In a way, THE WALKING DEAD has it pretty easy these days, when it
comes to critical evaluations. Insofar as viewer expectations are
concerned, the breathtaking idiocy and awfulness that, in season 2,
became its standard succeeded in setting the bar so low that anything
that isn't just as breathtakingly awful and idiotic can't help but seem a
significant improvement.
Such is the case with this
week's installment, "Walk With Me," which takes a break from the main
group of characters and follows, instead, Andrea and Michonne as they
encounter the barricaded town of Woodbury and its secretly villainous
Governor. The ep will, I imagine, take a few hits for its glacial pace.
I've never been particularly bothered by this aspect of the TWD that
devolved last season, except when it's just being used to eat up
screen-time. There was some of that tonight--it's maybe a 28-minute plot
being stretched to cover a 42-minute episode, but that's actually
pretty good by TWD standards. More significantly, the ep dispenses with
the most extreme elements of soap melodrama, even more so than did the
3rd season debut. The creators clearly still view the series through
that lens, and while that remains the case, TWD will never be mistaken
for a high-quality production by anyone qualified to render the
judgment, but dialing back the soap to any noticeable extent will always
feel like a big step up--its absence doesn't even have to be filled
with anything particularly interesting.
And in this case, it isn't. This particular storyline and its
central antagonist are both drawn from the TWD comic, but, as with much
of what the series takes from its source material, noting this unfairly
sleights the book. The comic is, among other things, an open-ended study
of how the end of the world affects those who survive it. Our heroes
struggle to hold on to the important parts of their humanity in a world
were such things feel, increasingly, like burdensome baggage. As one
would expect, those they encounter tend to be deeply damaged in various
ways. When it comes to adapting this, the series got off on a very wrong
foot right out of the gate, when, in season 1, the street hoodlums in
"Vatos"--the first survivors they'd encountered--turned out to be kindly
young fellows guarding a nursing-home full of old people. The rest of
that particular episode is one of the best-written of the series, and
one of the only ones that feels like the comic, but the note that
particular twist struck was so fundamentally wrong that the ep is often
regarded as one of the worst of the first season (and the series
itself). The Governor is the comic's greatest villain, a sadistic maniac
who learned it's good to be the
king. Upon the end of the world, he devolved into barbarism most
excessive, an example of how far people can fall, and a contrast with
our heroes. The series, perpetually aimed at a milquetoast, white-bred,
middle-class, middle America audience, has always soft-pedaled (or
eliminated) the horror elements of the book, and its creators certainly
have no intention of ever offering any glimpses into an abyss as black
as that. David Morrissey would be as miscast playing anything resembling
the comic Governor as was John Wayne playing Genghis Khan. In "Walk
With Me," he does his best impression of Liam Neeson playing an American
southerner, as he goes through the paces of the kinder, gentler,
English-er Governor-In-Name-Only the series' writers have concocted--a
standard b-movie villain part with no thematic point, and, in fact,
nothing to distinguish it from any other b-movie villain part. GINO is
the benevolent ruler in public, while being villainous outside the sight
of the general population of Woodbury.
Andrea takes another beating at the hands of TWD's notoriously misogynistic writers, almost immediately falling for GINO's corny public-face
bullshit and seeming to fall, to some extent, for him, as well. It's up
to Michonne to be skeptical of GINO and his little paradise, but instead of writing her as wisely so, she's being written only as an Angry Black Woman caricature, pissed off, cynical and disapproving of everything without apparent
reason--her part leaves the viewer with the impression she'd react exactly the same way to anyone. Shorn of her sword, she wields at the world her one facial
expression: a perpetually sour look.
As a character, she doesn't yet exist, and rather than developing her
and using her (and Andrea) as our eyes into the world of Woodbury, the
writers leave her at the caricature, and break off to follow the
Governor and his henchmen for long stretches. Her relationship with
Andrea is yet another casualty of the creators' decision to skip so much
time between season 2 and 3. She and Andrea have been together and
surviving the zombie badlands for more than 8 months, but are written as
basically strangers, with no rapport and no apparent understanding of
or trust in one another. When, last season, Andrea was written as in thrall to Shane, another homicidal maniac, Dale tried to warn her; he genuinely cared for her and was trying to look out for her, and she was contemptuous of him for it, and treated him as if she could barely tolerate
him. Now, she's under the spell of yet another homicidal maniac, and,
again, the pattern repeats; she's giving grief to the woman who saved her and has looked out
for her for more than 8 months, merely because that woman is not immediately willing to jump on GINO's bandwagon (or his bones).
Michael
Rooker returned, tonight, as Merle, Daryl's scumbag brother. He's with
the Woodbury gang now, having survived the self-amputation of his hand,
and I'd be lying if I said he wasn't a sight for my own rather sore
eyes. Merle has proven very popular among the TWD fan-base, but one
suspects its really Rooker who is the draw in the equation. That's
certainly the case with me. I was a Rooker fan for a long time before
TWD came along. But it's also true (and rather unexpected) that,
watching him tonight (and his scenes are easily the highlight of this
ep), his character feels like a reminder of a time when the show wasn't
the godawful mess it later became, a time when it still had all the
potential in the world.
Beyond Rooker, "Walk With Me"
is pretty uninteresting. It wasn't, however, actively godawful. It's
unfortunate that this, alone, can make it better than most of the rest
of the series.
--j.
---
NOTE: This ep was also astonishingly poorly directed. Andrea and Michonne, near the beginning, were able to "hide" from GINO and his men, though in plain sight of them, behind a pathetically thin bush or two--Michonne was even able to stand up, openly, and behead her two pet zombies with her sword (who were also standing in the open) without anyone seeing (the zombies had drawn attention by becoming riled up by the sight of GINO and his men, which is in direct contradiction to what GINO's "scientist" says later in the ep--that zombies like them who have had their means to attack people removed lose the desire to attack them). Later, GINO and a handful of his men are able to creep up on and massacre a National Guard unit that outnumbered them and was waiting in a more-or-less open area in zombie country, apparently without having a single look-out posted. There was no firefight, as directed--the Guardsmen just stood around and let themselves be killed by a force they outnumbered.
[Cross-posted to my comics blog]
Monday, October 29, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
On THE WALKING DEAD, Shit Happens
A good title for tonight's installment of THE WALKING DEAD would have been "Shit Happens." The creators of the series chose, instead, one that warned their terminally mainstream audience of what was to come: "Sick." Though one fellow was injured in "Sick," no one was actually sick. Rather, the sickness in question had to do with the decision, by the creators, to import, into their mainstream tale, some of the nastiness routinely found in the comics they're allegedly adapting.
It was a welcome addition. The world of TWD should be a dark, brutal, unforgiving one, and the television version, chasing that middle-American-milquetoast audience, has been marked by a distinct lack of ugliness for far too long. Our hero Rick, in particular, seems to have regrown the testicular tissue arbitrarily razored away from him by the abysmal writing of season 2. Tonight, he had some steel in his spine when he dealt with the antics of a way-over-the-top-of-the-top villain briefly thrown his way. In this case, it was a prison inmate overly fond of pointing guns in people's faces at the least provocation, even when they had weapons trained on him. It's the sort of thing bad filmmakers have, in recent years, mistaken for an intimidating posture, the sort of thing that, in the real world, would pretty much guarantee a continuing lifespan of about 30 more seconds. This clown lasted more than 30 seconds, but, with Iron Rick on the job, not much more than as many minutes--Rick even fed the pistol-waving prick's sissy-boy sidekick to a crowd of zombies after the hard-charging henchman fled right into their midst.
Some good shit. Rick, it should be said, seemed a little more upset than he should have been about this, but that would be a small complaint, indeed, if it had been the only crack in the episode.
Unfortunately, the rest of the episode cracked open and unleashed some shit that was significantly less than good, and significantly closer to the object of the metaphor.
Last week, "Seed" planted some little hope that TWD was about to become something like TWD, rather than wasting its time as the world's most expensive, worst written daytime soap at night. This week, the show mostly collapsed right back into the very bad habits of season 2. In the closing moments of "Seed," a zombie chomped a chunk from Hershel's leg, and Rick, in an effort to short-circuit the zombie infection, grabbed an axe and chopped off the afflicted limb. Hershel spent "Sick" in bed, hovering between life and death as a bad Lifetime soap melodrama played out around him. Lots of time spent on long faces and pointless, redundant, cliché-ridden speeches about the old boy's fate.
Very, very bad shit.
Idiot Plot Syndrome--one of the absolute worst elements of TWD season 2--was back in full force, as well. With Hershel having suffered this horrible injury, any viewer with more than a few functioning brain-cells could be forgiven for thinking the group's immediate concern would be toward locating the prison's infirmary and acquiring things like bandages, antibiotics, painkillers--the things the stricken vet needs so he doesn't die. Those were more brain-cells than the writers employed when assembling "Sick," though, because while the characters speak of the critical need to find the infirmary, they don't do anything toward that end. They've just encountered a group of men who had been incarcerated in the prison, and who would presumably know exactly where to go, but our heroes don't even ask them about it. They choose, instead, to spend their time helping clear a new cell-block, so these fellows can have a place to sleep--an adventure in zombie-killing that could just as easily have been written as necessary to get to the infirmary. It's left to young Carl to slip off on his own--off camera--and find the supplies they need.[1] For his troubles, he's publicly shat upon by his wretched mother, whose own contribution to Hershel's health, up to that point, had amounted to hovering over him and looking Very Concerned (perhaps realizing how this looked, the writers added in, as an apparent afterthought, a moment wherein Hershel stopped breathing, and Lori resuscitated him).
And that's the shit that happened with "Sick"--after a promising start to the season, an ep that, overall, would be best sent to a waste-treatment facility.
--j.
---
[1] It would be virtually impossible to overstate the idiocy of this complete lack of concern for finding the infirmary. The group wasted half of season 2 in the search for a red-shirt non-entity of absolutely no consequence, whereas Hershel, being a medical professional who has shown wizard-like powers in both the healing of the injured and of the conjuring of ammunition, is one of their most important human assets, yet not even his own daughters make any effort to find the infirmary nor demand any action from anyone else to that end. They just stand around with long faces, reciting the clichés of the Lifetime soap melodrama they're playing out. Maggie, rather than doing anything to help her father live, tells him it's all right for him to die.
UPDATE (23 Oct., 2012) - BMF125, a poster on the IMDb's "Walking Dead" board, reminds me of a massive continuity error I meant to mention but forgot when doing my write-up. In "Seed," the group prowled through a corridor that was absolutely crawling with zombies, and had to duck into the cafeteria with a whole horde of them on their trail. It was difficult to hold the doors closed from all the creatures outside. As "Sick" begins, they open that door seconds later, story-time, and there's only one zombie there. Then, they drag Hershel out into the corridor and back to the section of the prison they'd already secured, again failing to run into the zombie horde. They leave the door between the allegedly zombie-infested section and the secured section open so the prisoners they found in the cafeteria can follow. Add a vanishing zombie horde to TWD's many, many problems.
[cross-posted to my comics blog]
It was a welcome addition. The world of TWD should be a dark, brutal, unforgiving one, and the television version, chasing that middle-American-milquetoast audience, has been marked by a distinct lack of ugliness for far too long. Our hero Rick, in particular, seems to have regrown the testicular tissue arbitrarily razored away from him by the abysmal writing of season 2. Tonight, he had some steel in his spine when he dealt with the antics of a way-over-the-top-of-the-top villain briefly thrown his way. In this case, it was a prison inmate overly fond of pointing guns in people's faces at the least provocation, even when they had weapons trained on him. It's the sort of thing bad filmmakers have, in recent years, mistaken for an intimidating posture, the sort of thing that, in the real world, would pretty much guarantee a continuing lifespan of about 30 more seconds. This clown lasted more than 30 seconds, but, with Iron Rick on the job, not much more than as many minutes--Rick even fed the pistol-waving prick's sissy-boy sidekick to a crowd of zombies after the hard-charging henchman fled right into their midst.
