"Does Whatever A Spider Can"

Went and saw the midnight showing of Spider-Man 2 last night. It was a great flick, and I thought it was even better than the first one (and I really dug the first one). The effects were sharper, the villain not as bizzare (Willem DeFoe was a great villain, I think, but the guy they had playing Doc Ock was just so damn believable in his motivations and the way he expressed his inner dialogue through his expressions), and the characters much more developed. Most of the problems the first one had were in that the film was having to establish most of them and tell Spider-Man's origins. With that already out of the way, the characters were allowed breathing room, growing room. The cinematography was classic Sam Rami, with quick camera cuts and fast zooms. Think Evil Dead Trilogy. There's even a nice homage to Army of Darkness in one scene in the hospital, complete with a little chainsaw and trying to lop off an arm...of sorts. The fight scenes were excellent throughout the film. Spidey and Doc Ock went at it on trains (though as Dom pointed out, there is no elevated train in New York), the sides of buildings, in mid-air, and pretty much all across New York City. Doc's "smart arms" were just damn cool, and worked surprisingly well, despite my initial misgivings about CGI'd arms flailing all over the place.

Whereas the first film dealt mostly with responsibility, Spider-Man 2 focused on choice and issues of identity, specifically with having one's personality split down the middle and caught between two different aspects. Spidey and Doc Ock are the two most obvious examples of that identity crisis, though Harry Osborn gets a bit of it too towards the end.

The film works very well on several levels, managing to continue the threads of the previous movie and seem like a continuation of it, while at the same time standing alone as a film in and of itself and managing to create new threads and plotlines to explore in future installments.

All in all, I was very impressed with the film. It was that rarest of movies--a sequel which was even better than the original. The only flaw was that the soundtrack spawned another of those songs which we'll have to listen to all summer long. Last time, it was some post-grunge sludge from the guy who fronts Nickelback. This time around, it's an emo tune by Dashboard Confessional. You know that'll get annoying 'round about the end of July, by which point in time the pop stations will have played it three or four times a day for almost two months.

~chaos cricket

Song of the Moment: Moxy Fruvous, "Spiderman"