At this point, I just hope Peter stops dating altogether, because I don’t think I can sit through another film that involves the same shtick. It just seems like the writers couldn’t be bothered to give the villains or the leading ladies any other motivation (besides Doctor Octopus, to be fair. Spiderman 2 remains the golden standard for the franchise), so they keep recycling the script from Raimi’s first film.
You’d think someone would suspect why the same girls keep finding themselves in these situations constantly.
To recap, MJ was practically thrown from the sky by Green Goblin, captured by Doc Ock, and then left in a web next to a construction site by Venom and Sandman. Is that seriously not enough to raise a few questions about the guy she’s dating/ been dating? Let not even get started on Gwen’s luck.
At 5 movies in, spidey has an 80% success rate, which let’s be honest, is pretty good. Here’s hoping the planned Sinister Six movie doesn’t come down to the team having to save their girlfriends from each other.
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They might as well be produced by Marvel.
No one seems interested in exposing Spiderman’s identity. Being the only Major Marvel superhero out there actually battling a dual identity crisis, one would think someone may just want to expose him. Be it Norman, Harry, Harry’s butler (what was up with that scene?!) or Eddie Brock/ Venom from Raimi’s trilogy, or Harry again, or Dr, Conners/ lizard from the rebooted series.
A lot of superhero movies tend to portray the authorities as almost utterly incompetent, but the lengths to which this franchise has taken it is almost offensive. The only purpose the NYPD appears to serve in a Spiderman movie is to let the audience know how strong the villain(s) really is (are). There was a scene in ‘The Amazing Spiderman’ where cops actually take lizard down in a shootout towards the end of the film, which I really liked in principle, but he just regenerated in a second and converted all the cops in the frame into lizards. I guess I should have known better.
A special mention goes out to the trigger happy cop who decides to take a shot at Electro while Spiderman is trying to get through to him. He singlehandedly managed to release a shit storm on New York, and so is indirectly accountable for making the audience sit through the drab second half of The Amazing Spiderman 2
Both origin movies conveniently have a super hero and super villain spawning in the same city, at about the same time, and they just happen to know each other! At other times you have an alien symbiote from OUTER SPACE coming in an attaching itself to the ONLY superhero around. It proves alien life exists, but no biggie. Peter would rather prance around in a suspicious black spidey suit with no idea of its origins
Mark Webb’s movies are no better in this department: The guys who’s kid Spiderman saves in ‘The Amazing Spiderman’ just happens to be an ON DUTY crane operator with a ton of clout, IN the vicinity of the action, AND has no problem lining up some cranes to help our neighborhood arachnid on his way.
More recently, Electro and Harry decide to work against Spiderman together, but Harry decides to wait till Spiderman is finished with Electro before conveniently showing up to a fair fight. What a benevolent bad guy.
The reason I say this is because each one of these movies has been fundamentally vanilla. Spiderman is going to beat the bad guys and save the city yet again. Its pretty much exactly how it plays out every time. Hell, even Transformers killed Optimus Prime for a bit in Revenge of the Fallen.
Besides that one sub-plot in Raimi’s ‘Spider-Man’ where Green Goblin tries to convince Spiderman to work with him, I can’t really think of a subplot that really excited me in terms of the character arc within any of the films.
The whole Peter losing focus and his powers arc in Spiderman 2 was one of the worst subplots in a superhero movie, and no surprise: the minute MJ is captured by the villain all the focus comes swinging back in a second.
The symbiote, and consequently Venom’s entire arc was wasted in Spiderman 3, not to mention (again) Gwen Stacy there.
A lot of views seemed to find the Richard Parker sub plot interesting in the new series, but I’ll wait to call it till I see it get fully developed hopefully in the third film.
Rhino, Norman Osbourne were most recently wasted in Amazing Spiderman 2, serving almost no purpose whatsoever
I’m sure I’m not the only one who wants to see the likes on Kraven, Carnage, and yes, Venom too done right.
Sure, I'm not expecting a full blown Carnage arc, or the Six Arm Saga to show up on screen anytime soon, but how cool is just the thought of those stories being adapted. Here's hoping that maybe SONY is listening, and turns things around with their next few offerings.