Some good shit. Rick, it should be said, seemed a little more upset than he should have been about this, but that would be a small complaint, indeed, if it had been the only crack in the episode.
Unfortunately, the rest of the episode cracked open and unleashed some shit that was significantly less than good, and significantly closer to the object of the metaphor.
Last week, "Seed" planted some little hope that TWD was about to become something like TWD, rather than wasting its time as the world's most expensive, worst written daytime soap at night. This week, the show mostly collapsed right back into the very bad habits of season 2. In the closing moments of "Seed," a zombie chomped a chunk from Hershel's leg, and Rick, in an effort to short-circuit the zombie infection, grabbed an axe and chopped off the afflicted limb. Hershel spent "Sick" in bed, hovering between life and death as a bad Lifetime soap melodrama played out around him. Lots of time spent on long faces and pointless, redundant, cliché-ridden speeches about the old boy's fate.
Very, very bad shit.
Idiot Plot Syndrome--one of the absolute worst elements of TWD season 2--was back in full force, as well. With Hershel having suffered this horrible injury, any viewer with more than a few functioning brain-cells could be forgiven for thinking the group's immediate concern would be toward locating the prison's infirmary and acquiring things like bandages, antibiotics, painkillers--the things the stricken vet needs so he doesn't die. Those were more brain-cells than the writers employed when assembling "Sick," though, because while the characters speak of the critical need to find the infirmary, they don't do anything toward that end. They've just encountered a group of men who had been incarcerated in the prison, and who would presumably know exactly where to go, but our heroes don't even ask them about it. They choose, instead, to spend their time helping clear a new cell-block, so these fellows can have a place to sleep--an adventure in zombie-killing that could just as easily have been written as necessary to get to the infirmary. It's left to young Carl to slip off on his own--off camera--and find the supplies they need.[1] For his troubles, he's publicly shat upon by his wretched mother, whose own contribution to Hershel's health, up to that point, had amounted to hovering over him and looking Very Concerned (perhaps realizing how this looked, the writers added in, as an apparent afterthought, a moment wherein Hershel stopped breathing, and Lori resuscitated him).
And that's the shit that happened with "Sick"--after a promising start to the season, an ep that, overall, would be best sent to a waste-treatment facility.
--j.
---
[1] It would be virtually impossible to overstate the idiocy of this complete lack of concern for finding the infirmary. The group wasted half of season 2 in the search for a red-shirt non-entity of absolutely no consequence, whereas Hershel, being a medical professional who has shown wizard-like powers in both the healing of the injured and of the conjuring of ammunition, is one of their most important human assets, yet not even his own daughters make any effort to find the infirmary nor demand any action from anyone else to that end. They just stand around with long faces, reciting the clichés of the Lifetime soap melodrama they're playing out. Maggie, rather than doing anything to help her father live, tells him it's all right for him to die.
UPDATE (23 Oct., 2012) - BMF125, a poster on the IMDb's "Walking Dead" board, reminds me of a massive continuity error I meant to mention but forgot when doing my write-up. In "Seed," the group prowled through a corridor that was absolutely crawling with zombies, and had to duck into the cafeteria with a whole horde of them on their trail. It was difficult to hold the doors closed from all the creatures outside. As "Sick" begins, they open that door seconds later, story-time, and there's only one zombie there. Then, they drag Hershel out into the corridor and back to the section of the prison they'd already secured, again failing to run into the zombie horde. They leave the door between the allegedly zombie-infested section and the secured section open so the prisoners they found in the cafeteria can follow. Add a vanishing zombie horde to TWD's many, many problems.
[cross-posted to my comics blog]
Monday, October 15, 2012
THE WALKING DEAD Plants A Curious Seed
A remarkable thing happened on THE WALKING DEAD last night. "Seed," the series' 3rd-season opener, aired, which should, itself, seem pretty incredible after the complete creative train-wreck that was season 2, but the ratings for that unfortunate mess were high, and that isn't the remarkable thing in question. The remarkable thing that happened on TWD last night is that, for the first time since 2010, the series offered an episode that not only wasn't outright awful in every respect but was, on balance, actually pretty good.
TWD is, to quote the comic legend, "a continuing story of survival horror." In my long initial review of the television version, I wrote about how, during the series' brief first season, its writers focused on survival concerns, but often de-emphasized the horror elements of the project, likely in an effort to "mainstream" it. When season 2 came along, with a new writing team, the survival concerns mostly went out the window as well, as the series was rebuilt on a daytime soap model, the quality of the writing plummeted, and the zombie apocalypse--the central premise of the project--was mostly shunted aside and treated as something that got in the way of recycled soap melodrama "plots." When the end of the world was allowed to be a factor in the proceedings, it was written as badly as everything else.
At the time, I noted that "in the comic, when the characters are out on the road, they're short of everything, starving, stinking, at the mercy of the elements, of zombies, of other humans, and are rarely far from devastating harm. There was little sense of this in the series, and the atmosphere of desperation it produced was almost entirely absent." In a footnote to this, I wrote that "oddly enough, the CDC plotline [from season 1], which was pretty dumb, was one of the only times the series briefly featured the sense of desperation that hovers over the characters in every issue of the comic when they're out in the open. With the exception of that one story (which mostly just paid it lip-service), the series does very little to convey this."
The first thing TWD's writers got right with tonight's episode was to inject a taste of that sense of desperation.
Caveat: it would be wrong to overstate the extent of this. After the creators ham-handedly rushed the series into winter at the end of last season (in a way that made a typical TWD hash out of the timeline), one would think they had a winter storyline in mind. That would be a good choice--it's much harder to survive a winter, particularly without a safe haven--but tonight, they decided to skip the colder seasons entirely, and pick up several months later in warm weather again. It's poor storytelling, and the characters' months on the road don't seem to have taken, on them, anything like the toll it should have, which is particularly true in the case of Rick (who is still functioning at the fevered intensity he'd achieved by the end of last season, and, absurdly, still hasn't talked to his wife about what happened with Shane). It would be easy to overstate the degree of that Sense of Desperation present in "Seed," but after last season, it's hard to regard any little bit as anything other than a massive improvement. The characters, last night, were cruddy, grim, allegedly low on ammo, and contemplating canned dog-food for dinner. That's a start.
Another thing the writers got right is just to shut up. The series has suffered from a combination of varying degrees of writers who can't write dialogue and actors who can't perform it. Most "conversations" last season were of that insanely stilted breed of soap melodrama speechifying, directed toward subjects that, given what should have been the characters' circumstances, were absolutely ludicrous as a focus. The world had ended, and they were spending their time arguing about Rick's worthiness as a father and Lori's theory that women should be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. Tonight, showrunner Glen Mazzara (who wrote the ep) seemed to find a solution: long passages of visual storytelling in which no one says anything. "Seed" features a very sparse script. Much of the dialogue that does exist is devoted to the task at hand: surviving the zombe apocalypse. Even the silence of the characters serves that end; they're trying not to attract the dead. The soapy rubbish that had consumed season 2 was kept to a minimum, and treated as an aside.[1]
Here's where I see the potential problem going forward. Mazzara responded to the loud complaints about last year's deadly dull first 7 episodes by essentially saying he was going to throw zombies at the problem. And that's exactly what he did. As the last 6 eps demonstrated, though, this can make the series less dull, but it doesn't really deal with its underlying problem, which is the very poor quality of its writing. "Seed," while toning down the soap, throws in a shit-load of zombies, and it seems likely that this is just another version of throwing some zombies at the problem. That's not something the creators can do every week.[2] The sparse, to-the-point dialogue probably won't continue--the more likely scenario (since there hasn't been any sort of shake-up behind the scenes) is that TWD soon slips back into the inanity that ruled season 2. When, earlier this year, it was announced the series would be adapting the prison arc from the comic, it sounded like a terrible idea. Not just because it would almost inevitably become another example of a great storyline the series would travesty but because the prison was another safe haven. That faint hint of Sense of Desperation I found so refreshing in "Seed" is probably going to disappear rather quickly, and TWD, safe behind prison walls, will go back to wallowing in piss-poor melodrama.
"Seed," though far from perfect, is, overall, a good episode, one that provides some little hint of what TWD could have been in more talented hands. Will the crop that springs from it be a bumper one of roughly realized potential, or will it just come up more poison oak?
I'm curious.
--j.
---
[1] It's also the case that "Seed" doesn't steer clear of reliance on Idiot Plot Syndrome to move certain parts of the story along. The characters know zombies sometimes lie motionless--while they were cleaning up the yard, one of the creatures who had fallen down after being shot even started moving again as they walked by it--yet when they go inside the bowels of the prison, they're walking over the corpses that litter the place without a care in the world for this. They take Hershel, the one fellow they have with any medical training and a guy who is really too old to be putting in too much action in the first place, right into combat in a dark labyrinth filled with dead people.
UPDATE (20 Oct., 2012) - A sub-gripe: When last TWD aired, I complained about how survival concerns, which should have been the primary preoccupation of a group of people in a zombie apocalypse, were almost entirely shunted aside throughout the 2nd season, and one of the items I noted was the group's failure to employ melee weapons against zombies, sticking, instead, with guns, which make a lot of noise and run out of ammo. In "Seed," when Rick suggests they have to clean the prison yard "hand-to-hand," it's treated as a remarkable suggestion, which means that, in 7-8 further months on the road and dealing with the zombie menace, they still haven't figured out the utility of blades, clubs, axes, etc.
This, to enlarge the focus again, is part of a larger dramatic problem with the ep, which is that, with the exception of a few lines, the (sparse) script for "Seed" could have taken place the day after the last episode, or a few days after. Besides the poor storytelling involved in skipping the winter, skipping so much time also leaves a dramatic black hole, because, while Hershel has grown some chin-whiskers, Carl's voice is breaking, and Lori appears as if she's about to pop, none of the personalities, or relationships, or the dynamic within the group seem to have evolved an inch in all that time. Seven-to-eight months have passed, and they're right where they were when we left them. Even the moments between Andrea and Michonne seem as if they're happening the day after "Beside the Dying Fire."
[2] Indeed, even the one week seemed to strain the production. The episode was full of guns spouting CGI muzzle-flashes while visibly not cycling, and Greg Nicotero's ordinarily solid, often fantastic zombie make-ups were frequently weak to outright awful ("Seed" featured his single worst "hero" zombie design, in an indoor creature that loses its head to a sword).
[cross-posted to my comics blog]
TWD is, to quote the comic legend, "a continuing story of survival horror." In my long initial review of the television version, I wrote about how, during the series' brief first season, its writers focused on survival concerns, but often de-emphasized the horror elements of the project, likely in an effort to "mainstream" it. When season 2 came along, with a new writing team, the survival concerns mostly went out the window as well, as the series was rebuilt on a daytime soap model, the quality of the writing plummeted, and the zombie apocalypse--the central premise of the project--was mostly shunted aside and treated as something that got in the way of recycled soap melodrama "plots." When the end of the world was allowed to be a factor in the proceedings, it was written as badly as everything else.
At the time, I noted that "in the comic, when the characters are out on the road, they're short of everything, starving, stinking, at the mercy of the elements, of zombies, of other humans, and are rarely far from devastating harm. There was little sense of this in the series, and the atmosphere of desperation it produced was almost entirely absent." In a footnote to this, I wrote that "oddly enough, the CDC plotline [from season 1], which was pretty dumb, was one of the only times the series briefly featured the sense of desperation that hovers over the characters in every issue of the comic when they're out in the open. With the exception of that one story (which mostly just paid it lip-service), the series does very little to convey this."
The first thing TWD's writers got right with tonight's episode was to inject a taste of that sense of desperation.
