With great power comes great responsibility.

"I mean, Marvel has certain hard and fast rules, like about the spider bite — you have to have Peter get bitten by a radioactive spider, and Uncle Ben’s death has to transform Peter Parker into Spider-Man, you know what I mean? He has to learn a lesson by that. But I’m trying to find new inflections and new context so that the story feels new. Because I do think the character is different; you want to honor the iconic elements of Spider-Man but you also want to reinvent the world around him so that it feels interesting and new, and that’s a tricky line to walk."

The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb in a Movieline interview.

All evidence would indicate that the Spider-Man reboot is going to be a big success à la The Avengers. I've read positive comments on line, it's doing well at the box office, all well and good, but hints in the previews suggest that the script has taken some liberties with the traditional version of Peter Parker's accession to arachnid abilities.

Sam Raimi's version is completely faithful to the original, simple, iconic version:  a radioactive spider bites Peter, bang, done.  (And Tobey Maguirre's WTF experience when he wakes up the next morning and looks in the mirror is a great little moment in the first movie.)  But the previews for the reboot hint about a deeper, darker aspect to this transformation, suggesting that Peter's parents had somehow genetically modified him in order to create the potential for his wall-crawling abilities.

 Sigh...as with the now-infamous plan on the part of Michael Bay to reboot the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as aliens, why do these people want to mess with success?  After all, Spider-Man's origin isn't really the radioactive spider bite - it's actually the moment of trauma when his actions cause the death of Uncle Ben, that discovery of consequences and responsibilities.  Why diminish that moral epiphany?

On the other hand, I have to give credit to Marc Webb's comments in the opening quote.  Isn't the whole purpose of doing a reboot is to "find new inflections and new context" - otherwise, why bother?  Sadly, the answer to that question may also be "in order to make millions of dollars by springboarding off a proven box-office commodity that may have another mile in it."

Regardless, I'll undoubtedly catch The Amazing Spider-Man in commercial release, so that I can experience it in 3-D, and see what they've actually done to the story. And who knows, maybe I've done the film an enormous injustice.  After all, it looks like they went back to the original web-shooters, so they're not completely evil.

- Sid

 

The Campbell Brothers strike again!

Well that's not fair...what about the people of Ralph?

- Sid

(Excerpted from The Pirates of Zan, by Murray Leinster)

Okay, I added the eldritch green misty bits.

I could not help feeling that they were evil things - mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

H. P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness

I recently visited Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia, and in one of those odd little coincidences happened to be reading a collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories as we flew over the astonishing panorama offered by the Coast Mountains - specifically, At The Mountains of Madness, a story of antarctic exploration, horrifying discovery, and distant, alien ranges of mountainous terror.

- Sid