Spider-Man Far from Home
Jul. 18th, 2019 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sasha_featherI needed to cheer myself up and get out of the heat, so I went to the movies, which worked.
I was excited to see trailers for Charlies' Angels and the upcoming Terminator movie. These both look like lesbian bait.
I mostly liked this Spider-Man film, it was fun and a nice escape, and the actors were good. I particularly like that Ned is a fat character of color, and there were no anti-fat statements or "jokes". Zendaya is great as a somewhat cynical MJ, Mae (Marissa Tomei) is wonderful and supportive.
Possible spoilers below the cut. I'm mostly quibbling to think through why this movie felt sort of flat and forgettable, esp. in comparison to the other films in this franchise.
At 2 hours 9 minutes, this film was about 30 minutes too long. The first part especially dragged. I've seen too many movies that think airplane travel is interesting, when commercial airplane travel is inherently boring and uncomfortable and visually dull. Easy to cut that section without losing much.
There was way too much heterosexuality going on, and it served the female characters poorly. Aunt Mae has an ongoing flirtation with Happy Hogan, which I had -20 interest in. Happy is the most boring straight white guy character. He is kind to Peter and Mae, so it makes no sense that I kind of hate him? But I do kind of hate him, IDK. The other women in the film are Betty (Ned's love interest), MJ (Peter's love interest, and Maria Hill, who gets a handful of lines. One of the teachers is upset about his unfaithful wife. There's a fairly pointless sub-plot involving a boy who is a romantic rival for MJ's affections, including this whole weird sub-plot where Peter is trying to remotely delete a photo and instead nearly blows up the whole tour bus. (I suppose this was to meant to introduce the drones?)
There's a plot hole involving drone/EDITH control which sophinisba points out here:
https://sophinisba.dreamwidth.org/427812.html
It's so clear to me that characters in movies don't watch movies. In a particularly frustrating scene, Peter is asked "who else did you tell?!" which is an instant flag that your interrogator is untrustworthy and is about to kill you. I thought that Peter would be smarter than this, more media-savvy: the solution to having dangerous knowledge about someone is to tell everyone. He could have had Flash, a classmate who is always recording himself for youtube or insta or something, spread this information, thus folding Flash into their team and making all the previous scenes with Flash have an actual pay off.
I think this movie was trying to do too much: several (excruciating to me) hetero romances, Peter struggling with responsibility, the "deep fake" plot with Mysterio, random travel all over Europe, plus jokes. Why were there so many spidey suits in this? The scene where Peter makes a new suit felt strange to me, like it was supposed to be a pay off, but there hadn't been a lead up to it.
I remember thinking about "Homecoming," that it was a very competently made film. I didn't get that sense from this sequel. The emotional beats and the timing just felt a little off.
Still! It was enjoyable. Perhaps I had my expectations too high.
I was excited to see trailers for Charlies' Angels and the upcoming Terminator movie. These both look like lesbian bait.
I mostly liked this Spider-Man film, it was fun and a nice escape, and the actors were good. I particularly like that Ned is a fat character of color, and there were no anti-fat statements or "jokes". Zendaya is great as a somewhat cynical MJ, Mae (Marissa Tomei) is wonderful and supportive.
Possible spoilers below the cut. I'm mostly quibbling to think through why this movie felt sort of flat and forgettable, esp. in comparison to the other films in this franchise.
At 2 hours 9 minutes, this film was about 30 minutes too long. The first part especially dragged. I've seen too many movies that think airplane travel is interesting, when commercial airplane travel is inherently boring and uncomfortable and visually dull. Easy to cut that section without losing much.
There was way too much heterosexuality going on, and it served the female characters poorly. Aunt Mae has an ongoing flirtation with Happy Hogan, which I had -20 interest in. Happy is the most boring straight white guy character. He is kind to Peter and Mae, so it makes no sense that I kind of hate him? But I do kind of hate him, IDK. The other women in the film are Betty (Ned's love interest), MJ (Peter's love interest, and Maria Hill, who gets a handful of lines. One of the teachers is upset about his unfaithful wife. There's a fairly pointless sub-plot involving a boy who is a romantic rival for MJ's affections, including this whole weird sub-plot where Peter is trying to remotely delete a photo and instead nearly blows up the whole tour bus. (I suppose this was to meant to introduce the drones?)
There's a plot hole involving drone/EDITH control which sophinisba points out here:
https://sophinisba.dreamwidth.org/427812.html
It's so clear to me that characters in movies don't watch movies. In a particularly frustrating scene, Peter is asked "who else did you tell?!" which is an instant flag that your interrogator is untrustworthy and is about to kill you. I thought that Peter would be smarter than this, more media-savvy: the solution to having dangerous knowledge about someone is to tell everyone. He could have had Flash, a classmate who is always recording himself for youtube or insta or something, spread this information, thus folding Flash into their team and making all the previous scenes with Flash have an actual pay off.
I think this movie was trying to do too much: several (excruciating to me) hetero romances, Peter struggling with responsibility, the "deep fake" plot with Mysterio, random travel all over Europe, plus jokes. Why were there so many spidey suits in this? The scene where Peter makes a new suit felt strange to me, like it was supposed to be a pay off, but there hadn't been a lead up to it.
I remember thinking about "Homecoming," that it was a very competently made film. I didn't get that sense from this sequel. The emotional beats and the timing just felt a little off.
Still! It was enjoyable. Perhaps I had my expectations too high.