Caveat: it would be wrong to overstate the extent of this. After the creators ham-handedly rushed the series into winter at the end of last season (in a way that made a typical TWD hash out of the timeline), one would think they had a winter storyline in mind. That would be a good choice--it's much harder to survive a winter, particularly without a safe haven--but tonight, they decided to skip the colder seasons entirely, and pick up several months later in warm weather again. It's poor storytelling, and the characters' months on the road don't seem to have taken, on them, anything like the toll it should have, which is particularly true in the case of Rick (who is still functioning at the fevered intensity he'd achieved by the end of last season, and, absurdly, still hasn't talked to his wife about what happened with Shane). It would be easy to overstate the degree of that Sense of Desperation present in "Seed," but after last season, it's hard to regard any little bit as anything other than a massive improvement. The characters, last night, were cruddy, grim, allegedly low on ammo, and contemplating canned dog-food for dinner. That's a start.
Another thing the writers got right is just to shut up. The series has suffered from a combination of varying degrees of writers who can't write dialogue and actors who can't perform it. Most "conversations" last season were of that insanely stilted breed of soap melodrama speechifying, directed toward subjects that, given what should have been the characters' circumstances, were absolutely ludicrous as a focus. The world had ended, and they were spending their time arguing about Rick's worthiness as a father and Lori's theory that women should be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. Tonight, showrunner Glen Mazzara (who wrote the ep) seemed to find a solution: long passages of visual storytelling in which no one says anything. "Seed" features a very sparse script. Much of the dialogue that does exist is devoted to the task at hand: surviving the zombe apocalypse. Even the silence of the characters serves that end; they're trying not to attract the dead. The soapy rubbish that had consumed season 2 was kept to a minimum, and treated as an aside.[1]
Here's where I see the potential problem going forward. Mazzara responded to the loud complaints about last year's deadly dull first 7 episodes by essentially saying he was going to throw zombies at the problem. And that's exactly what he did. As the last 6 eps demonstrated, though, this can make the series less dull, but it doesn't really deal with its underlying problem, which is the very poor quality of its writing. "Seed," while toning down the soap, throws in a shit-load of zombies, and it seems likely that this is just another version of throwing some zombies at the problem. That's not something the creators can do every week.[2] The sparse, to-the-point dialogue probably won't continue--the more likely scenario (since there hasn't been any sort of shake-up behind the scenes) is that TWD soon slips back into the inanity that ruled season 2. When, earlier this year, it was announced the series would be adapting the prison arc from the comic, it sounded like a terrible idea. Not just because it would almost inevitably become another example of a great storyline the series would travesty but because the prison was another safe haven. That faint hint of Sense of Desperation I found so refreshing in "Seed" is probably going to disappear rather quickly, and TWD, safe behind prison walls, will go back to wallowing in piss-poor melodrama.
"Seed," though far from perfect, is, overall, a good episode, one that provides some little hint of what TWD could have been in more talented hands. Will the crop that springs from it be a bumper one of roughly realized potential, or will it just come up more poison oak?
I'm curious.
--j.
---
[1] It's also the case that "Seed" doesn't steer clear of reliance on Idiot Plot Syndrome to move certain parts of the story along. The characters know zombies sometimes lie motionless--while they were cleaning up the yard, one of the creatures who had fallen down after being shot even started moving again as they walked by it--yet when they go inside the bowels of the prison, they're walking over the corpses that litter the place without a care in the world for this. They take Hershel, the one fellow they have with any medical training and a guy who is really too old to be putting in too much action in the first place, right into combat in a dark labyrinth filled with dead people.
UPDATE (20 Oct., 2012) - A sub-gripe: When last TWD aired, I complained about how survival concerns, which should have been the primary preoccupation of a group of people in a zombie apocalypse, were almost entirely shunted aside throughout the 2nd season, and one of the items I noted was the group's failure to employ melee weapons against zombies, sticking, instead, with guns, which make a lot of noise and run out of ammo. In "Seed," when Rick suggests they have to clean the prison yard "hand-to-hand," it's treated as a remarkable suggestion, which means that, in 7-8 further months on the road and dealing with the zombie menace, they still haven't figured out the utility of blades, clubs, axes, etc.
This, to enlarge the focus again, is part of a larger dramatic problem with the ep, which is that, with the exception of a few lines, the (sparse) script for "Seed" could have taken place the day after the last episode, or a few days after. Besides the poor storytelling involved in skipping the winter, skipping so much time also leaves a dramatic black hole, because, while Hershel has grown some chin-whiskers, Carl's voice is breaking, and Lori appears as if she's about to pop, none of the personalities, or relationships, or the dynamic within the group seem to have evolved an inch in all that time. Seven-to-eight months have passed, and they're right where they were when we left them. Even the moments between Andrea and Michonne seem as if they're happening the day after "Beside the Dying Fire."
[2] Indeed, even the one week seemed to strain the production. The episode was full of guns spouting CGI muzzle-flashes while visibly not cycling, and Greg Nicotero's ordinarily solid, often fantastic zombie make-ups were frequently weak to outright awful ("Seed" featured his single worst "hero" zombie design, in an indoor creature that loses its head to a sword).
[cross-posted to my comics blog]
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
For Your Height Only/Challenge of the Tiger
The most excellent blog of the most excellent Mondo Macabro presently features a brief piece I penned pimping MM's deliriously endearing double feature FOR YOUR HEIGHT ONLY/CHALLENGE OF THE TIGER. Check it out, and if it grabs you, grab a copy of the disc. In fact, grab lots of Mondo Macabro releases--you'll be glad you did, and you'll be supporting the work of one of the best labels we have.
--j.
--j.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
The Tangled Web of SPIDER-MAN 2
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, Sony's effort to reboot their Spidey franchise (and hold on to the lucrative movie rights to the character), has just opened, and from the initial reviews it sounds a bit like those behind this new film may have made some effort to get right some of the things the much-lauded (but not very good) SPIDER-MAN 2 got so wrong.
I was a fan of the first Sam Raimi movie. It certainly wasn't perfect but it succeeded a lot more often than it failed and watching it unexpectedly turned into one of the two best theater-going experiences of my life. In my childhood, Spidey had been a good friend of mine. I read before most kids my age could even recognize their letters and even at that, I was a fan of comics before I could read them myself. And Spider-man was one of my favorites from the beginning. I spent hours pouring over his four-color adventures, making them three-dimensional in my head, then I'd take to the back yard and make up new ones of my own at such a pace that my efforts to instantly act them out could scarcely keep up. At some point, I lost touch with that. You grow up, your outlook on things changes and even if you retain a love for what had captured your heart back then, that love changes as well. Something that means so much to you at that age never really leaves you though. That remarkable level of enthusiasm ends up stamped on your DNA, even when you're not aware of it, and sometimes--very, very rarely but every so often--you come across something that, seemingly like magic, reconnects you to it in some way. This is what happened to me when I saw SPIDER-MAN. Going into it, I was just hoping for a good flick. What I got was one that stuck a tap right into that intense enthusiasm of childhood and turned the spigot wide open. It--and by "it," I mean this feeling I'm trying to describe--was awesome. Spell that word in all caps, bold print, with it underscored and enough exclamation-points after it to make up the Great Wall of China and it would still never be enough.
That reaction wasn't random. Sam Raimi had more than just the talent to pull off the picture and more than just the right kind of talent. He also had that same love of the character, and it floated between every frame. Transmitting that through a big, Hollywood picture is quite a trick. With me, he managed it.
For a brief time, the movie could still bring on faint aftershocks of that initial reaction. This didn't, however, lead me to exaggerate the merits of the movie. It never became one of my favorites. I haven't watched it very often. The Green Goblin's "Power Ranger chic" look never fails to make me groan. It still managed to be a damn good movie though, and in spite of some missteps, a damn fine adaptation of the character and his world.
SPIDER-MAN was a huge hit. It received mixed critical reviews. Two years later, the gang behind the first film returned with SPIDER-MAN 2. It cost more and didn't make as much but it met with smashing critical success. People saying it was better than the original. Calling it the best comic adaptation of all time. Saying it transcended the comic material, which is what people who look down upon comics but know nothing of them always say when they like something based on one.
Nearly seven years ago, I wrote about SM2, and, as is so often my habit, took a very different view. Here's what I had to say about it then:
THE TANGLED WEB OF "SPIDER-MAN 2"
20 Oct., 2005
It raked in a fortune at the box office, was greeted with nearly universal critical approval, and, in the year since its release, has frequently been a hailed as one of the best comic book movies of all time. Often, as the best.
But I didn't like SPIDER-MAN 2.
More than that, I didn't even think it was a good movie. I didn't hate it, though my reaction to it admittedly becomes much firmer when faced with the blind adoration of many of its fans. It had its moments, some of them wonderful. Overall, though, not good. Frequently awful, in fact. Inferior to the mostly excellent original in pretty much every meaningful way.
Being a lifelong comic fan, I'm always trying, when I begin one of these reviews, to work out some sort of formula that allows me to offer criticism of these movies as both movies and as adaptations. A movie can, after all, be a good one even if it's a poor adaptation, just as the reverse can be the case if the material isn't well suited for the screen. For fans of the characters and stories, of course, the ideal is to have both a good film and a good adaptation. For this piece, I'm not going to make as much of an effort to separate the two, aiming instead for something a little less structured and a lot more free-flowing; more like a series of observations. This are several potential pit-falls to this approach and I may not avoid them all. For the record though, I'm not one who thinks a poor adaptation necessarily makes for a poor film.
On with the show...
In discussing the film in different venues, I've often referred to it as SPIDER-MAN 1 FOR MORONS. Thematically, the movie is simply a rehash of SPIDER-MAN, retreading the same power/responsibility theme that had already been covered in the first film and doing so in exactly the same way, often using exactly the same scenes. Have great power, shirk responsibility, bad things happen, resume responsibility. Rinse. Or, depending on the metaphor one feels is more appropriate, wipe and flush. Essentially a remake, it adds exactly nothing to the story of the original film and in fact takes much away from it in the retelling. Most of the humor is eliminated, most of the elements that allowed us to identify with Peter are removed or severely watered-down and, most egregiously, the story is retold with all the subtlety of a loaded log-truck traveling up a bad road. Lots of noise, lots of flash, lots of driving home the points the film wants to make in sledgehammer-to-the-face fashion but far less intelligence, little charm, little wit and no real point.
This alone isn't necessarily sufficient grounds to damn SPIDER-MAN 2. The power/responsibility theme, even if it is simply being rehashed, is still a Spider-Man theme (though as I'll get into in a moment, the movie deviates wildly from the source material in most matters). And big, dumbed-down rehashes can be fun sometimes too.
"Fun," however, isn't a word in the vocabulary of SPIDER-MAN 2.
In the comics, being Spider-Man caused Peter Parker plenty of problems but it also served as a release from the frequently high stress of his ordinary life. As Spider-Man, he could swing free through the city on a pleasant day, flip off rooftops with reckless abandon and be as big a clown as he wanted. The mask freed him. As dangerous as his activities could be, they were also fun. His Spider-Man persona was that of a merry prankster, a smartass, always throwing wisecracks, relentlessly teasing and taunting the stuffy underworld stiffs he battled, reveling in the role.
This is a crucial elements of Spider-Man, one of the central ones. The first film, though arguably underplaying it, clearly understood it. The second, however, hasn't a clue. Being Spider-Man is presented in it as some sort of cold, harsh discipline to be engaged in relentlessly, joylessly, in martial fashion and as a matter of "responsible behavior," regardless of whatever trouble it may cause in one's own life. Everything else is to be held as a secondary concern; the discipline must always come first.
This is, to put it mildly, quite out of step with the spirit of Spider-Man. Having chosen to shear away such a crucial element of the character, however, director Sam Raimi inexplicably chooses, as the major source for the film's story, a plotline from the comics which depended entirely upon this clown persona element he'd excised. The result is a hollow adaptation, one that uses superficial elements of the original story to tell an entirely different one.
