30 Things That Sucked About The Amazing Spider-Man (by me, with spoilers) - Edit 3
Before modification by Nate at 04/07/2012 08:31:45 PM
There were things I liked about the movie too, but it seems to me that Hollywood scripts are getting dumber all the time. Why can't they write things that make sense? Are they not being paid enough?
Here were some of the things from the movie that I thought were ridiculous. Some of these are just nitpicks, but others are legitimate complaints. I'll let you decide which are which. It's not an exhaustive list I'm sure, but I'm going from memory the day after.
1. Why is Dr. Connors so shocked when someone knows the answer he wants to the question of how to end weakness? He wrote a book, and according to Peter later in the movie all that information is in the book, not to mention the free articles on the Internet. A person doesn't need to be smart to know that answer, they just need to have done some basic research before coming to the company as an intern (something none of the other genius interns did, apparently).
2. Apparently the super important room full of genetically engineered spiders in a multi-billion-dollar company has no biometric security, no constant attendance by a scientist, and no surveillance of any kind, not to mention the lack of alarms when someone disturbs it.
3. Speaking of, what happened to Peter must have been obvious to Dr. Connors once he learned that Peter was Spider-Man. Maybe he should have done something about those hundreds of genetically modified spiders that can give people super-powers with a single bite?
4. I love Gwen Stacey and all, but it was strange how shy and nervous she was when Peter was asking her out, given that she dresses in skirts short enough to qualify as a High Class Prostitute Halloween costume. (EDIT - I'm not saying she should have been acting like Lucy the Town Bicycle, I'm just saying that someone who dresses with that much confidence is likely to be pretty socially confident as well.)
5. How on earth did they develop an "antidote" for the serum when they only inputed the correct math and perfected it earlier that day?
6. How did they have a computer already built not only to create the antidote but to give you an accurate countdown with a computer voice announcing it as the lizard antidote when, again, they only perfected the serum like the day before?
7. How did Peter and Gwen know about the antidote and how to make it? Did I miss that part? I might have missed that part.
8. Not to belabor the point, but how can you have an antidote for humans when you don't even know what the serum does to humans yet? When human trials haven't even started? Is it an antidote that works on mice? Then how do you know it'll work on humans?
9. Why was Evil Executive Assistant Dude going to the veteran's home (presumably to test the serum) at night? Isn't that the sort of thing you have to set up more than a couple hours in advance, and do when the old people are, for example, not sleeping? It was pretending to be a flu vaccine, remember. If he was going there for some midnight testing, why didn't he make a ton of that convenient antidote first, just in case?
10. I didn't see this right, but was the gasoline that ignited the dangling car dripping down onto the car from Peter's web? I hope not, because that makes no sense. Even if the gas tank were punctured, I doubt it would coat the outside of the car.
11. The heat of those flames would have roasted that kid from hell to breakfast.
12. Jumping back a moment, it was weird how Peter went from utterly shy to spinning Gwen into his arms and kissing her.
13. Jumping back forward, there is no possible way for a football, no matter how hard it's thrown, to bend the uprights on a sports field.
14. Jumping back again, Peter was apparently at the Stacey family dinner wearing his outfit under his clothes, which is incredibly stupid and dangerous, especially since he wasn't wearing his coat at dinner. What if you have to bend down to pick something up and your red spandex shows at the back? Also apparently he had the web-shooters on his wrists, right under the edge of his shirt, while he ate dinner.
15. How did Peter realistically hope to find the Lizard with his web sensing trick in the sewers? This is New York City. He is not realistically covering very much of the sewers with those webs. Also, the webs have an effective distance and then they fall, as we see when he tried to jump to the crane later, so he can't have even been shooting them very far down the sewer tunnels.
16. Is the New York City sewer really home to geckos?
17. Why did the Lizard come up from the sewers so far from Oscorp that there was time for the police to set up such a large ambush? He demonstrated at the high school that he can come up from the sewers wherever he wants.
18. Captain Stacey, I know you're, like, obligated to hate Spider-Man and all, but do you think that when a giant lizard is rampaging through the city and turning your men into other giant lizards, maybe you could stop dedicating such a tremendous amount of manpower to catching a relatively harmless guy in a suit?
19. Does Spider-Man swing in such a straight line that it was that easy for the police to get ahead of him and set up a huge SWAT team of men with tasers along the rooftops in his path?
20. Good thing there were like a dozen cranes along that one street leading to Oscorp. Good thing all the crane operators were a) reachable quickly by phone, b) working at night, c) close to their cranes, d) not yet evacuating, and e) able to access their cranes on the tops of buildings at night.
21. As fun as it was to see Peter fail his first heroic jump, how ludicrously cliche was it for the crane operator whose kid he saved to be there to save him in turn?
