film, it was like Marc Webb - the director - had watched the half dozen or so MCU films that existed at the time and thought, 'I need to be more Marvel!'
Everything about this film is more fluid and while the [whole] story ends up being a bit too circular and inevitable, the fact the film makers pushed the envelope a little makes me think the writing was already on the wall for this part of the franchise. I mean, it doesn't have a happy ending - as such - and an awful lot got tied up in the film even if it ended with the promise of more. It has its problems - Garfield was never a particularly likeable Parker, but the English actor did a far better New York accent than American Tobey Maguire. There was little or no real development between Peter and Harry Osborn despite the pair having known each other well until they were 10 and there was little to make you think that Peter would want anything to do with Harry now they're adults. Max Dillon - Electro - was terribly stereotyped and nerdy; his character walked straight from the pages of a comic whereas none of the other characters in this duology felt the same way. Plus, there are the usual gripes about crap dialogue and in this case almost too much of it. It felt like this film needed a lot of explainers.
The set pieces were excellent and while the revamping of Electro all felt a bit too PC/Not PC, his new look and use of powers was really well done; his demise seemed a wee bit too easy to be honest and the eventual fight to the finish with the new Green Goblin was over really before it started; it was like the action - again - came second to the human drama (of which there was little). And, of course, if Spider-Man was a loose adaptation of Amazing Fantasy #15 and The Amazing Spider-Man #122 (the origin of Spidey and the death of the original Green Goblin), then ASM2 does that weird thing of being a very very loose adaptation of The Amazing Spider-Man #121, regarded by many as one of the most iconic comics of all time. That comic featured the death of a major character for the very first time in a Marvel comic and caused ripples throughout comic books at the time; while the film handled it differently it had the same outcome and reason for that outcome.
The thing is this is a longish film that didn't feel long. It starts far too slowly and suffers from what all the previous four Spidey films suffered from, wasted opportunities, yet it was more enjoyable and felt more like the Spider-Man films we get now. There's things about it I didn't like, some rather contrived events, a couple of rather unbelievable scenarios and some oddly unexplained plot devices to aid the flow of the film, but none were that jarring as to detract from enjoying it. It also has an interesting ending, one that promised possibly the Sinister Six as the next antagonists - which would obviously finally get done this year and it will be interesting to see both Maguire and Garfield reprise their roles for Spider-Man: No Way Home, which, of course will be reviewed in a couple months, once I managed to find a decent rip.
Next time: The three Fantastic Four films and maybe the rest.
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