In "Spider-Man No More,"[1] the principal comic story from which most of SPIDER-MAN 2 is drawn, Peter, after years as a costumed crimefighter, had lost touch with why he'd become Spider-Man in the first place. Maintaining the identity was causing him a lot of problems and he was becoming convinced that, because it was fun and got in the way of his more adult pursuits, it was an immature thing. "...every boy, sooner or later," Peter thinks, "must put away his toys, and become a man." It was time to grow up, so "toy" Spidey went in the trash, in that famous image from the comic recreated in the movie. After Peter renounced his secret identity, crime became, for him, what it is to most people; a distant thing about which he heard on the news. Though it took some adjusting, this distance made it much easier to ignore. One night, though, Peter, passing by a warehouse, sees a night watchman being attacked by a pair of thugs. With the crime no longer distant but right there, up close and personal, he doesn't hesitate for a moment to jump into the fray and put away the two would-be thieves. The incident and the sight of the watchman, an older fellow, bring flooding back the memory of his Uncle Ben and of the reason he really became Spider-Man--those things with which he'd lost touch--and this makes him realize he'd gotten the equation reversed. Spider-Man wasn't a toy of childhood. It was his mature acceptance of responsibility, not a youthful shirking of it. He reclaims the mask and swears that no one will ever come to harm because Spider-Man failed to act.
In SPIDER-MAN 2, being Spider-Man isn't something Peter enjoys at all and though he helps others, it seems to serve no positive function in his own life--it is, instead, a joyless exercise through which he puts himself in almost masochistic fashion and that he allows to utterly consume his life because he feels it's the responsible thing to do. He hasn't lost touch with why he became Spider-Man. He has, in fact, become obsessed by it to a very unhealthy degree. When he has an imaginary conversation with his deceased Uncle Ben and tells him he's going to stop being Spider-Man, it's a conscious walking away from what he'd seen and accepted as a responsibility.[2] Such a characterization of Peter is a drastic deviation from "Spider-Man No More" and from nearly all of the over 40 years worth of comic stories. This sharp disconnect from the source material is made even sharper by a scene in which Peter witnesses a mugging a few feet away from him, mirroring the one in the original "Spider-Man No More" story, and, with the victim yelling for help, just walks away.[3]
Such a gross mischaracterization is actually the point where an earlier ill-conceived snowball became an avalanche. That early snowball was set to rolling at the end of the first film, when Peter tells M.J., the love of his life, that he can only be her friend, nothing more. It was only one scene and troubling though it was, it did arguably help give a more operatic ending to the movie. And, of course, it could be written off later without too much trouble. Unfortunately, Raimi decided, instead, to build an entire movie upon it. Thus was born the Peter Parker of SPIDER-MAN 2 who, out of a combination of masochistic commitment to being Spider-Man and an obsessive fear of putting loved ones in danger, shuns intimate human contact and commits himself to a lonely, loveless existence--that harsh, joyless discipline. This is a Peter Parker entirely alien to the comic character. In the book, Peter actively pursued romantic interests over the years, like any other normal person. Even after Gwen Stacy, whom he intended to marry, was murdered by the Green Goblin because of her connection to him, he never adopted the course chosen by the movie Peter. And for good reason; it's a completely irrational choice. In the first film, it appeared at the very end out of nowhere. During the course of the movie, the Green Goblin had learned that Peter was Spider-Man and had menaced M.J. and his Aunt May. This is a problem, but the obvious solution is for Peter to zealously guard his secret identity. If it's compromised, all of his friends and family would be in danger in any case.[4] Unless he planned to cut off all human contact--and he clearly didn't--it made no sense to deny himself a romantic interest. Yet that's exactly what he decided to do in "reaction" to the Goblin's actions. The filmmakers arbitrarily committed movie Peter to this inane choice, setting up being Spider-Man and having a real life as all-or-nothing mutually exclusive options. This notion doesn't logically flow from anything in the movie and has more patently obvious holes in it than a Swiss cheese but it becomes the "rationale," if the word can be so abused, for his giving up Spider-Man. It's the only way he thinks he can live a normal life.
In the all-important matter of M.J., we can only empathize with Peter to the degree to which we choose to ignore the fact that he's losing the love of his life only because he, himself, is needlessly throwing her away.[5] M.J., at the end of the film, easily refutes his "reasoning" for doing so by pointing out another of those obvious holes in the cheese; she's an adult, and can make her own decision about what kind of risks she's willing to take. In the meantime though, we've had to sit through two hours of a movie allegedly about Peter Parker/Spider-Man wherein a character who isn't recognizable as Peter Parker or Spider-Man commits to a transparently illogical, arbitrarily-imposed decision Peter Parker never made, requiring him to go through a process through which Peter Parker never had to go in order to reach a conclusion that should have been obvious to anyone from the beginning.
Not very impressive, either as an adaptation or as a film on its own merits.
In the adaptation department, Dr. Octopus doesn't fare much better than Spider-Man. The movie appropriates the spectacular visual of Doc Ock with little of the substance. This isn't necessarily a bad decision--in spite of the efforts of various writers over the years to better shade the character, Doc Ock, in the books, is still rather bland and lacking in depth. He's insane, obsessive, greedy, self-absorbed--quite a weird little guy. The accident that grafts his mechanical arms to his body damages his mind but he wasn't in very good shape in that department to begin with; the brain damage only made bad matters worse. Unfortunately, the filmmakers don't succeed in replacing this with anything better. Their attempt to build a better Dr. Octopus makes of him a sort of sympathetic pseudo-villain. Movie Ock is actually a good guy, a fellow with a loving wife and stable life, selflessly dedicated to the cause of bettering mankind. He only does bad things because a protective microchip on his neck burns out during the accident allowing the artificial intelligence in his mechanical arms to manipulate him into it.
The scope of Spider-Man's powers in the film offers another wild deviation from the source material adopted to the film's detriment. This, too, was born, somewhat, in the first film, where we see Spider-Man exhibiting strength and ruggedness that if not completely beyond the abilities of the comic version are certainly at the extreme end of those abilities. With SPIDER-MAN 2, however, all restraint goes out the window. At one point, when his webs stop working in mid-swing, he falls what looks like 50 or 60 stories, crashes into a roof and gets right up without even having the wind knocked out of him (comic Spidey would have been killed instantly by such a fall). Later, he takes another nasty fall and lands with his bare midsection crunching, full body weight, across the lip of a dumpster. Again, no apparent harm. Later, another nasty fall and he bounces off the roof of a car. This time, he appears to be injured but only for humorous purposes (the scene is a repeat of the playing-across-rooftops scene from the first movie[6]). In his battles with Dr. Octopus, he's repeatedly slammed face-first into stone and brick walls; slammed so hard those walls crack and crumble under the impact of his face and body. They leave him completely unmarked and don't even slow him down. (Comic Spidey has, when weakened, been bloodied by ordinary human foes). He falls off a speeding el train, landing on the paved street far below, and zips right back into action without a moment's pause. By far the most outrageous scene though (and the most embarrassingly awful), is the one wherein he stops that train, speeding out of control, with his bare hands.[7]
Such things look absolutely ridiculous on the screen; they're abjectly pointless, brutal assaults on the willingness of the audience to suspend disbelief. Perhaps more importantly, they amount to an attack on another core element of the Spider-Man character: his basic humanity. This was the very thing that made Spider-Man so revolutionary in the 1960s. He's "not Superman," to quote Aunt May's laugh-line from the first movie. He isn't a god pretending to be a regular fellow; he is a regular fellow who just happens to gain amazing powers. Throughout SPIDER-MAN 2 though, he's presented as an all-but-indestructible juggernaut, with strength and durability so far beyond our frame of reference as to seem positively otherworldly. This works to undermine our ability to relate to the character; it's a constant visual reminder that he's not one of us--taken to the extreme it is in the movie, not even remotely one of us.
Related to this is another of the character's core attributes brutalized by this treatment: his bravery. For all of Peter's doubts and anxieties, Spidey is a very gutsy fellow. Frequently, he's completely outmatched by his opponents. In the early years of the book, which saw the introduction of most of the key villains, it became a virtual formula that he would fail in his first attempt at taking them down, sometimes rather spectacularly being served a dish of his own posterior. In the latter category belongs his first encounter with Dr. Octopus.[8] Ock dismantled him in short order, tossing him aside when he was through like a piece of refuse. But as in all those other stories, Peter gets it together, comes back and, defying the odds, puts the villain away. By contrast, it's difficult to imagine anyone giving too much trouble to the character with the capabilities we see in SPIDER-MAN 2, much less outmatching him. He's relentless, unstoppable, possessed of Hulk-like strength and nearly impossible to injure; attributing bravery to him for what he does is like attributing it to a person who squashes a bug.[9]
Of course, no one wants to see a movie about a "hero" squashing a bug. The filmmakers deal with the problem they've created in so radically amping up Spider-Man's powers in exactly the wrong way; they radically amp up the durability of the villain in order to make him more of a match. They don't bother to give any in-story reason for it either. As with their Spider-Man's vow of celibacy earlier, this is a matter of one bad decision dictating another. The result is both an absurdity made even more absurd and a thing so completely removed from the source material as to be unrecognizable. In both the comics and the movie, Dr. Octopus is bonded with his mechanical arms via a lab accident but he, himself, has no superpowers--physically, he remains a normal human. In a fight with Spider-Man, comic Ock must let his mechanical arms do the work and be careful not to let Spidey land a solid blow on him. One good shot and it's all over. In the movie though, Spider-Man is shown laying into Ock with full-blown, right-to-the-face haymakers over and over again, to little or no apparent effect. In a bank, he hits Ock so hard with a very large bag of coins that Ock is blasted backwards, his head and body leaving a crater in a rock wall, again little effect. Moments later, he hits Ock with a desk so hard it blows Ock off his feet, across the room, through a plate-glass window, and into the side of a car outside. Even after all that, Ock's impact on the car is still violent enough to blast it off the ground as though another car had plowed into it at a high speed. It doesn't even slow Ock down.
And so on.
"Spiderman 2" isn't one to let a little thing like internal logic or consistency get in its way either. The fellow who can stop a train with his bare hands can't even slow down Ock with repeated haymakers but frail old Aunt May manages to stagger Ock by striking him with her umbrella.[10] The film's lowest point in this regard occurs as the dreadful climax of the elevated train sequence. As noted earlier, the entire film presents Peter as being almost pathologically obsessed with the notion that his activities as Spider-Man pose a danger to his friends and family; it is, in fact, his central motivation throughout the film. If such a fear had no other effect, it would certainly lead him to zealously guard his secret identity, exposure of which would be the very thing that would place his loved ones in danger. His anxiety about this is so great that he's made of his life a misery, but during the train sequence, he whips off his mask and needlessly exposes his identity to the entire train full of people.[11] Rumor at the time was that this was done at the insistence of star Tobey McGuire, who wanted to be more strongly associated by moviegoers with the character of Spider-Man rather than just nerdy Peter Parker. This seems likely, as the entire film is replete with scenes where, while out as Spider-Man, he removes his mask. It thus offers a character far more more obsessed than his comic counterpart has ever been with the fear of placing his loved ones in danger via his Spidey activities, but one who, paradoxically, is far more careless--almost cavalierly careless--than his comic counterpart about having his identity revealed to the world.
SPIDER-MAN 2 was a big success and I know I'm pushing a very large rock up a very steep hill on this one but I also know that history's judgment of a film often isn't the same as that passed by the temporary passions of its own day. I don't really have any formal closing comments here. These are some of my observations on the film and why I didn't like it. Take them for what they're worth.
--j.
---
[1] From "Amazing Spider-Man" #50
[2] Raimi visualizes this by having Peter revert to his former pre-Spider-Man nerdy self from the first film.
