The Amazing Spiderman 2.

I saw The Amazing Spiderman 2 this week, and although it has good actors, cool special effects and one of the best of the superhero characters ever created, the film has some story problems which it never recovers from. But many of its weaknesses are common to the whole superhero genre, so I thought it would be good to look at how most of these films work to see why Spiderman 2 isn’t as good as it could have been.

First, a disclaimer. I grew up reading comics, and Spiderman was my favourite. He was a down to earth hero, who had real world worries and problems, and was young enough that I could identify with him. He lived in a world I envied: one where superheroes were common, as were equally powerful super villains. It seemed like every second day  New York was being terrorized by some villain with super powers, and Spiderman had to come to the rescue. But it wasn’t only villains he had to worry about. Often, he would find himself battling another super hero over territory, a girl or bragging rights. One week, Spiderman gets along with the X-Men, the next week they are at each other’s throats. It was a rich, complex world, full of story possibilities and shifting alliances.

When special effects got good enough to make superhero movies worth watching, they took this world, made a lot of money, and then …. they got stuck. You may have noticed that the first movie in most of the Marvel franchises is usually the best. That’s because they all get to start with a story that practically writes itself. An ordinary guy is minding his own business when he accidentally gets into a situation that gives him super powers (e.g., Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider). There follows a period of discovery: he feels strange, slowly realizes something has changed, gets a taste of his weird new talents. So what should he do? Who should he tell? Ignore the powers? Use them for good or evil? Inevitably something happens that forces him to make a choice to become a good guy. Then what? He has to learn how to use his powers against the bad guys, while finding a way to keep his identity  secret( unless he’s Tony Stark in Iron Man). It is all golden story material, the stuff ancient myths are made of. Your character has a built-in story arc, where he goes from normal to extraordinary, has all sorts of tough choices to make, and by the end, he is a new person and he has beaten an enemy, and learnt some important moral lessons. Fantastic.

There’s a reason Hollywood likes comic book characters, these movies  almost write themselves. Even better, most of the long-running comic books have rebooted their series so many times that they have several slightly different versions of how a superhero like Peter Parker was created. You just choose the one readrers like the most. The creation story works so well that it is what most of the comic book movies start with. Batman, Superman, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America, The Fantastic Four – each of these franchises begin with the tale of how their heroes got their super powers. Even The Avengers, which doesn’t show the genesis of any of its characters, qualifies as a creation story, because it is about the formation of a team. Any one of these movies could have featured plots that take place years after the super hero gains his/her powers. It is not like anyone really needs to know all the backstory on Krypton to understand a Superman movie. George Lucas proved with Star Wars that even little kids can handle a few opening titles and then jump into a story. You don’t need to start a comic book movie with a creation story, but most of the movies do because it is easier.

But what do you do with the sequel? Your hero has already been created, so now what? In the comics this is simple: fight some more bad guys, get involved with other super heroes, there are all sorts of possibilities. But in the movies, Hollywood is stuck on first base. They know how to make the first movie, and saw that it made lots of money. So they make it again. But this time, they make the creation story about how the super villains get their powers. So, in Spiderman 2, we meet a poor nerdy schmuck ( played by Damien Wayans*) who, through a workplace accident, gets turned into Electro. We also see how Harry Osbourne becomes the Green Goblin.

In theory, playing this card a second time should work, but in Spiderman 2, it doesn’t. The difference between a super villain and a super hero is that the bad guy rarely has much depth. In the comics, they are foils for the good guys, who are allowed to be tortured souls. But a bad guy who doesn’t want to use his powers for evil isn’t very useful plot-wise, since he doesn’t give the superhero anything to fight against. As a result, most super villains are like hurricanes – they arrive with a lot of rage, and not much interest in negotiating. That allows the heroes to fight, fail, and then  struggle to find new strategies for defeating the bad guys. But if you hang your movie on the bad guy’s story, you are betting on the wrong horse. Most villains, like Electro and Green Goblin, just aren’t that interesting, so the story falls flat. In Spiderman 2, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that many of us remember the Green Goblin storyline from the Toby McGuire franchise, so this isn’t exactly news. To add to the film’s problems, Electro is given way too much power, straining credulity, which is saying a lot in a fantasy movie like this.

The superhero movies don’t have to fall into this pit. As I mentioned earlier, the comics didn’t have this problem because they assumed the world was full of super bad guys who had been created years before. Occasionally a new one would be created, but the stories didn’t hinge on that. I think this is one of the reasons the X-Men movies work better. The mutants are simply a fact of life. Magneto is a great villain because he has to decide whether he will be bad or good, allowing his character to change in interesting ways. Unlike the other films, the X-Men are more faithful to the rich story universes of the comics, so the plots have to be more complicated than simple creation stories.

Franchises like Spiderman do have a future, but they will have to get past the temptation to treat every film like the first. Hollywood doesn’t have this problem with other genres: few thrillers spend the entire movie discovering how a spy became a spy, or how the detective chose his career. We accept that some people are detectives, and then we enjoy watching them solve a mystery. The movies have to realize that we are all willing to accept that the comic book universe has lots of heroes and super villains. Now tell us some stories in that world that will be exciting, without reinventing the wheel every time. It can be done.