Entangled

Rating: Null/10 (15 May 2007)

Its not going to be another comment about how large complex projects have to be unimaginative for the simple reason of coordinating all the geographically dispersed teams working on bits that need to integrate. I've studied this in some detail in the film business. Its a mundane insight and I won't bore you with it.
Let's just say that of all the superhero movies, this one has the most possibilities for giving us exciting dimensional vision. "King Kong" did it, and I saw some titillating motions in another WETA project, "Van Helsing." And there was some promise in the last Spiderman's fight with Ock. And its not as if dull studios can't do dimensional: just watch that first chase in "Casino Royale."
But this is as pure a cinematic waste as I've experienced, so let's talk about why it fails and why it appears not to.
Film is a matter of assembly across different worlds. There's the central world of the embodiment anchored by the actors of course, and there's the world of the cinematic cosmos, how the world works and the eye we borrow behaves in it. On these two armatures are assembled all sorts of bits that each are placed individually but that we seldom see as bits. What we are meant to see is the overall organism, the being of the thing.
There are only two ways for this to emerge. Either you use convention or you rely on some coherent orchestration, usually from one mind. Here it is mere convention and why this is ordinary, even ordinarily ordinary. I've given up on Raimi, and so apparently have all his talented collaborators: Dykstra, Elfman the most obvious. He's the new Verhoeven.
He's interested in events and not circumstance. Snapshots (as is Jonah Jameson) instead of story; parts instead of assemblies. Its film-making 101, this, that real film is not about independent panels like a comic book. There's motion involved. That motion has to behave in accordance with and at the same time define and illustrate the world we see and the dynamics of how we see it.
Those rules of motion are negotiated over time between us and the filmmakers, and constitute an evolving vocabulary. What he have here is the cinematic equivalent of two hours or "you know" and other such automatic, meaningless utterances. Part of what we pay for is this game, and under normal circumstances the question we decide is whether we want sugar or meat. Here we get cardboard.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.