[3] The only exception to this that springs readily to mind is "Spidey Cops Out" from "Amazing Spider-Man" #112, wherein, in the course of two pages, Spidey encounters but refuses to get involved in a mugging, then a kidnapping, the latter with the victim screaming to him for help. In the story, Aunt May had disappeared and he'd decided it was more important to try to find her than to get involved in the incidents in question. Still, it comes across as a gross mischaracterization (the fact that I even remember it attests to that). The story was written by Gerry Conway. It was only his second issue on the book and he hadn't quite gotten a handle on the character yet. He went on to a classic run.
[4] He keeps M.J. at "just friends" arm's length throughout SPIDER-MAN 2 but she's still kidnapped because of the Spidey connection.
[5] In the comics, the creators were forever devising ways to put Spider-Man between Peter and his various romantic interests but as contrived as they sometimes were, they made much more sense and you could empathize with Peter's plight. Betty Brant, after the death of her ne'er-do-well brother, was very firm on the point that she wanted a stable, boring mate who took no chances. Gwen Stacy believed Spider-Man had murdered her father. And so on.
[6] Significant portions of the movie were direct repeats of things from the first film. We get Peter taking out the garbage again, leading to another familiar conversation with M.J. We get the villain-talking-to-himself scene (in the first movie, it was Osbourne talking with his evil Goblin side--this time around, it's Octavius conversing with his mechanical arms). Another rescue of another child from another burning building. Another conversation with Uncle Ben (same car set, same wardrobe as the first time around). A repeat of that roof-jumping scene, played for comedy as it was the first time around. M.J. is once again kidnapped by the villain in order to draw out Spider-Man. The villain once again has a last-minute moment where he comes to his senses. And so on.
[7] Regarding the scope of Spidey's strength, there are moments of wild inconsistency in the comics (the most outrageous--and idiotic--probably being his takedown of the cosmically-powered Firelord in Amazing Spider-Man #269-270), but stopping a speeding train like that is a feat worthy of the Hulk; it isn't even remotely within the power range of any version of Spider-Man we've seen before. I singled out the train thing but that's only the most outrageous example of this sort of thing.
[8] From "Amazing Spider-Man" #3, another story from which SPIDER-MAN 2 is drawn.
[9] To put a finer point on this line of criticism, one of the most celebrated moments from the comic came in "Amazing Spider-Man" #32-33, when Spider-Man is pinned beneath a large piece of machinery in a room that is rapidly flooding. A few feet away is a new serum that will heal a dying Aunt May. If he can't free himself, he'll die, and, without the serum, she'll die. He's completely exhausted though. He's been running for days without a break. He'd just fought his way through a phalanx of hoods then gone 10 rounds with Dr. Octopus. The machine above him is massive. When he first tries, he can't budge it an inch. Between the two issues he spends seven pages--an eternity, by Silver Age comic standards--struggling to free himself, thinking of Aunt May, beating himself up again for Uncle Ben's death, insisting to himself that he won't let May die.
And, throughout the course of this, slowly, ever so painfully, he manages to begin lifting the machine off his back and, with the strain so great he's on the verge of blacking out, he frees himself. The sequence is one of the greatest moments in the history of superhero comics and is widely regarded as Spider-Man's defining moment. As such, its a severe criticism of SPIDER-MAN 2 indeed to note the obvious fact that such a sequence--Spidey's defining moment--would, after seeing what he does in the second film, look insultingly disrespectful of continuity if included in any subsequent film.
[10] She saves Spider-Man's life by doing so--Ock was about to skewer him on a large blade. In SPIDER-MAN 2, May is a fan of Spider-Man and dislikes Dr. Octopus, exactly the opposite of the comics.
[11] The passengers' subsequent promise that they won't tell anyone is pure corn, and handled in such a disgustingly saccharine manner as to be wretch-inducing--easily the lowest depth the film plumbs.
...
This is reprinted from my comics blog, here:
http://comicscomments.blogspot.com/2005/10/tangled-web-of-spider-man-2.html
I was a fan of the first Sam Raimi movie. It certainly wasn't perfect but it succeeded a lot more often than it failed and watching it unexpectedly turned into one of the two best theater-going experiences of my life. In my childhood, Spidey had been a good friend of mine. I read before most kids my age could even recognize their letters and even at that, I was a fan of comics before I could read them myself. And Spider-man was one of my favorites from the beginning. I spent hours pouring over his four-color adventures, making them three-dimensional in my head, then I'd take to the back yard and make up new ones of my own at such a pace that my efforts to instantly act them out could scarcely keep up. At some point, I lost touch with that. You grow up, your outlook on things changes and even if you retain a love for what had captured your heart back then, that love changes as well. Something that means so much to you at that age never really leaves you though. That remarkable level of enthusiasm ends up stamped on your DNA, even when you're not aware of it, and sometimes--very, very rarely but every so often--you come across something that, seemingly like magic, reconnects you to it in some way. This is what happened to me when I saw SPIDER-MAN. Going into it, I was just hoping for a good flick. What I got was one that stuck a tap right into that intense enthusiasm of childhood and turned the spigot wide open. It--and by "it," I mean this feeling I'm trying to describe--was awesome. Spell that word in all caps, bold print, with it underscored and enough exclamation-points after it to make up the Great Wall of China and it would still never be enough.
That reaction wasn't random. Sam Raimi had more than just the talent to pull off the picture and more than just the right kind of talent. He also had that same love of the character, and it floated between every frame. Transmitting that through a big, Hollywood picture is quite a trick. With me, he managed it.
For a brief time, the movie could still bring on faint aftershocks of that initial reaction. This didn't, however, lead me to exaggerate the merits of the movie. It never became one of my favorites. I haven't watched it very often. The Green Goblin's "Power Ranger chic" look never fails to make me groan. It still managed to be a damn good movie though, and in spite of some missteps, a damn fine adaptation of the character and his world.
SPIDER-MAN was a huge hit. It received mixed critical reviews. Two years later, the gang behind the first film returned with SPIDER-MAN 2. It cost more and didn't make as much but it met with smashing critical success. People saying it was better than the original. Calling it the best comic adaptation of all time. Saying it transcended the comic material, which is what people who look down upon comics but know nothing of them always say when they like something based on one.
Nearly seven years ago, I wrote about SM2, and, as is so often my habit, took a very different view. Here's what I had to say about it then:
THE TANGLED WEB OF "SPIDER-MAN 2"
20 Oct., 2005
It raked in a fortune at the box office, was greeted with nearly universal critical approval, and, in the year since its release, has frequently been a hailed as one of the best comic book movies of all time. Often, as the best.
But I didn't like SPIDER-MAN 2.
More than that, I didn't even think it was a good movie. I didn't hate it, though my reaction to it admittedly becomes much firmer when faced with the blind adoration of many of its fans. It had its moments, some of them wonderful. Overall, though, not good. Frequently awful, in fact. Inferior to the mostly excellent original in pretty much every meaningful way.
Being a lifelong comic fan, I'm always trying, when I begin one of these reviews, to work out some sort of formula that allows me to offer criticism of these movies as both movies and as adaptations. A movie can, after all, be a good one even if it's a poor adaptation, just as the reverse can be the case if the material isn't well suited for the screen. For fans of the characters and stories, of course, the ideal is to have both a good film and a good adaptation. For this piece, I'm not going to make as much of an effort to separate the two, aiming instead for something a little less structured and a lot more free-flowing; more like a series of observations. This are several potential pit-falls to this approach and I may not avoid them all. For the record though, I'm not one who thinks a poor adaptation necessarily makes for a poor film.
On with the show...
In discussing the film in different venues, I've often referred to it as SPIDER-MAN 1 FOR MORONS. Thematically, the movie is simply a rehash of SPIDER-MAN, retreading the same power/responsibility theme that had already been covered in the first film and doing so in exactly the same way, often using exactly the same scenes. Have great power, shirk responsibility, bad things happen, resume responsibility. Rinse. Or, depending on the metaphor one feels is more appropriate, wipe and flush. Essentially a remake, it adds exactly nothing to the story of the original film and in fact takes much away from it in the retelling. Most of the humor is eliminated, most of the elements that allowed us to identify with Peter are removed or severely watered-down and, most egregiously, the story is retold with all the subtlety of a loaded log-truck traveling up a bad road. Lots of noise, lots of flash, lots of driving home the points the film wants to make in sledgehammer-to-the-face fashion but far less intelligence, little charm, little wit and no real point.
This alone isn't necessarily sufficient grounds to damn SPIDER-MAN 2. The power/responsibility theme, even if it is simply being rehashed, is still a Spider-Man theme (though as I'll get into in a moment, the movie deviates wildly from the source material in most matters). And big, dumbed-down rehashes can be fun sometimes too.
"Fun," however, isn't a word in the vocabulary of SPIDER-MAN 2.
In the comics, being Spider-Man caused Peter Parker plenty of problems but it also served as a release from the frequently high stress of his ordinary life. As Spider-Man, he could swing free through the city on a pleasant day, flip off rooftops with reckless abandon and be as big a clown as he wanted. The mask freed him. As dangerous as his activities could be, they were also fun. His Spider-Man persona was that of a merry prankster, a smartass, always throwing wisecracks, relentlessly teasing and taunting the stuffy underworld stiffs he battled, reveling in the role.
This is a crucial elements of Spider-Man, one of the central ones. The first film, though arguably underplaying it, clearly understood it. The second, however, hasn't a clue. Being Spider-Man is presented in it as some sort of cold, harsh discipline to be engaged in relentlessly, joylessly, in martial fashion and as a matter of "responsible behavior," regardless of whatever trouble it may cause in one's own life. Everything else is to be held as a secondary concern; the discipline must always come first.
This is, to put it mildly, quite out of step with the spirit of Spider-Man. Having chosen to shear away such a crucial element of the character, however, director Sam Raimi inexplicably chooses, as the major source for the film's story, a plotline from the comics which depended entirely upon this clown persona element he'd excised. The result is a hollow adaptation, one that uses superficial elements of the original story to tell an entirely different one.
In "Spider-Man No More,"[1] the principal comic story from which most of SPIDER-MAN 2 is drawn, Peter, after years as a costumed crimefighter, had lost touch with why he'd become Spider-Man in the first place. Maintaining the identity was causing him a lot of problems and he was becoming convinced that, because it was fun and got in the way of his more adult pursuits, it was an immature thing. "...every boy, sooner or later," Peter thinks, "must put away his toys, and become a man." It was time to grow up, so "toy" Spidey went in the trash, in that famous image from the comic recreated in the movie. After Peter renounced his secret identity, crime became, for him, what it is to most people; a distant thing about which he heard on the news. Though it took some adjusting, this distance made it much easier to ignore. One night, though, Peter, passing by a warehouse, sees a night watchman being attacked by a pair of thugs. With the crime no longer distant but right there, up close and personal, he doesn't hesitate for a moment to jump into the fray and put away the two would-be thieves. The incident and the sight of the watchman, an older fellow, bring flooding back the memory of his Uncle Ben and of the reason he really became Spider-Man--those things with which he'd lost touch--and this makes him realize he'd gotten the equation reversed. Spider-Man wasn't a toy of childhood. It was his mature acceptance of responsibility, not a youthful shirking of it. He reclaims the mask and swears that no one will ever come to harm because Spider-Man failed to act.
