Hacker Cinema
Spider-Man 2
2004 · Film · 127 min
Part of Spider-Man Collection
Directed by Sam Raimi
ActionAdventureScience Fiction
Peter Parker is going through a major identity crisis. Burned out from being Spider-Man, he decides to shelve his superhero alter ego, which leaves the city suffering in the wake of carnage left by the evil Doc Ock. In the meantime, Parker still can't act on his feelings for Mary Jane Watson, a girl he's loved since childhood. A certain anger begins to brew in his best friend Harry Osborn as well...
4 positive2 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
> The point is that the heroes in the MCU stories didn't have to outgrow their nerd phase through virtues like courage, responsibility, duty - instead science made them into men. Peter Parker is bit by a spider, The Hulk got irradiated, Captain America got injected, Tony Stark's invention is a literal shell which superficially turns him into Iron Man and protects him from consequences/reality.
Tell us you know nothing of those characters without telling us you know nothing of those characters.
For both brevity and character recognition, I'll stick to Spider-Man. This is a character who starts off as an average person like any one of us, and suddenly, he's granted amazing powers after being bitten by a spider. However, that isn't what makes him a hero.
No, what makes Spider-Man a hero is his underlying theme of responsibility. He recognizes (largely due to his uncle's teachings) that he has a duty to use his powers to help others.
Unfortunately, his hero persona effectively ruins his life -- he regularly loses friends and loved ones, and his constant need to jump to the rescue of others prevents him from ever holding down a reasonable job, leaving him barely scraping by most of the time.
It's not all rainbows and unicorns for his hero persona, either, as the editor/owner of New York's top journalism outlet, the Daily Bugle, spends all of his time and effort portraying Spider-Man as a villain, he has a huge rogues gallery trying to kill him, and it's pretty common for other Marvel heroes to ignore or refuse him help when he needs it.
Leaving his costume behind and blending in with the rest of New York would unquestionably improve his life, and yet, he soldiers on, because he recognizes that should he do so, people will suffer and die for it.
Now, if you're only familiar with the movies, I'll grant that they haven't always done a good job at showing this. Sure, Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man lost his uncle early on, and his failure saving Gwen Stacy was tragic, but we never really see his hero persona impacting his regular day-to-day life. Tom Holland's Spider-Man largely has the same issue: we don't even see his uncle die, and it's not until nearly the end of his third movie that he finally loses someone. His choice to be forgotten at the end only sets up the possibility that he may finally be portrayed correctly in follow-up movies (I haven't seen the newest one yet).
If for some reason you feel the need to stick to films, the ones that come closest to capture how rough things are for Peter Parker trying to balance his private and hero lives, you're best off watching the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films, and in particular, the second one.
But realize that none of the movies get close to how bad Peter has it in the comics. It's somewhat of a meme that the Spider-Man writers hate Peter, given how much punishment they dole out to the character for daring to try and help others. As a result, he's constantly questioning whether he's making a difference and whether he should give it up, and it reaches a point where even the One Above All (i.e., God in the Marvel universe) has to give the guy a pep talk. But, in the end, he always rises to the occasion, no matter how much personal sacrifice he has to make.
That is why Peter Parker is a hero.
Nice project. Spider-Man (2000) was a great game for the time. It had a solid action/platforming engine, it had voice-acting with a number of actors pulled from some of the animated shows that were running at the time, and it came out before the 2002 Sam Riami film that forced most subsequent games to follow the movie timelines. I played the N64 version at the time, and found it fairly polished and much better than most of the Spider-Man games that came out before it (Arcade's Revenge, Maximum Carnage, Separation Anxiety, to name a few).
I would argue it would hold the crown for best Spider-Man game for some time until the flawed masterpiece Spider-Man 2 (2004) gave us truly amazing web-slinging physics in a sandbox environment, or the less-free-but-tighter-overall Ultimate Spider-Man in 2005.
> I hear a lot about comic book movies and those are getting extremely samey (or maybe they already were)
They weren't. Compare Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Batman Begins (2005). Compare X-Men (2000).
All of those had a story to tell. Recent superhero movies... not so much.
Like with many things in my lifetime I think perfection was achieved in this area at least a couple of decades ago. As the article states, nobody actually cared whether a DVD had Dolby or DTS on it. There was this perception that DTS must have been higher quality, so you'd imagine it was (and often the DTS version sounded louder due to calibration issues).
Our relentless insistence on progression has led to gimmicks like Dolby Atmos. It really doesn't add much of value to anything. It's just a new logo to put on cheap plastic soundbars that will be in landfills in a decade.
When you watch movies from the early days of Dolby Digital in the 80s you can tell that progress has been made since then. But watch a movie from the early 2000s and it will sound just like one today. In fact, they often sound better. Examples are Lord of the Rings, Spider-man 2 and War of the Worlds.
Why can't we just be happy?
Ah yes, Blender the "hobbyist" tool that's also:
* Used by NASA for a lot of their 3d modelling
* Used in Spider Man 2 for storyboarding
* Used for some special effects in Red Dwarf
* Used in Captain America: The Winter Soldier for previsualization
* Rendered the entirety of the movie Next Gen
The list goes on and grows every year. No, it won't affect the next Pixar movie, but if that's your standard then 3Delight sounds like just as much of a hobbyist thing.
True, but I suspect that doesn't massively prolong most movies, only big ones that people are passionate about (Star Wars, The Godfather Trilogy, etc).
Just randomly picking... 2004. Top 10 movies from that year, and pulling future media sales predictions out of my ass:
Shrek 2 kids movie, profitable regardless. Spider-Man 2 probably poor The Passion of the Christ probably poor Meet the Fockers nobody cares. The Incredibles kids movie, profitable regardless. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban great. The Day After Tomorrow nobody cares. The Bourne Supremacy possibly good. National Treasure nobody cares. The Polar Express nobody cares.
I mean, I am sure all of these will have future releases on new media. There is no reason not to re-release movies, it is essentially printing money), but will many of them see dramatic sales that will really change how we view the profitability of those movies? Meet the Fockers was a good movie, but nobody is going to give a shit if you re-release it in 3D, 4K resolution, "hyperdisk". Only a few have that potential I think, and it gets more bleak if you stop looking at the top 10.
After the initial burst of home media sales, I just don't see most movies getting anything more than a trickle of revenue. For every movie like Office Space, there are dozens that aren't.