Arising from the ashes of our failed movie review series like the drunken pheonix he is, A.Ron emerges to give a review of the two premier superhero franchises at opposite ends of their respective lifespans.  ”The Amazing Spider-Man” attempts to reboot the franchise around new, younger stars and an edgier, more deliberate retelling of the origin of our friendly neighborhood webslinger, while Christopher Nolan closes out his take on the Batman mythos with the third and final installment, “The Dark Knight Rises”.   I’m going to use the next two paragraphs to give a spoiler-free review of both, and you can click the link for “more” to get the spoiler filled version.

Spider-Man is an ultimately disappointing movie.  It suffers from many problems; we all already know the origin of Spider-Man, and it’s one of the least interesting things about the character at this point.  In a movie that clocks in almost 2 and a half hours long, we waste half the screen time with this recycled crap.  That’s another problem.  The movie is two and a half hours long, and feels like it’s three and a half.  In between truly plodding origin and character development, we have short bursts of intenese action that, while cool, are things we’ve already seen before in better Spider-Man movies.  I think that Andrew Garfield is potentially a better Spider-Man than even Toby McGuire, and Emma Stone is a fine version of Gwen Stacy.  I hope that they don’t end up as Pierce Bronson, who could have been the definitive, iconic version of James Bond except he was saddled with soggy, limp scripts and plots.  The effects are also sub-par, in an age where The Avengers has shown us how to make balls-out gaga SFX work in a seamless, believeable manner, this is just unacceptable.

In stark contrast, The Dark Knight Rises is one of the most satisfying ends to a trilogy that  has become the definitive version of Batman.  Every concern I had heading in with the intrinsic ridiculousness of Bane and Catwoman and the historic letdowns in the third installment of trilogies were washed away,  from the opening scene.  It just worked.  There are a few plot holes (but by no means as many as The Dark Knight), and a few instances of clunky dialog, but in contrast to the plasticy, poorly rendered CGI action of Spider-Man, these effects are practical, weighty, and  real.  I can’t explain how polarizing this movie has become; friends of mine who I respect are reacting with a “meh” or are even openly critical of the film. I just don’t understand it.  I don’t understand how you can walk away from this film unsatisfied.  The only thing I can see in common with the people that I know that don’t like it are a) carrying into the film an awareness and trauma from the horrible theater shootings, and / or b) a fairly leftist point of view.  I’ve heard the plot described by guys like Matthew Yglasis as “balls out rightwing” and as a self-described “radical moderate” I can sort of see what they’re saying, but if this ruins a piece of fiction for you, I don’t know what to day.  If you can get over the shadow the killings casts on the movie (and I admit, at several points in the movie, I was acutely aware of the events and how they tied into the movie, and it was for me a moving empathetic experience), and can divorce real life Occupy movements with fictional ones, I think you’re going to have a good time.

Want to hear more?  Read on for spoilers galore…

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