In SPIDER-MAN 2, being Spider-Man isn't something Peter enjoys at all and though he helps others, it seems to serve no positive function in his own life--it is, instead, a joyless exercise through which he puts himself in almost masochistic fashion and that he allows to utterly consume his life because he feels it's the responsible thing to do. He hasn't lost touch with why he became Spider-Man. He has, in fact, become obsessed by it to a very unhealthy degree. When he has an imaginary conversation with his deceased Uncle Ben and tells him he's going to stop being Spider-Man, it's a conscious walking away from what he'd seen and accepted as a responsibility.[2] Such a characterization of Peter is a drastic deviation from "Spider-Man No More" and from nearly all of the over 40 years worth of comic stories. This sharp disconnect from the source material is made even sharper by a scene in which Peter witnesses a mugging a few feet away from him, mirroring the one in the original "Spider-Man No More" story, and, with the victim yelling for help, just walks away.[3]
Such a gross mischaracterization is actually the point where an earlier ill-conceived snowball became an avalanche. That early snowball was set to rolling at the end of the first film, when Peter tells M.J., the love of his life, that he can only be her friend, nothing more. It was only one scene and troubling though it was, it did arguably help give a more operatic ending to the movie. And, of course, it could be written off later without too much trouble. Unfortunately, Raimi decided, instead, to build an entire movie upon it. Thus was born the Peter Parker of SPIDER-MAN 2 who, out of a combination of masochistic commitment to being Spider-Man and an obsessive fear of putting loved ones in danger, shuns intimate human contact and commits himself to a lonely, loveless existence--that harsh, joyless discipline. This is a Peter Parker entirely alien to the comic character. In the book, Peter actively pursued romantic interests over the years, like any other normal person. Even after Gwen Stacy, whom he intended to marry, was murdered by the Green Goblin because of her connection to him, he never adopted the course chosen by the movie Peter. And for good reason; it's a completely irrational choice. In the first film, it appeared at the very end out of nowhere. During the course of the movie, the Green Goblin had learned that Peter was Spider-Man and had menaced M.J. and his Aunt May. This is a problem, but the obvious solution is for Peter to zealously guard his secret identity. If it's compromised, all of his friends and family would be in danger in any case.[4] Unless he planned to cut off all human contact--and he clearly didn't--it made no sense to deny himself a romantic interest. Yet that's exactly what he decided to do in "reaction" to the Goblin's actions. The filmmakers arbitrarily committed movie Peter to this inane choice, setting up being Spider-Man and having a real life as all-or-nothing mutually exclusive options. This notion doesn't logically flow from anything in the movie and has more patently obvious holes in it than a Swiss cheese but it becomes the "rationale," if the word can be so abused, for his giving up Spider-Man. It's the only way he thinks he can live a normal life.
In the all-important matter of M.J., we can only empathize with Peter to the degree to which we choose to ignore the fact that he's losing the love of his life only because he, himself, is needlessly throwing her away.[5] M.J., at the end of the film, easily refutes his "reasoning" for doing so by pointing out another of those obvious holes in the cheese; she's an adult, and can make her own decision about what kind of risks she's willing to take. In the meantime though, we've had to sit through two hours of a movie allegedly about Peter Parker/Spider-Man wherein a character who isn't recognizable as Peter Parker or Spider-Man commits to a transparently illogical, arbitrarily-imposed decision Peter Parker never made, requiring him to go through a process through which Peter Parker never had to go in order to reach a conclusion that should have been obvious to anyone from the beginning.
Not very impressive, either as an adaptation or as a film on its own merits.
In the adaptation department, Dr. Octopus doesn't fare much better than Spider-Man. The movie appropriates the spectacular visual of Doc Ock with little of the substance. This isn't necessarily a bad decision--in spite of the efforts of various writers over the years to better shade the character, Doc Ock, in the books, is still rather bland and lacking in depth. He's insane, obsessive, greedy, self-absorbed--quite a weird little guy. The accident that grafts his mechanical arms to his body damages his mind but he wasn't in very good shape in that department to begin with; the brain damage only made bad matters worse. Unfortunately, the filmmakers don't succeed in replacing this with anything better. Their attempt to build a better Dr. Octopus makes of him a sort of sympathetic pseudo-villain. Movie Ock is actually a good guy, a fellow with a loving wife and stable life, selflessly dedicated to the cause of bettering mankind. He only does bad things because a protective microchip on his neck burns out during the accident allowing the artificial intelligence in his mechanical arms to manipulate him into it.
The scope of Spider-Man's powers in the film offers another wild deviation from the source material adopted to the film's detriment. This, too, was born, somewhat, in the first film, where we see Spider-Man exhibiting strength and ruggedness that if not completely beyond the abilities of the comic version are certainly at the extreme end of those abilities. With SPIDER-MAN 2, however, all restraint goes out the window. At one point, when his webs stop working in mid-swing, he falls what looks like 50 or 60 stories, crashes into a roof and gets right up without even having the wind knocked out of him (comic Spidey would have been killed instantly by such a fall). Later, he takes another nasty fall and lands with his bare midsection crunching, full body weight, across the lip of a dumpster. Again, no apparent harm. Later, another nasty fall and he bounces off the roof of a car. This time, he appears to be injured but only for humorous purposes (the scene is a repeat of the playing-across-rooftops scene from the first movie[6]). In his battles with Dr. Octopus, he's repeatedly slammed face-first into stone and brick walls; slammed so hard those walls crack and crumble under the impact of his face and body. They leave him completely unmarked and don't even slow him down. (Comic Spidey has, when weakened, been bloodied by ordinary human foes). He falls off a speeding el train, landing on the paved street far below, and zips right back into action without a moment's pause. By far the most outrageous scene though (and the most embarrassingly awful), is the one wherein he stops that train, speeding out of control, with his bare hands.[7]
Such things look absolutely ridiculous on the screen; they're abjectly pointless, brutal assaults on the willingness of the audience to suspend disbelief. Perhaps more importantly, they amount to an attack on another core element of the Spider-Man character: his basic humanity. This was the very thing that made Spider-Man so revolutionary in the 1960s. He's "not Superman," to quote Aunt May's laugh-line from the first movie. He isn't a god pretending to be a regular fellow; he is a regular fellow who just happens to gain amazing powers. Throughout SPIDER-MAN 2 though, he's presented as an all-but-indestructible juggernaut, with strength and durability so far beyond our frame of reference as to seem positively otherworldly. This works to undermine our ability to relate to the character; it's a constant visual reminder that he's not one of us--taken to the extreme it is in the movie, not even remotely one of us.
Related to this is another of the character's core attributes brutalized by this treatment: his bravery. For all of Peter's doubts and anxieties, Spidey is a very gutsy fellow. Frequently, he's completely outmatched by his opponents. In the early years of the book, which saw the introduction of most of the key villains, it became a virtual formula that he would fail in his first attempt at taking them down, sometimes rather spectacularly being served a dish of his own posterior. In the latter category belongs his first encounter with Dr. Octopus.[8] Ock dismantled him in short order, tossing him aside when he was through like a piece of refuse. But as in all those other stories, Peter gets it together, comes back and, defying the odds, puts the villain away. By contrast, it's difficult to imagine anyone giving too much trouble to the character with the capabilities we see in SPIDER-MAN 2, much less outmatching him. He's relentless, unstoppable, possessed of Hulk-like strength and nearly impossible to injure; attributing bravery to him for what he does is like attributing it to a person who squashes a bug.[9]
Of course, no one wants to see a movie about a "hero" squashing a bug. The filmmakers deal with the problem they've created in so radically amping up Spider-Man's powers in exactly the wrong way; they radically amp up the durability of the villain in order to make him more of a match. They don't bother to give any in-story reason for it either. As with their Spider-Man's vow of celibacy earlier, this is a matter of one bad decision dictating another. The result is both an absurdity made even more absurd and a thing so completely removed from the source material as to be unrecognizable. In both the comics and the movie, Dr. Octopus is bonded with his mechanical arms via a lab accident but he, himself, has no superpowers--physically, he remains a normal human. In a fight with Spider-Man, comic Ock must let his mechanical arms do the work and be careful not to let Spidey land a solid blow on him. One good shot and it's all over. In the movie though, Spider-Man is shown laying into Ock with full-blown, right-to-the-face haymakers over and over again, to little or no apparent effect. In a bank, he hits Ock so hard with a very large bag of coins that Ock is blasted backwards, his head and body leaving a crater in a rock wall, again little effect. Moments later, he hits Ock with a desk so hard it blows Ock off his feet, across the room, through a plate-glass window, and into the side of a car outside. Even after all that, Ock's impact on the car is still violent enough to blast it off the ground as though another car had plowed into it at a high speed. It doesn't even slow Ock down.
And so on.
"Spiderman 2" isn't one to let a little thing like internal logic or consistency get in its way either. The fellow who can stop a train with his bare hands can't even slow down Ock with repeated haymakers but frail old Aunt May manages to stagger Ock by striking him with her umbrella.[10] The film's lowest point in this regard occurs as the dreadful climax of the elevated train sequence. As noted earlier, the entire film presents Peter as being almost pathologically obsessed with the notion that his activities as Spider-Man pose a danger to his friends and family; it is, in fact, his central motivation throughout the film. If such a fear had no other effect, it would certainly lead him to zealously guard his secret identity, exposure of which would be the very thing that would place his loved ones in danger. His anxiety about this is so great that he's made of his life a misery, but during the train sequence, he whips off his mask and needlessly exposes his identity to the entire train full of people.[11] Rumor at the time was that this was done at the insistence of star Tobey McGuire, who wanted to be more strongly associated by moviegoers with the character of Spider-Man rather than just nerdy Peter Parker. This seems likely, as the entire film is replete with scenes where, while out as Spider-Man, he removes his mask. It thus offers a character far more more obsessed than his comic counterpart has ever been with the fear of placing his loved ones in danger via his Spidey activities, but one who, paradoxically, is far more careless--almost cavalierly careless--than his comic counterpart about having his identity revealed to the world.
SPIDER-MAN 2 was a big success and I know I'm pushing a very large rock up a very steep hill on this one but I also know that history's judgment of a film often isn't the same as that passed by the temporary passions of its own day. I don't really have any formal closing comments here. These are some of my observations on the film and why I didn't like it. Take them for what they're worth.
--j.
---
[1] From "Amazing Spider-Man" #50
[2] Raimi visualizes this by having Peter revert to his former pre-Spider-Man nerdy self from the first film.
[3] The only exception to this that springs readily to mind is "Spidey Cops Out" from "Amazing Spider-Man" #112, wherein, in the course of two pages, Spidey encounters but refuses to get involved in a mugging, then a kidnapping, the latter with the victim screaming to him for help. In the story, Aunt May had disappeared and he'd decided it was more important to try to find her than to get involved in the incidents in question. Still, it comes across as a gross mischaracterization (the fact that I even remember it attests to that). The story was written by Gerry Conway. It was only his second issue on the book and he hadn't quite gotten a handle on the character yet. He went on to a classic run.
[4] He keeps M.J. at "just friends" arm's length throughout SPIDER-MAN 2 but she's still kidnapped because of the Spidey connection.
[5] In the comics, the creators were forever devising ways to put Spider-Man between Peter and his various romantic interests but as contrived as they sometimes were, they made much more sense and you could empathize with Peter's plight. Betty Brant, after the death of her ne'er-do-well brother, was very firm on the point that she wanted a stable, boring mate who took no chances. Gwen Stacy believed Spider-Man had murdered her father. And so on.
[6] Significant portions of the movie were direct repeats of things from the first film. We get Peter taking out the garbage again, leading to another familiar conversation with M.J. We get the villain-talking-to-himself scene (in the first movie, it was Osbourne talking with his evil Goblin side--this time around, it's Octavius conversing with his mechanical arms). Another rescue of another child from another burning building. Another conversation with Uncle Ben (same car set, same wardrobe as the first time around). A repeat of that roof-jumping scene, played for comedy as it was the first time around. M.J. is once again kidnapped by the villain in order to draw out Spider-Man. The villain once again has a last-minute moment where he comes to his senses. And so on.
[7] Regarding the scope of Spidey's strength, there are moments of wild inconsistency in the comics (the most outrageous--and idiotic--probably being his takedown of the cosmically-powered Firelord in Amazing Spider-Man #269-270), but stopping a speeding train like that is a feat worthy of the Hulk; it isn't even remotely within the power range of any version of Spider-Man we've seen before. I singled out the train thing but that's only the most outrageous example of this sort of thing.
[8] From "Amazing Spider-Man" #3, another story from which SPIDER-MAN 2 is drawn.
