With Great Power Comes Pointless Sequels

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, cats and kiddies, hippies and squares! Welcome to this, the inaugural post of America's premiere pop culture blog (and other assorted odds and ends). Let's get right to it.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news for all you classic comics fans out there, but I've given the matter a great deal of thought, and I've finally come to the inevitable conclusion: the new Spider-man movie, due out next summer, is gonna SUCK!

That's right, you heard right, and you heard it here first, folks. THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (2012) is gonna suck great big buffalo nuts.

To begin with, a little backstory. We all remember with a certain degree of fondness (some of us less so, perhaps) the Sam Raimi trilogy. It almost seems quaint now, so quickly are Marvel Comics and Columbia Pictures moving to reboot the series already, but that wasn't how the story should have transpired. Raimi was actually on board to direct what would have been SPIDER-MAN 4. Series stars Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst had made it known that they would only re-up if Raimi was attached to direct. So far so good. But Raimi was having trouble putting together a script to his liking, and between that and general creative differences as to what direction the series should go, Raimi ends up leaving the franchise. With his departure, that meant the whole thing would not only need to be recast, but the decision was made to reboot the series entirely.

REBOOT??!! Jesus, SPIDER-MAN 3 is only FOUR YEARS OLD for fuck's sake! Are you kidding me?

Now don't get me wrong; I'm not one of those nostalgia obsessed guys that's stuck in the (recent) past. Sometimes a reboot is a great idea. The 80s/90s version of the BATMAN franchise was mostly in the toilet when along comes Christopher Nolan to transform the corny Caped Crusader into, well, CINEMA. But unfortunately, for every DARK KNIGHT, there has to be a SUPERMAN RETURNS. And that Bryan Singer travesty probably offers more than a few clues as to what will be wrong with the new Spidey.

As a general rule, if they fuck up the suit for a comic book character, that tends to mean they're gonna fuck up the rest of the movie. SUPERMAN RETURNS and DAREDEVIL are the poster children for that theory, as both movies were pretty much disasters and they did things to their characters' costumes that bordered on the obscene. We've all seen the new outfit photos leaked over the net, and the results are, well, not too good.

Now, I'll give 'em credit for employing what appear to be web-shooters. Hey, at least they're trying. But if this is what the new Spidey is supposed to look like, we're in trouble. Even the Nicholas Hammond version from the 70s got the damn suit right!

Then, there's the matter of what appears to be a dramatic shift in tone. I'm aware that there's a contingent out there that found the Raimi films a little too "cartoony". For my taste, Raimi's movies brought Stan Lee's characters to life in live action about as effectively as I've ever seen. Yeah, they completely screwed up the Green Goblin's outfit, and they deleted the bit about the web-shooters altogether, but these were tweaks that I found easy enough to live with since they got so much other stuff right. But this new crew looks like they're doing a complete 180 with regard to the look and feel of these characters. 

Think dark. No, REALLY dark. Like SUPERMAN RETURNS dark. Now that's pretty fuckin' dark. Bryan Singer took the Richard Donner movies and extracted every last ounce of warmth and naive wonder that those films had to offer. What we got instead was a sterile, cold, overlong, miscast, self-indulgent mess. All the CGI magic that money could buy could not disguise the fact that that movie essentially had no point of view and nothing to add to the Superman mythology. Judging by the new SPIDER-MAN trailer, we might be in store for the same thing here.

Sheesh. I could be wrong, and folks are more than welcome to disagree with me, but I have the sinking feeling that this film will turn out to be a visually good-looking yet spiritually empty artifice when it hits every single multiplex in America summer 2012. Bring back STAN LEE and STEVE DITKO!