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jere7mySpider-Man 2 opens with a recap of the first film—via a series of still images, illustrated beautifully by Alex Ross. This helps the audience bridge the credibility gap into the comic-book universe. Once we're there, Sam Raimi treats us with respect, asking us in return to pretend we're reading a comic and set aside our jadedness for a couple of hours. If you can, you'll have a good time.
Alfred Molina is a perfect Doc Ock, playing up the man/machine duality, and J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson continues to be my favorite part of the franchise. James Franco's Harry Osborne was the only character that seemed out of place, following a plot line that only tangentially impinged on the audience's awareness, but by the end I realized how skillfully they'd positioned his character, so I stopped complaining. Kirsten Dunst's nipples are again featured players, though the operative factor this time is thinness rather than wetness.
Spidey himself is well-treated here. Once you get past the fact that the central moral dilemma is, basically, "Being a super-hero doesn't leave me a lot of free time," Tobey Maguire's more confident Spidey is a lot of fun to ride along with. (And a lot of fun to ogle, K. would be sure to mention. She had some Tobey-crushing going on.) The wisecracks start to appear, and we get to see some of the reason for them: it's fun being Spider-Man, especially when it's a vacation from mundane woes. Peter Parker gets to be exuberant when he puts the suit on.
The movie drags a bit during the eight or nine hundred Meaningful Speeches that are required, by law, to re-state the theme of the film, from Aunt May and Mary Jane and Peter and Dr. Octavius...etc., etc. The seething, undifferentiated wad of teenage hormones that filled our theater grew restless during the speeches, and again during the weird Christ imagery. And while the effects are generally better than the first film's, the first and the last big F/X shots were just awful, which...well, it would have been better to have the bad ones somewhere in the middle, is all. I was very impressed with Doc Ock's creepy, heavy, semi-autonomous extra arms, and their contrast with Spidey's hyperkinetic acrobatics and web-slinging; both characters remained clear and distinct, even during the most frenetic fights.
It's certainly worth seeing, better blockbuster fare than most of what we get these summers. Don't look for a lot of depth, don't expect the science to make sense, but there were a lot of genuinely funny scenes, a fat handful of thrilling action set-pieces, and plenty of, well, comic-book angst. Better than the first, which I liked well enough.
(Re: the subject, one of Peter Parker's textbooks was Photonics by Saleh & Teich, which I've got here on my shelf; we used it for our optics seminar at Swarthmore. Great book, though having it in a movie that features little golden spheres of tritium is a bit of slumming.)
Alfred Molina is a perfect Doc Ock, playing up the man/machine duality, and J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson continues to be my favorite part of the franchise. James Franco's Harry Osborne was the only character that seemed out of place, following a plot line that only tangentially impinged on the audience's awareness, but by the end I realized how skillfully they'd positioned his character, so I stopped complaining. Kirsten Dunst's nipples are again featured players, though the operative factor this time is thinness rather than wetness.
Spidey himself is well-treated here. Once you get past the fact that the central moral dilemma is, basically, "Being a super-hero doesn't leave me a lot of free time," Tobey Maguire's more confident Spidey is a lot of fun to ride along with. (And a lot of fun to ogle, K. would be sure to mention. She had some Tobey-crushing going on.) The wisecracks start to appear, and we get to see some of the reason for them: it's fun being Spider-Man, especially when it's a vacation from mundane woes. Peter Parker gets to be exuberant when he puts the suit on.
The movie drags a bit during the eight or nine hundred Meaningful Speeches that are required, by law, to re-state the theme of the film, from Aunt May and Mary Jane and Peter and Dr. Octavius...etc., etc. The seething, undifferentiated wad of teenage hormones that filled our theater grew restless during the speeches, and again during the weird Christ imagery. And while the effects are generally better than the first film's, the first and the last big F/X shots were just awful, which...well, it would have been better to have the bad ones somewhere in the middle, is all. I was very impressed with Doc Ock's creepy, heavy, semi-autonomous extra arms, and their contrast with Spidey's hyperkinetic acrobatics and web-slinging; both characters remained clear and distinct, even during the most frenetic fights.
It's certainly worth seeing, better blockbuster fare than most of what we get these summers. Don't look for a lot of depth, don't expect the science to make sense, but there were a lot of genuinely funny scenes, a fat handful of thrilling action set-pieces, and plenty of, well, comic-book angst. Better than the first, which I liked well enough.
(Re: the subject, one of Peter Parker's textbooks was Photonics by Saleh & Teich, which I've got here on my shelf; we used it for our optics seminar at Swarthmore. Great book, though having it in a movie that features little golden spheres of tritium is a bit of slumming.)
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Date: 2004-07-01 03:52 pm (UTC)Professor: And what are the eigenvalues? Come on people...
Parker: 13.7 electron volts!
...what?? Did they just pick some random terms?