[9] To put a finer point on this line of criticism, one of the most celebrated moments from the comic came in "Amazing Spider-Man" #32-33, when Spider-Man is pinned beneath a large piece of machinery in a room that is rapidly flooding. A few feet away is a new serum that will heal a dying Aunt May. If he can't free himself, he'll die, and, without the serum, she'll die. He's completely exhausted though. He's been running for days without a break. He'd just fought his way through a phalanx of hoods then gone 10 rounds with Dr. Octopus. The machine above him is massive. When he first tries, he can't budge it an inch. Between the two issues he spends seven pages--an eternity, by Silver Age comic standards--struggling to free himself, thinking of Aunt May, beating himself up again for Uncle Ben's death, insisting to himself that he won't let May die.
And, throughout the course of this, slowly, ever so painfully, he manages to begin lifting the machine off his back and, with the strain so great he's on the verge of blacking out, he frees himself. The sequence is one of the greatest moments in the history of superhero comics and is widely regarded as Spider-Man's defining moment. As such, its a severe criticism of SPIDER-MAN 2 indeed to note the obvious fact that such a sequence--Spidey's defining moment--would, after seeing what he does in the second film, look insultingly disrespectful of continuity if included in any subsequent film.
[10] She saves Spider-Man's life by doing so--Ock was about to skewer him on a large blade. In SPIDER-MAN 2, May is a fan of Spider-Man and dislikes Dr. Octopus, exactly the opposite of the comics.
[11] The passengers' subsequent promise that they won't tell anyone is pure corn, and handled in such a disgustingly saccharine manner as to be wretch-inducing--easily the lowest depth the film plumbs.
...
This is reprinted from my comics blog, here:
http://comicscomments.blogspot.com/2005/10/tangled-web-of-spider-man-2.html
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Mickey's Last
July 17th was the 6th anniversary of the
death, at the age of 88, of Mickey Spillane, one of the bestselling
authors of all time. The Mick was an unpretentious, even
anti-pretentious, writer of hardboiled crime stories, with emphasis on
the "hard"--hard-hitting, hard drinking, hard-headed, and pushing the
envelope with regard to sex and violence in popular fiction damn hard.
His most famous creation is Mike Hammer, and to the extent that the
character was Spillane's fantasy version of himself--and it's probably
fair to assume this was largely the case--it doesn't speak well of him,
but Spillane was an extraordinarily talented pulpster. Their often
reprehensible aspects aside, his tales sold so well because they're damn
good. I was a fan.
Upon
hearing the news he'd died, I spent an hour or two writing a sort of
obituary in a rough counterfeit of his style, with several twists on
some of his more memorable lines. I've never really done much with it. I
came across it a few weeks ago, decided I sort of liked it, and,
entirely by coincidence, the sixth anniversary of his death was
approaching, so I thought I'd post it here (then forgot about it until a
few days after the anniversary--sue me):
MICKEY'S LAST
The old man coughed and sputtered, tossed in his bed and cursed whatever gods made him old, made him weak, made him sick. "God must be a woman," he grumbled, and maybe the thought made him feel a little better. As tired as he was, he was still a tough old bastard, but as he sensed his end upon him, he knew Death was one rap he wasn't going to beat.
"Fuck you," he growled. "I got one more story to finish, and you can't have me 'till it's done."
Hauling himself off the bed and over to his desk took nearly everything he had, but he managed it, flopping into his chair with a grunt, wheezing, trying to catch his breath. His old Smith-Corona--"Betsy," he called her--was there, the paper already spooled and ready to go, carriage poised where he'd left it earlier. He'd banged out a lot of tales on the old girl over the years. All the blood and thunder that had made him one of the best selling pulp writers in human history had spooled though her on the way from his mind to the book-shelves. Beatings, rapes, murders, all the tools of the hardboiled trade--she'd seen it all.
He didn't have a lot of time left, now, though, and he knew it. His next story was nearly written. His last story. For weeks, as he'd felt Death creeping up on him, he'd worked on it like a madman, devoting his every waking hour to it, correcting as he went along. It was put-up or shut-up time. Get it in the can, or forever hold your peace.
And he desperately wanted to get it in the can. Of all the lousy luck, he'd been hit with some first-rate inspiration right here in the last few days of his life. "With me it always has to be the hard way," he thought, and the curse he spat at malevolent fate filled the room, as he glanced at the page to remember where he'd stopped, paused a bit to put himself in the moment and try to get the swimming feeling out of his head, and started typing it out.
This wasn't just hack-work, his last story. He'd done hack-work, and he knew the difference between it and the real stuff, even if he made a show of never giving a damn one way or the other. That's why he wanted to get this new story done--it was the real stuff, and it was really good. It was the best damn thing he'd ever written. He had to get it on the page.
He'd known how it was going to end before he'd started, and, after working through it in his head for a few weeks, he knew it was nearly finished. He even had a pretty good idea of what the last paragraph would say--it would be a big reveal, and a big blowout ending. It was just a matter of getting it there. "Best damn thing I've ever written." The thought drove him. As he typed along, he was fading, though, no way around it. He was numb, his eyes getting heavy. He had the story by the balls, but his fingers flew over the keyboard more and more slowly. For an hour, he kept himself focused, kept himself together, hammered away at it at best speed.
Finally, he'd nearly licked it. He'd broken himself, but it seemed he'd outrun death after all. He was down to the end, the big finale. It felt good, a weight off his chest. He was ready to put his much-contemplated final paragraph into place and call it a wrap. He knew roughly how he wanted it to go; he'd turned it over enough in his head. He definitely knew the last line. He paused to think it out. It had to be perfect--it would be the last paragraph of the last story he'd ever write. The last paragraph of the best story he'd ever written. He leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, breathing deeply and mulling it over until he had it cold perfect, every word in line in his head. He cracked his knuckles, and a smile crossed his lips. As he opened his eyes, he noticed, through his window, the first rays of the dawn sunlight peaking over the Carolina horizon. "Quite a sight," he thought, and he suddenly went lightheaded. "Goddamn it," disgustedly. He never felt his head hit the typewriter.
He was outside his body, a soul or a spirit or some damn thing. He could see himself lying in a pile slumped over his typewriter and knew his big finale would never be written. He shook his head, offered another disgusted "goddamn it." Beside him stood a figure in a black robe with the face of a corpse.
"Death, right?", he asked the visitor.
Corpse-face nodded his head.
"Y'know, I was almost finished with that," pointing to the typewriter.
"I know." Spectral, creepy voice.
The old man looked surprised. "You knew?"
Corpse-face noded again.
"Then... how could you?!" The old man thundered incredulously.
Corpse-face smiled wickedly at the old man. "It was easy."
* * *
To the extent that he was his characters, the Mick was a reactionary, a sadist, a misogynist, a scumbag, and there's not a whole hell of a lot good you can say about that.
He was a hell of a writer, though. And sometimes, that hell is enough.
Mickey Spillane died today, at 88 years of age. He'll be missed.
--j.
17 July, 2006
---
A
few extra notes: Spillane died of pancreatic carcinoma. At the time
this was written, I didn't know that. It's years ago, of course, but as I
recall, the press reports just mentioned an illness, and I made him
sort of generically ill. Also, my comments about his character at the
end could be taken as pretty harsh, if not read carefully. People who
knew the Mick said he was actually a good fellow, and if that's true,
I'm glad to hear it.
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Rating the ALIEN
PROMETHEUS, Ridley Scott's much-hyped prequel to ALIEN is upon us, and in anticipation, Lebeau, over on Le Blog, has written some thoughts on the ALIEN franchise. I was going to comment on it, but, as happened a few months ago when I was replying to some things he'd written about Kevin Smith, it started to run a bit long, and, as then, I thought, "why not post it here?"
The "c" word is overused. There can be no denying it. Times being what they are, it has simply become a part of our casual, everyday conversation, alongside a lot of other unfortunate habits that progressively degrade our language. I've probably abused it myself on occasion. This, however, is a case when justice wouldn't be served by the application of any lesser word.
The original ALIEN (1979) is, simply put, a classic.
It wasn't entirely "original," though. Lebeau quotes ALIEN co-writer Dan O'Bannon: "I didn't steal ALIEN from anybody. I stole it from everybody!" It wasn't quite "everybody." Plot-wise, the film was a warmed-over stew of basic story elements lifted from IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE and Mario Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, with a tiny smidgen of THE THING and a pinch of post-Watergate Malevolent Authority from JAWS thrown in to taste.[1]
Still, it would be absurd to look upon the film as a mere retread. If that had been all there was to it, it wouldn't have earned the revered place it rightfully holds in cinema history. No, this ALIEN's DNA was a lot more rich and varied. First, it was just a hell of a movie, a great, gory, suspense-filled horror picture full of mystery and menace that hooked you early and held you 'til the end. Beyond that, nearly everything about the way the film is written, designed, performed, and shot is practically revolutionary, a giant leap forward for genre pictures. In ways that count--and that far outweigh any negative stigma that may attach to its acknowledged plot recycling--ALIEN was, indeed, an original. It's also--to clip another overused but entirely appropriate accolade--a film ahead of its time. So ahead of its time, in fact, that, as I see it, it is, for the most part, still ahead of its time.
Often--far too often, in my view--filmmakers choose to present these kinds of sci-fi/fantasy stories through the lens of melodrama. Dialogue of puffed-up soap-opera pseudo-profundity, delivered through broad, anti-naturalistic performances that often slip into positively overwrought. Two years before ALIEN, STAR WARS had set a standard for this species of film, and practically every line of dialogue in it is an example of this phenomenon. Top-shelf melodrama, sure, but no one at any point acting or sounding like real people in a real world.
The worlds in which these stories are set often don't look or sound real or seem plausible or feel relatable. Escapism, an important element of this kind of fiction, is often allowed to predominate to the detriment of such considerations,[2] which, while I'm certainly never down on escapism, I've always found unfortunate, because I think it contributed to the ghettoization of this brand of genre cinema for decades, and still contributes mightily to the Philistinian-yet-widespread perception that such films are inherently something between entirely unserious popcorn and low-grade trash for the socially impaired.
ALIEN is a key film in the development of a much more naturalistic approach to sci-fi and fantasy. The characters don't indulge in melodrama-speak. They don't use a lot of pseudo-futuristic pseudo-jargon or techno-babble. They yack about mundane subjects over dinner, complain about not being paid enough, talk over one another, argue at times. They're a band of ordinary working stiffs and seem entirely like people who could exist in the real world. Instantly relatable. And their world feels real. Instead of some clean, neat, sterile environment with a lot of weird-production-design-elements-because-it's-the-future-and-weird, their ship looks like an actual workspace--industrial, grimy, practical, full of equipment that looks both usable and used.[3] When the alien, in its various forms, appears, it seems in every way like a genuine, organic being, one that is alien. The reactions of the various crewmembers to their increasingly dire situation feel quite real, as well. There is, in all of this, a reclamation of the genre from those whose (mis)treatment of it has resulted in its being so often dismissed as mere nerd porn.
ALIEN is special in many other ways, as well.
Its special effects--all practical, in the blessed pre-CGI era--are, almost without exception, excellent (the visual effects took an Academy Award in that category). Thirty-three years later, nearly all of them are not only still impressive but, for the most part, blow away anything we get out of the computers that do all the work for us these days. To understand how impressive this is, consider what passed for special effects a few decades before ALIEN.
More broadly, the film is a consistent visual treat. Its tagline on release was "In space, no one can hear you scream," and space, as the film presents it from the opening, is a vast, cold, lonely, and inhospitable place indeed, a place where a seemingly-immense mining ship amounts to a tiny bit of nothing. A hell of a place to get into a jam. As the story proceeds to its conclusion, the ship becomes a claustrophobic death-trap, where a catastrophic fate-worse-than-death may be lurking literally anywhere in the smoke, flashing lights, and shadows of its seemingly ever-tightening corridors. By the end, Ripley, the last survivor, must try to save herself while trapped in the single room of a shuttle with the creature. All of this is pure visual storytelling--the last 20 or so minutes of the film contain almost no dialogue.
