[OT] Spider Man origin modernizations - effective?

[JacktheRabbit]

Actually this is an easy one tp explain. It goes hand in hand with another reference in the movie. The "other" photographer at the Daily Bugle who couldnt get a good picture of Spirederman was mentioned by first name once.

His name was "Eddie" this would probably be Eddie Brock who becomes a rival of Peter Parker and always comes up second best. Then he loses his job and is humiliated when he breaks a story that Spiderman later proves to be false.

Eventually Eddie becomes the Venom the greatest of Spidermans villians. Venom is a symbiotic supervillian who has powers like sipderman but slightly twisted. One of those powers is that Venom can change color to perfectly blend into his environment.

So that is where the reference is aimed at.

One thing I was surprised about, though, was that they make the point of saying twice, that some spiders can change color to camoflauge themselves, and they didn't have anyone pull a chameleon act. Although, I think that was more of an abstract reference to his costume and how it allowed him to maintain his anonymity and still maintain a normal life.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Actually this is an easy one tp explain. It goes hand in hand with another reference in the movie. The "other" photographer at the Daily Bugle who couldnt get a good picture of Spirederman was mentioned by first name once.

His name was "Eddie" this would probably be Eddie Brock who becomes a rival of Peter Parker and always comes up second best. Then he loses his job and is humiliated when he breaks a story that Spiderman later proves to be false.

Eventually Eddie becomes the Venom the greatest of Spidermans villians. Venom is a symbiotic supervillian who has powers like sipderman but slightly twisted. One of those powers is that Venom can change color to perfectly blend into his environment.

So that is where the reference is aimed at.

Indeed. And this goes toward supporting my theory about Venom, mentioned in the other Spider-man thread.

I really don't think they're going to be able to go the "alien symbiote" route for Venom. An alien costume may work in a comic book, but I really don't think it would work in the reality constructed by the Spider-man movies. Let's be honest, even comic book movies have more of a "real life" setting than actual comic books.

I think Venom should be the result of a recreation of Peter's accident. Maybe it's another accident, but I think it'd be better if someone finds out how Peter got his powers and tries to duplicate the experiment. Only something goes wrong. You get super strength, sticking to walls, shooting webs--but you also get a horrible physial mutation of the subject. Bada-bing, bada-boom, you've got Venom. Different origin, same end result.



BTW, they couldn't kill of Gwen/MJ/whoever. It would have made the movie too depressing for American audiences. More to the point, though, you want a relationship you can build over the course of three or four movies. You don't have a billion stories in comic books to build it. If you kill off the female lead in the first movie, you have to introduce a new one in the second, and it just slows down the process.

And to keep things a little on-topic, I thought all the modernizations were perfect. I never believed--well, not since I was a kid--that a high school student, however intelligent, could invent something like Spidey's web shooters.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

They just need to make sure they get the right person to play Venom. He should creep you out even when the suit is not covering his skin.

Think of a mad buff Hannibal Lector.

 

[Flinx]

The modernizations in the movie were fine by me. It's simply that "radioactive" was the buzzword when Spidey was first created and "genetic manipulation" and "nanotechnology" are popular buzzwords today. You notice they kept in the professional wrestling aspect of his origin the same because it is so popular today. I even remember an interview with Stan Lee where he said that he had no idea what things like "gamma rays" were. He just heard the term, thought it sounded cool and put it in his comics.

They did manage to keep the most important parts of his origin unchanged. Mainly that his powers came from the accidental bite of a spider and that he got his sense of responsibility from his Uncle Ben who, through a one-time act of irresponsibility, he let die.

 

[Shard O'Glase]

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Then there's the upkeep of his webshooters. Peter Parker's a poor guy. How does he NOT run out of money, leaving himself unable to afford the chemicals to make more web-fluid? If you like the idea of his shooters out of webfluid, then they could just say "His body can only produce so much webbing at a time, so he needs time to recuperate when he uses to much". Personally I like it the way they have it. I don't like the mechanical webshooters, having seen something better in Spider-Man 2099, and I never liked the whole "I'm out of web fluid" bit.

And Peter Parker is NOT a Tony Stark or a Reed Richards or even close to them. He's smart, but those 2 are unnaturally smart. (Damn, that sounded stupid) What I mean is, they were so smart it was BS. Peter was smart, but within the realm of reality. That's what I liked about him. Sure, he had powers, but Peter Parker himself isn't outlandish the way Reed Richards is, with an intellect of god-like proportions. I could really see a Peter Parker type in real life, sans the spider powers. Whereas Reed Richards I can't see existing in reality.

