Skewed Webs

Rating: Null/10 (10 May 2002)

Spoilers herein.
I was profoundly disappointed in this because I expected a creative combination of two warring factions in filmmaking: the framers and the swoopers.
Comics are rooted in the icons of preliteracy evolving into stained glass: brilliant colors and grand underlying mythology. Marvel comics (Stan Lee) adjusted the idiom slightly to make the mythology more accessible, and at the same time make each panel more active. He also popularized the overlapping of static panels on the page, so that not only was each panel composed, but each assembly of panels.
Pulling on those two poles, the mythology and the framing, must be done simultaneously. By focusing more and more on the framing of the art, it allowed the referenced mythical power to increase. In other words, by making the images more static, the story became more dynamic and thus stronger. What made Spidey so novel was that his superhero action is primarily one of swooping and perching on oddly perspectived surfaces.
So this particular comic, Spiderman, provides a much richer basis for effective film art than any other because it has a unique blend of framing and swooping. To appreciate the opportunity, you need to know one of the most lasting and interesting controversies in the film world.
`Moving' pictures were seen as a sibling to `still' pictures which themselves inherited much from easel art. Similar equipment and conventions applied. All early movies placed the camera at eye level on a stationary tripod. The movement was one that a normal human observer would see. A second-order movement was introduced and mastered by Eisenstein, the movement of the camera from one shot to another. The individual shots were still from a stationary camera, but there was a choreography of the eye introduced. The setup of each shot was still essentially composed like a photo, rather like a comic panel in fact. The master of that today in film is Greenaway, but successful hacks like Speilberg mine what's been done. In fact folks like Speilberg compose their films first as comics (storyboards) and then replicate the frames.
But there emerged a new school, led by Hitchcock that had the camera moving while the action moved. By controlling those moves, Hitch's camera had personality, curiosity. Tarkovsky and later dePalma mastered this and innovated so that some rare films have the eye as a main character. Today, essentially every filmmaker has a swooping camera because he/she can and because composing the Eisenstein/Kurosawa way requires insight beyond the skills of the current crop. So we now have a community of swoopers, mostly inept, constantly copying.
So you can see how I got my hopes up. The Spiderman material was rooted in clever framing like Eisenstein/Kurosawa -- it is no accident that Peter Parker is the photographer of Spiderman.
But it also depends on referencing and exploiting the swooping eye as with Tarkovsky/dePalma. It also makes heavy use of the odd-angled architecture of Welles, which clearly spilled more from his films into comics than into successor films.
But what we get is a depressingly unoriginal treatment, wholly unaware of either the grand possibilities or even the educated eye. This is not just a pedantic concern -- you cannot have an exciting movie without an exciting eye. And this film's eye is hidden behind an inanimate mask. This is the Goblin's movie, not Spidey's