DRAT! I forgot to pick up the spray-can of insecticide before leaving home to see joint directors Bob Persichetti and Peter Ramsay’s foray into fantasyland in search of a serious message delivered by an arachnid with human form.
Purists may cavil or quibble with the word “insecticide” in connection with spiders. Spiders are not insects. But insecticides work as efficiently on spiders as they do on insects.
The target audience for Spider-Man movies rather depends on the viewer’s movie-going experience and tastes. Its live-action Spidery predecessors are straight-out actioners in which a human, having been bitten by a spider, learns to morph into a comic-book hero whose penchant is to run around the city confronting and destroying wickedness. Comic-book heroes can do anything their creators want, on either paper or film. Credibility isn’t a problem.
When comic-book users grow up, hopefully they will discover real books that tell stories with words, not pictures, and live happily ever after. People, for whom translating all those words into narrative is difficult, find it easier to get their stories from pictures. Persichetti and Ramsay have crafted an animated thriller that takes 117-minutes to deliver the kind of movie with which members of that group feel comfortable.
If that’s you, don’t be embarrassed. Enjoy the movie, as the box-office person routinely implores you to do as she or he takes your money and delivers your ticket. I spoke with such a person as I moved from the cinema showing this Spider-Man to the one screening the day’s next movie. We agreed that we’d found animated Spider-Man to be tedious, even soporific.
At all cinemas
Who can be trusted?
In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.
If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.
Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.
Thank you,
Ian Meikle, editor
Leave a Reply