Spidey has run out of money and gone really low on or made weak batches of web shooters in the comics. And as for his int, he is frequently refered to as unaturally smart. As pointed out he made those spidey sense homing beacons as well as the web shooters.

and in the comics he gets scholarships out the wazoo, all his teachers think he is the smartest kid in creation, and would and could make it anywhere if he would only actually show up. He is targeted by science firms for hire even though he is still incredibly young, in fact unaturally young and inexperienced for the jobs they want to give him, if only he could show up, and not be such a flake. Gee the burdens of responsibility etc. The references to him having the capability to be one of the earths greatest scientists if he only could devote some time to it, and stay away from being spidey a bit are legion. Do they cosntantly devote time to look spidey is smart comics, no, but they certainly have supported it enough for him to be able to "comic book logically" develop super science devices.

 

[Squire James]

Every writer who did Spiderman comics probably had a different guy in mind when they wrote their stories. I don't find it too big a surprise that the movie guys did the same thing. As long as they did a good job, all is well!

 

[Jhamin]

In my mind the thing about the organic web-shooters was that it allowed them to cut about ten min of exposition and focus on the story. They didn't have to do a montage of the shooters being built, the webs were just another power.

And as for the Gwen Stacy/Mary Jane thing.

How long has it been since Gwen died? Do modern comic readers under the age of 25 to 30 even know who she was?

 

[el-remmen]

?). Like you pointed out, he gets this flash of insight and creates the web-shooters, then after that, nothing. He never invents anything else like that, again.

I have to respectfully disagree with that statement.

He also built his Spidey tracers which worked with his Spider-sense. I saw the creation of these two items as a side-effect of his powers - that is to say - what was now "spidery" inside of him helped inspire his latent mechanical/chemical genius. The fact that often in the comics Peter was tweeaking his web-shooters b/c they didn't always remain fucntional was just a nice added detail that even what he built was not perfect.

In addition, Spidey was consistantly jury-rigging this or that to help him defeat villians all the time - If I can think of examples I will post them but it is too early right now.

I will most likely NOT see the Spider-man movie as it will not jive with my own view of Spider-man - among these things is the exclusion of Gwen Stacey, who's death at the hands of the Green Goblin is arguable as formative an event in Peter's life as the death of his Uncle Ben. I would have paid anything to have seen the scene of his pulling her up to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge by his web only to find her neck was broken by the jerk of him catching her.

A dark turn like that in the movie would have been right up Sam Raimi's alley - and then they could have saved Mary Jane for the sequel we all know will come.

Oh that and the Green Goblin looks cheezy and the effects do not seem to blend well with live action from what I have seen in trailer and commercials.

 

[el-remmen]

Oh, and I think I am too old to think of Venom as the greatest Spidey villian of all time (um, that would be the Green Goblin). He is more of a joke.

The poigniant end to his "parasite" suit would have been better left as it was at the end of Web of Spider-man #1.

 

[Jeremy]

The problem with MJ vs Gwen Stacy is that that would be an entirely other character to introduce either in this movie or MJ in the next.

And with Aunt May in the hospital, MJ probably would have show up with the close relation the Parkers and the Watsons have in the books. So that would be that much more cram-it-into the movie.

By combining the two characters into one person, they managed to get the heart string tugs of both character's qualities while not having to cut out some of the humanizing scenes for Peter, the ones that help us identify with him.

That means we have two fully developed main characters for the second movie and no 30-60 min expositions to soak up our movie time next time.

Yes, I think this movie was rife with ways to sequel it. Tobey's contract is for 3 spidey movies. He said if he could have signed up for one, he probably would have as it would have been wiser, but he didn't have the option. And Sam was really persuasive.

Besides Eddie Brock, Dr. Connors was also mentioned (Peter lost his job with the will-be Lizard), and with Harry Osborne nicely conflicted we could very well have the second green goblin back in the third movie as well.

And with MJ and the "I was in the neighborhood bit", not to mention Spidey calling her not only by name, but MJ in a certain intense scene, and with the much trailer-ized swapping of spit and the look on her face at the end after she has a comparison... Oh yeah, very feasible she's got it all figured.

That's the problem with alter ego's that have the same height and the same voice (and the same lips).

Now if he'd been wearing glasses.. She'd never have known. Clark's glasses kept him disguised from Lois for who knows how long...