22. If his web was so far off from being able to hit the crane where he first fell and got saved, how was he able to then simply stand there and hit the crane with a new web?
23. Why was Peter, injured and in a tremendous hurry, still showboating and doing backflips and twists in the air as he swung from the cranes?
24. Why didn't his injury seem to bother him once he got to the tower, when he was barely able to jump around beforehand?
25. Good thing they keep liquid nitrogen on the roof of the Oscorp tower, which is the safest place for liquid nitrogen since there are never storms in New York City.
26. Good thing Captain Stacey was able to shoot the liquid nitrogen pipe in just the right way so that Peter could grab it, instead of it just flying everywhere. But then, Peter was dating his daughter, so maybe Stacey would have been okay with that other option too.
27. Speaking of, how does one shoot a pipe of liquid nitrogen free like that? If you hit the metal connector I assume it does nothing. If you hit the pipe, would a shotgun blast really shear it right off if it's strong enough to hold liquid nitrogen? That pipe looked pretty flexible once it was off, more like a tube. Are flexible tubes used to pipe liquid nitrogen?
28. Wasn't it great and heart-wrenching when Dr. Connors saved Spider-Man from falling, and then when his bad arm crumbled still managed to grab him and cry out as he struggled to pull the boy back up to the roof? I mean wow, good thing he was there, since Spider-Man has no way to survive a fall or even help Dr. Connors with the hauling by, say, placing a hand on the wall so he'd stick to it, instead of just dangling there like a useless sack of super-hero.
29. Jumping way back again, because I'm thinking of Captain Stacey, didn't he say that the police were following the carjacker as part of a sting operation? If that was the same guy who killed Uncle Ben, that means the police were letting a known murderer walk the streets. But no one ever mentions that he was a murderer, just that he was a carjacker. I mean, did I miss something? Was that NOT the guy? Was the guy never caught? I might have missed something.
30. Nice that Gwen still pines for Peter when he broke up with her on the day of her father's funeral. And nice that Peter cares about her so much that he's willing to risk her life for the sake of appeasing his own hormones. And nice that no one mentions that it's really Peter's fault that the Lizard was created in the first place, which directly led to Captain Stacey's death. Given the history in the comics, my guess is that Peter is going for the full Stacey family death sweep.
P.S. I think it was Dr. Octopus at the end--someone with ties to the Parkers and Connors (a scientist?) who speaks with a bit of an accent.
P.P.S. Was that really a death-cry-of-grief I heard in the background when Captain Stacey died? Really?
Here were some of the things from the movie that I thought were ridiculous. Some of these are just nitpicks, but others are legitimate complaints. I'll let you decide which are which. It's not an exhaustive list I'm sure, but I'm going from memory the day after.
1. Why is Dr. Connors so shocked when someone knows the answer he wants to the question of how to end weakness? He wrote a book, and according to Peter later in the movie all that information is in the book, not to mention the free articles on the Internet. A person doesn't need to be smart to know that answer, they just need to have done some basic research before coming to the company as an intern (something none of the other genius interns did, apparently).
2. Apparently the super important room full of genetically engineered spiders in a multi-billion-dollar company has no biometric security, no constant attendance by a scientist, and no surveillance of any kind, not to mention the lack of alarms when someone disturbs it.
3. Speaking of, what happened to Peter must have been obvious to Dr. Connors once he learned that Peter was Spider-Man. Maybe he should have done something about those hundreds of genetically modified spiders that can give people super-powers with a single bite?
4. I love Gwen Stacey and all, but it was strange how shy and nervous she was when Peter was asking her out, given that she dresses in skirts short enough to qualify as a High Class Prostitute Halloween costume. (EDIT - I'm not saying she should have been acting like Lucy the Town Bicycle, I'm just saying that someone who dresses with that much confidence is likely to be pretty socially confident as well.)
5. How on earth did they develop an "antidote" for the serum when they only inputed the correct math and perfected it earlier that day?
6. How did they have a computer already built not only to create the antidote but to give you an accurate countdown with a computer voice announcing it as the lizard antidote when, again, they only perfected the serum like the day before?
7. How did Peter and Gwen know about the antidote and how to make it? Did I miss that part? I might have missed that part.
8. Not to belabor the point, but how can you have an antidote for humans when you don't even know what the serum does to humans yet? When human trials haven't even started? Is it an antidote that works on mice? Then how do you know it'll work on humans?
9. Why was Evil Executive Assistant Dude going to the veteran's home (presumably to test the serum) at night? Isn't that the sort of thing you have to set up more than a couple hours in advance, and do when the old people are, for example, not sleeping? It was pretending to be a flu vaccine, remember. If he was going there for some midnight testing, why didn't he make a ton of that convenient antidote first, just in case?