Lebeau pays appropriate homage to the film's imagery:
This was only Ridley Scott's second feature as a director. His next, BLADE RUNNER, was even more impressive (and more important). He capped off a trilogy of solid genre efforts with LEGEND, a film that, while not up to his earlier efforts, was still a visually remarkable and immensely enjoyable fairy tale.[4] Unfortunately, this was virtually the death of Scott as an interesting filmmaker. His artistic collapse was sudden and it was shocking but it was very nearly complete. Of his subsequent 17 features, only THELMA & LOUISE rose above the level of entirely forgettable, standard-issue Hollywood trash. There's a great deal of hype surrounding his present return to the ALIEN fold with PROMETHEUS. The last 27 years of his career offer absolutely nothing to justify this.
Lebeau covers the entire ALIEN franchise that followed, but there isn't really that much to say about the others. James Cameron's ALIENS was a big moneymaker and when younger, I was rather fond of it. Since I grew up, I don't find it holds up as well.
Lebeau says something about it I can get behind:
I won't beat up on ALIENS too much. There's nothing wrong with a movie being a roller-coaster, and this loud, fast-paced, explosion-filled picture certainly qualifies as that. There just isn't really anything special about it.
The subsequent films continued this decline. For the most part, they're just terrible. Lebeau covers them, but I think I'll just defer to him and call this a wrap.
--j.
---
[1] As disarming as it is to see O'Bannon freely concede his "borrowings," he isn't always so open about them--at least once, he denied having ever seen PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. Readers can view both films and form their own conclusions regarding the veracity of this claim. The existence of this footnote indicates my own.
[2] For examples, see absolutely everything in the very unfortunate STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.
[3] Since I knocked STAR WARS on the melodrama stuff, I'll note that it deserves credit for moving production design in this direction. A lot of the world of that film looks dirty and run down--well-used, worn out. Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS, from 5 years earlier, also featured a well-worn work-space of a space-station.
[4] It was, however, one that fell back into that pattern of anti-naturalistic dialogue I was dissing earlier. The persistence of this approach and the sparsity of material that runs counter to it (the revised BATTLESTAR GALACTICA being a prominent example of the latter) is one of the ways in which I think ALIEN, today, is still ahead of its time.
[5] Both of which began life as intended ALIEN rip-offs, then evolved in more original directions.
[6] In SOUTHERN COMFORT, the soldiers were untested recruits and undisciplined weekend warriors who had, at no time, been in any sort of dangerous combat situation. Their repeated stupid decisions were an outgrowth of this. This film's colonial Marines, by contrast, are described as tough, seasoned vets and played by guys in their 30s. They turn out to be a lot of utterly ineffectual, all-mouth cretins who fall apart at the slightest sign of trouble and make their own situation worse at every turn solely because the script calls for it. [This note added 11 June, 2012]
The "c" word is overused. There can be no denying it. Times being what they are, it has simply become a part of our casual, everyday conversation, alongside a lot of other unfortunate habits that progressively degrade our language. I've probably abused it myself on occasion. This, however, is a case when justice wouldn't be served by the application of any lesser word.
The original ALIEN (1979) is, simply put, a classic.
Still, it would be absurd to look upon the film as a mere retread. If that had been all there was to it, it wouldn't have earned the revered place it rightfully holds in cinema history. No, this ALIEN's DNA was a lot more rich and varied. First, it was just a hell of a movie, a great, gory, suspense-filled horror picture full of mystery and menace that hooked you early and held you 'til the end. Beyond that, nearly everything about the way the film is written, designed, performed, and shot is practically revolutionary, a giant leap forward for genre pictures. In ways that count--and that far outweigh any negative stigma that may attach to its acknowledged plot recycling--ALIEN was, indeed, an original. It's also--to clip another overused but entirely appropriate accolade--a film ahead of its time. So ahead of its time, in fact, that, as I see it, it is, for the most part, still ahead of its time.
Often--far too often, in my view--filmmakers choose to present these kinds of sci-fi/fantasy stories through the lens of melodrama. Dialogue of puffed-up soap-opera pseudo-profundity, delivered through broad, anti-naturalistic performances that often slip into positively overwrought. Two years before ALIEN, STAR WARS had set a standard for this species of film, and practically every line of dialogue in it is an example of this phenomenon. Top-shelf melodrama, sure, but no one at any point acting or sounding like real people in a real world.
The worlds in which these stories are set often don't look or sound real or seem plausible or feel relatable. Escapism, an important element of this kind of fiction, is often allowed to predominate to the detriment of such considerations,[2] which, while I'm certainly never down on escapism, I've always found unfortunate, because I think it contributed to the ghettoization of this brand of genre cinema for decades, and still contributes mightily to the Philistinian-yet-widespread perception that such films are inherently something between entirely unserious popcorn and low-grade trash for the socially impaired.
ALIEN is a key film in the development of a much more naturalistic approach to sci-fi and fantasy. The characters don't indulge in melodrama-speak. They don't use a lot of pseudo-futuristic pseudo-jargon or techno-babble. They yack about mundane subjects over dinner, complain about not being paid enough, talk over one another, argue at times. They're a band of ordinary working stiffs and seem entirely like people who could exist in the real world. Instantly relatable. And their world feels real. Instead of some clean, neat, sterile environment with a lot of weird-production-design-elements-because-it's-the-future-and-weird, their ship looks like an actual workspace--industrial, grimy, practical, full of equipment that looks both usable and used.[3] When the alien, in its various forms, appears, it seems in every way like a genuine, organic being, one that is alien. The reactions of the various crewmembers to their increasingly dire situation feel quite real, as well. There is, in all of this, a reclamation of the genre from those whose (mis)treatment of it has resulted in its being so often dismissed as mere nerd porn.
ALIEN is special in many other ways, as well.
Its special effects--all practical, in the blessed pre-CGI era--are, almost without exception, excellent (the visual effects took an Academy Award in that category). Thirty-three years later, nearly all of them are not only still impressive but, for the most part, blow away anything we get out of the computers that do all the work for us these days. To understand how impressive this is, consider what passed for special effects a few decades before ALIEN.
More broadly, the film is a consistent visual treat. Its tagline on release was "In space, no one can hear you scream," and space, as the film presents it from the opening, is a vast, cold, lonely, and inhospitable place indeed, a place where a seemingly-immense mining ship amounts to a tiny bit of nothing. A hell of a place to get into a jam. As the story proceeds to its conclusion, the ship becomes a claustrophobic death-trap, where a catastrophic fate-worse-than-death may be lurking literally anywhere in the smoke, flashing lights, and shadows of its seemingly ever-tightening corridors. By the end, Ripley, the last survivor, must try to save herself while trapped in the single room of a shuttle with the creature. All of this is pure visual storytelling--the last 20 or so minutes of the film contain almost no dialogue.
Lebeau pays appropriate homage to the film's imagery:
"Alien gave us so many indelible images that have seeped into pop culture... Alien (along with Scott’s Blade Runner) created a new set of visuals that would inform every science fiction movie made in the last several decades. Its cultural impact can't be under-estimated."This was Derek Vanlint's first feature as cinematographer. He made only two other movies in that capacity before his death in 2010.
This was only Ridley Scott's second feature as a director. His next, BLADE RUNNER, was even more impressive (and more important). He capped off a trilogy of solid genre efforts with LEGEND, a film that, while not up to his earlier efforts, was still a visually remarkable and immensely enjoyable fairy tale.[4] Unfortunately, this was virtually the death of Scott as an interesting filmmaker. His artistic collapse was sudden and it was shocking but it was very nearly complete. Of his subsequent 17 features, only THELMA & LOUISE rose above the level of entirely forgettable, standard-issue Hollywood trash. There's a great deal of hype surrounding his present return to the ALIEN fold with PROMETHEUS. The last 27 years of his career offer absolutely nothing to justify this.
Lebeau covers the entire ALIEN franchise that followed, but there isn't really that much to say about the others. James Cameron's ALIENS was a big moneymaker and when younger, I was rather fond of it. Since I grew up, I don't find it holds up as well.
Lebeau says something about it I can get behind:
"The genius of Cameron's take on Alien was that he changed up the formula. Where Scott's film had been a psychological thriller which Scott described as a 'fun house', Cameron's sequel was a take-no-prisoners action movie more along the lines of a roller coaster."I don't see this (or anything else about ALIENS) as any sort of "genius," but I do think it prudent for sequels to aim for a great deal more than merely repeating the earlier film and while Cameron sort of got that sequels should be different (though his own replicated the plot structure of the original so closely that it could virtually be called a remake), he didn't get that they should be ambitious and didn't do anything new or original with his own. There's a much-remarked-upon motherhood theme that really isn't that interesting, as the background regarding Ripley's own daughter that would have given it weight is absent--entirely missing from the theatrical release and barely present even in the extended cut (it exists primarily as an excuse for the big finale). The android doesn't turn out to be a betrayer, as in the first movie, but that role is taken by a different character. Whereas Scott took a plot made up entirely of elements ripped off from previous material and made something new and special from it, Cameron took a whole heap of things from previous films and made a big, noisy film made up of things from previous films. He copied a great deal of the work he'd already done as an art director, production designer and general jack-of-all-trades on Roger Corman's GALAXY OF TERROR and FORBIDDEN WORLD.[5] It wasn't enough to merely duplicate scenes from THE TERMINATOR, Cameron hired actor Michael Biehn to repeat the scenes Biehn performed in THE TERMINATOR. The film's much-commented-upon "Vietnam metaphor" was he and producer Walter Hill rehashing what Hill had already done much better in SOUTHERN COMFORT.[6] Most wearying, he managed to throw in just about every worn-out action-movie cliché of ALIENS' era. If it had been done before (and done and done), Cameron wanted it done again for his picture. He replaced the one-man-army action hero in vogue at the time with a woman, and as a consequence, he's sometimes credited with the innovation of the female action-hero lead, but while this is wildly inaccurate, it is true that the success of ALIENS helped spur a proliferation of Ripleyesque screen tough-chicks that continues to this day.
I won't beat up on ALIENS too much. There's nothing wrong with a movie being a roller-coaster, and this loud, fast-paced, explosion-filled picture certainly qualifies as that. There just isn't really anything special about it.
The subsequent films continued this decline. For the most part, they're just terrible. Lebeau covers them, but I think I'll just defer to him and call this a wrap.
--j.
---
[1] As disarming as it is to see O'Bannon freely concede his "borrowings," he isn't always so open about them--at least once, he denied having ever seen PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. Readers can view both films and form their own conclusions regarding the veracity of this claim. The existence of this footnote indicates my own.
[2] For examples, see absolutely everything in the very unfortunate STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.
[3] Since I knocked STAR WARS on the melodrama stuff, I'll note that it deserves credit for moving production design in this direction. A lot of the world of that film looks dirty and run down--well-used, worn out. Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS, from 5 years earlier, also featured a well-worn work-space of a space-station.
[4] It was, however, one that fell back into that pattern of anti-naturalistic dialogue I was dissing earlier. The persistence of this approach and the sparsity of material that runs counter to it (the revised BATTLESTAR GALACTICA being a prominent example of the latter) is one of the ways in which I think ALIEN, today, is still ahead of its time.
[5] Both of which began life as intended ALIEN rip-offs, then evolved in more original directions.
[6] In SOUTHERN COMFORT, the soldiers were untested recruits and undisciplined weekend warriors who had, at no time, been in any sort of dangerous combat situation. Their repeated stupid decisions were an outgrowth of this. This film's colonial Marines, by contrast, are described as tough, seasoned vets and played by guys in their 30s. They turn out to be a lot of utterly ineffectual, all-mouth cretins who fall apart at the slightest sign of trouble and make their own situation worse at every turn solely because the script calls for it. [This note added 11 June, 2012]
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