Arachnid redundant

Coming to your friendly neighbourhood multiplex a mere five years after the termination of the successful Sam Raimi-helmed trilogy, this reboot of the Spider-Man franchise, while sporting a new star (Andrew Garfield), new origin story, new villain and new director (a guy named, I kid you not, Marc Webb), feels above all overwhelmingly unnecessary. It also feels about 136 minutes long—which it is. Yet again we get one of these superhero movies that feels obliged to include the protagonist’s origin story, the development of his social conscience, the introduction of a love interest, the introduction of a villain, the villain’s origin story, the villain’s plot to destroy New York/the US/the planet, and the villain’s undoing, all in one five-act mega-movie—the exact opposite of the experience of reading a fleet, diverting comic book. Though it has its moments of energy and excitement, The Amazing Spider-Man is ultimately an exhausting experience, one of diminishing returns, simultaneously over-stuffed with incident and far too compressed to satisfyingly resolve half of the narrative threads it spins.

The element that’s always struck me as novel about Spider-Man was the fact that before becoming a superhero Peter Parker was basically an ordinary, somewhat nerdy teenager, a character most comic readers could easily identify with. This Spider-Man, written by a trio of scenarists led by James Vanderbilt (whose wildly variable filmography includes Darkness Falls and Zodiac), divests Peter of any such quotidian roots. Peter’s background is indeed more Amazing: before he disappeared Peter’s dad (Campbell Scott) was involved is some secret project to splice various genes to “create a world without weakness.” By the time that Peter, a talented photographer and, we soon realize, a scientific genius, becomes a high school senior he discovers dad’s hidden files and tracks down Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), dad’s old partner, who just happens to be the mentor of Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone), the girl Peter’s in love with. Such Amazing coincidences abound: Gwen’s dad (Dennis Leary) just happens to be the Chief of Police, and, in a risibly contrived rehash of that already risible turning point in the Spider-Man legend, Peter’s Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) is accidentally killed by the very convenience store robber Peter failed to apprehend about 30 seconds earlier. (Vanderbilt and company refrain from regurgitating the “With great power…” line.) Peter discovers his superpowers after he sneaks into Connors’ high security laboratory (the words “BIOCABLE DEVELOPMENT UNIT” appear ominously beside the door) and gets bitten by that fateful radioactive arachnid.

Garfield’s fine so long as he refrains from excess emoting (see Never Let Me Go for a preview). Stone is a welcome presence, and not only because of her thigh-highlighting outfits. Neither looks much like a teenager, but we are in the realm of myth here. Not mythical enough however to forgive James Horner’s overbearing score or such silly, extraneous detours such as the bit where, despite the evacuation of Manhattan, city workers unite to help Spider-Man more easily access stuff to attach his webs to. Or to keep us from wondering why the Lizard (née Connors) decides to set up his laboratory in a sewer. Though, oddly enough, Spidey’s nemesis is finally the movie’s most sympathetic character, a sort of simplified version of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. Connors’ ingestion of a super-serum gives him back his missing arm and grants him the strength of ten men, but in return makes him crazy, turns him into a lizard and takes away his penis. Talk about cold(-blooded) comforts.

To fuse and refuse: The Fly at 25

Seth Brundle, the tragic genius at the core of The Fly (1986), is motivated to crack the secrets of teleportation not only because such innovation will challenge established concepts of time and space, but also because he suffers from motion sickness—teleportation means never having to set foot in a propelled vehicle again. This bit of character eccentricity is one of the many ingenious details that have allowed The Fly to endure these last 25 years, not only as what may be the defining synthesis of every major theme in David Cronenberg’s filmography, but as the modern big-budget genre film that synthesized an intelligent query into the most vital and troubling issues faced by contemporary philosophers, scientists and policy-makers with an absolutely primal and inspired display of body horror theatrics. There is no other movie at once so smart and so disgusting. Indeed, The Fly features what remains the most astonishing vomit scene—wait, make that scenes—in cinema history. (A word of warning to the uninitiated: do not watch this movie while eating yogurt.)

Rooted in the 1957 short story by George Langelaan and, of course, the Vincent Price film of the same title (1958), The Fly is several things: a chamber love triangle between Brundle, a journalist (Geena Davis) trying to file and article for a magazine named Particle, and her editor (John Getz); a science fiction about a man who accidentally gets into a machine with an insect and pays the abysmal consequences; and a shock-meditation on aging, death, and what it means to be human. “Am I dying?” Brundle wonders after his successful self-teleportation with insect co-pilot begins to exact its gooey toll on his flesh. (“His” flesh? Or something else? Teleportation obliterates form in order to recreate it elsewhere.) This being a Cronenberg film, whatever existential terror or grief Brundle feels en route to becoming Brundle-fly is eclipsed by unquenchable fascination. Other versions of Langelaan’s ‘Fly’ had its protagonist lose his ability to speak relatively early in the story; Cronenberg insisted that his Brundle keep his tongue nimble as long as possible—he wanted Brundle to articulate what was happening to him until the very end, at which point a single, unbearably sad gesture is all that’s needed for the experiment to reach its dire conclusion.

Much credit has to be given to Goldblum, whose toothy, lanky charisma, dry humour and quiet showmanship rendered him one of Cronenberg’s perfect alter egos: a smart man of action; a geek with sex appeal; a guy who can endow the word "cheeseburger" with seductive magic. And Davis, Goldblum’s girlfriend at the time, is every bit his match, both intrigued and repulsed, in-love and loving and fiercely self-protective: her alarmed response to the possibility that she’s pregnant with Son of Brundle-fly is deeply affecting. Its fantastic narrative being awkwardly yet necessarily compressed, The Fly is not without its little flaws—a bit of boilerplate dialogue here, some garish lighting there; way too much showy pathos from Getz’s emasculated ex—but the immense power of its unnerving ideas, the complex dynamics of its tautly told story, and the nuanced performances of its two leads earn its status as some very peculiar sort of masterpiece.