The Amazing Spider-Man 2

I went to see the Amazing Spider-Man 2 in its first week and, naturally, went to join the big queue at the door.

"Is this for Spider-Man?" I asked.

"No; Captain America."

It's pretty damning when a franchise can't compete with a rival over a month into its run, but it's actually not unfair. Spider-Man has a lot to like about it, but not very much that surprises and there's not quite anything to love. It's not a bad film - it's not even a bad superhero film - but that just makes its failure to deliver a more powerful indication of how much the main MCU has raised the bar since X-Men and Raimi's first Spider-Man were the canine genitals of the sub-genre.

Now, this is not to say either that I didn't like the film. I had a good time. Andrew Garfield is mostly likable in a lead role that desperately needs its actor to be likable, despite a couple of failures of Dawson casting (he is just a bit too old to be so stroppy), and Emma Stone returns as a formidable interpretation of Gwen Stacey. Jamie Foxx brings a wonderful fragile rage to the role of Electro and Dane DeHaan is basically already a goblin as Harry Osborn. The effects are good, as they have to be, and the action set pieces properly dramatic, if occasionally a little hard to follow.

But we've seen so much of this before. Spider-Man kind of needs a new direction, and while 'with great power comes great responsibility' will never get old, the 'can I, can't I narrative' of Spidey's love life needs a gear change, and not the one that comes from dating Gwen Stacey.

Actually... and here's a thing that needs some spoiler warnings.

I know, on some level, that Gwen Stacey was always going to die, that it is what she does. I still wish that they hadn't killed her. I liked her as a character, and I'm not convinced that the narrative benefited from her death.

I guess it's kind of a fixed point of comics history - it did kind of end an age and all - but this isn't the Silver Age, and post-Incredibles I think that we could stand to move away from heroism as the preserve of the superpowered. It's what I like about Black Widow and Hawkeye in the Avengers, and it's what I liked about this Gwen Stacey, but her death makes her into another victim and I think that she deserved more. If nothing else, she deserved to die doing, not falling.

And unfortunately, that is the impression I take away from TASM2; that they made Gwen Stacey awesome, only to shove her into the fridge.

Noah

Darren Aaronofsky made the film π. It was small, incomprehensible in parts, and deeply bizarre, assuming a techno-magical basis to Jewish mysticism. Aaronofsky's Noah is like that, only huge.

The film describes the antediluvian civilisation of the descendants of Cain as a vast, world-spanning technological empire based on the exploitation of 'zohar', a mystical stone holding a spark of divine power. Having corrupted and destroyed both Creation and the Watchers, fallen angels who once tried to help them, men have proven unworthy and the Creator decides to wipe them out.

It is to the line of Seth that God entrusts the saving of the innocent; the creatures that have never fallen from the grace of the Garden. Aided by the surviving Watchers, Noah and his sons create the Ark, and place two of every animal in a drugged stupor to ride out the coming flood.

Antagonism is provided by Tubal-Cain, last king of the people of Cain, and by the clash of Noah's conviction that all men must die and his family's hope to begin anew in the new world.

The film is a weird mashup of Biblical narrative and pseuod-divine science fiction, and there is a weird inconsistency that comes from not really cleaving to one in preference to the other. Overall, it is an interesting film, with some fantastic cinematography and production design married to decent performances from a strong cast. The palette of the film is predominantly grey and brown, which can be a bit wearying on the eye, but in that palette the design is sumptuous, and the exceptions are striking for their contrast. On occasions, the actors are shot purely in silhouette against a vivid sky, while the green land where the Creator (never God, at least not from the descendants of Seth) still has some sway stands out starkly against the barrens of the Cainites.