10. I didn't see this right, but was the gasoline that ignited the dangling car dripping down onto the car from Peter's web? I hope not, because that makes no sense. Even if the gas tank were punctured, I doubt it would coat the outside of the car.
11. The heat of those flames would have roasted that kid from hell to breakfast.
12. Jumping back a moment, it was weird how Peter went from utterly shy to spinning Gwen into his arms and kissing her.
13. Jumping back forward, there is no possible way for a football, no matter how hard it's thrown, to bend the uprights on a sports field.
14. Jumping back again, Peter was apparently at the Stacey family dinner wearing his outfit under his clothes, which is incredibly stupid and dangerous, especially since he wasn't wearing his coat at dinner. What if you have to bend down to pick something up and your red spandex shows at the back? Also apparently he had the web-shooters on his wrists, right under the edge of his shirt, while he ate dinner.
15. How did Peter realistically hope to find the Lizard with his web sensing trick in the sewers? This is New York City. He is not realistically covering very much of the sewers with those webs. Also, the webs have an effective distance and then they fall, as we see when he tried to jump to the crane later, so he can't have even been shooting them very far down the sewer tunnels.
16. Is the New York City sewer really home to geckos?
17. Why did the Lizard come up from the sewers so far from Oscorp that there was time for the police to set up such a large ambush? He demonstrated at the high school that he can come up from the sewers wherever he wants.
18. Captain Stacey, I know you're, like, obligated to hate Spider-Man and all, but do you think that when a giant lizard is rampaging through the city and turning your men into other giant lizards, maybe you could stop dedicating such a tremendous amount of manpower to catching a relatively harmless guy in a suit?
19. Does Spider-Man swing in such a straight line that it was that easy for the police to get ahead of him and set up a huge SWAT team of men with tasers along the rooftops in his path?
20. Good thing there were like a dozen cranes along that one street leading to Oscorp. Good thing all the crane operators were a) reachable quickly by phone, b) working at night, c) close to their cranes, d) not yet evacuating, and e) able to access their cranes on the tops of buildings at night.
21. As fun as it was to see Peter fail his first heroic jump, how ludicrously cliche was it for the crane operator whose kid he saved to be there to save him in turn?
22. If his web was so far off from being able to hit the crane where he first fell and got saved, how was he able to then simply stand there and hit the crane with a new web?
23. Why was Peter, injured and in a tremendous hurry, still showboating and doing backflips and twists in the air as he swung from the cranes?
24. Why didn't his injury seem to bother him once he got to the tower, when he was barely able to jump around beforehand?
25. Good thing they keep liquid nitrogen on the roof of the Oscorp tower, which is the safest place for liquid nitrogen since there are never storms in New York City.
26. Good thing Captain Stacey was able to shoot the liquid nitrogen pipe in just the right way so that Peter could grab it, instead of it just flying everywhere. But then, Peter was dating his daughter, so maybe Stacey would have been okay with that other option too.
27. Speaking of, how does one shoot a pipe of liquid nitrogen free like that? If you hit the metal connector I assume it does nothing. If you hit the pipe, would a shotgun blast really shear it right off if it's strong enough to hold liquid nitrogen? That pipe looked pretty flexible once it was off, more like a tube. Are flexible tubes used to pipe liquid nitrogen?
28. Wasn't it great and heart-wrenching when Dr. Connors saved Spider-Man from falling, and then when his bad arm crumbled still managed to grab him and cry out as he struggled to pull the boy back up to the roof? I mean wow, good thing he was there, since Spider-Man has no way to survive a fall or even help Dr. Connors with the hauling by, say, placing a hand on the wall so he'd stick to it, instead of just dangling there like a useless sack of super-hero.
29. Jumping way back again, because I'm thinking of Captain Stacey, didn't he say that the police were following the carjacker as part of a sting operation? If that was the same guy who killed Uncle Ben, that means the police were letting a known murderer walk the streets. But no one ever mentions that he was a murderer, just that he was a carjacker. I mean, did I miss something? Was that NOT the guy? Was the guy never caught? I might have missed something.
30. Nice that Gwen still pines for Peter when he broke up with her on the day of her father's funeral. And nice that Peter cares about her so much that he's willing to risk her life for the sake of appeasing his own hormones. And nice that no one mentions that it's really Peter's fault that the Lizard was created in the first place, which directly led to Captain Stacey's death. Given the history in the comics, my guess is that Peter is going for the full Stacey family death sweep.
P.S. I think it was Dr. Octopus at the end--someone with ties to the Parkers and Connors (a scientist?) who speaks with a bit of an accent.
P.P.S. Was that really a death-cry-of-grief I heard in the background when Captain Stacey died? Really?