too few spiders, too much technobabble

saw the new spider-man movie. no spiders in it, so it was a waste of time.

i want you to know it was a struggle to put this transcript together.

Hey friends —

I saw Spider-Man: Brand New Day this weekend, and I regret to inform you that there are NO, I repeat, NO spiders in the movie. Furthermore, the presentation of hypothetical spider/human hybrid biology was totally nonsensical. I knew it would be, but usually, if the movie is focused on a single super-being, I am willing to suspend disbelief for the story, but this movie throws in a whole zoo of poorly justified characters so that I was overwhelmed by the bad rationalizations, and the story itself was bad and pointless.

To give you an overview, in the previous movie, Spider-Man had invoked a magical spell, literally a magic spell, to erase knowledge of spider-man and his alias as Peter Parker from eveyone in the world. I’m forgiving the use of magic because it set up an interesting situation: even his best friend and the love of his life forgot who Peter Parker was. This was a great, sweeping reset that would let sequels return to the core personality traits of Peter Parker. He’s alone. He’s a teenaged, or in his early 20s, nerd struggling with relationships and setting up his identity, while not wanting to fall back on the extravagance of being a super-powered hero. He wanted to be himself. This could have been a relatable premise, and it could have been the basis for a story that was more than a rock-’em-sock-’em brawl. Unfortunately, telling a story of personal growth was beyond the talents of Marvel writers, and they fell back on a cheat.

They have a huge stable of superheroes, so they just inserted a bunch of them into the movie and kind of wrecked the more thoughtful story with…a bunch of excuses for rock-’em-sock-’em brawls. If you like that sort of thing, you might have fun at this movie. I know a lot of people do, and they packed the theater to the benefit of the Morris Theater Co-op. Yay?

Tragically, one of the extra superheroes they salted the simmering super-hero soup with was an X-Man. I won’t say which one, but you’ll figure it out fast. Here’s the thing: I hate the X-Men. Those movies have the most egregiously unfocused and anti-scientific premise, in which random mutations to the X-gene confer diverse radical abilities on people, so one mutation might give someone near-infinite regeneration, another might be able to shoot laser beams out of their eyes (eyes are receivers, not emitters, people!), or they can fly, or read minds. You get the idea. One gene can be modified to give people the power to violate the laws of thermodynamics at will. I especially hate it when the movies have pompous expositions about changing the course of evolution.

One item of canon in the X-Men movies is that there are millions of X-mutants all around the planet, and they sometimes gather in groups to complain about how they can’t just take over the world, and how the State is oppressing them. There ought to be a big coven of flamboyand super-powered mutants right there in Queens, making the introduction of just one more kind of trivial, even if they are particularly powerful. But this one unique mutant is the maguffin of the movie, and chasing them down is the central conflict.

But wait, you might ask, what about the magical memory loss and Peter Parker’s smaller, but personally more important desire to reconnect with his old friends? That comes up now and then, but mainly Spider-Man must work with a secret government agency to help track down they mystery X-person.

Also, Spider-man’s powers are getting flaky, sometimes dialing up to an irritating extreme and accompanying headaches. He grows biological web-shooters in his forearms. Why was that a necessary plot point? I don’t know, it wasn’t. It doesn’t really affect the plot, except to add one more thing that has to be explained. He’s also experiencing wild fluctations in his spider hormone levels, which I found very interesting. What hormones? Like Juvenile Hormone, which would suppress the development of new features?

Unfortunately, our knowledge of arachnid endocrinology is poor and fragmentary. Sawadro, Bednarek, and Babczyńska wrote in 2017:

The neuroendocrine system of insects, including the presence of the main neuroactive compounds, and their role in ontogenesis are probably best understood of all the arthropods. Development, metamorphosis, the maturation of the gonads, vitellogenesis and egg production are regulated by hormones (juvenile hormones, ecdysteroids) and neuropeptides. However, knowledge about their presence and functions in spiders is fragmentary.

The juvenile hormone (JH) plays a crucial role in arthropod physiological processes, e.g., the regulation of metamorphosis, development, and reproduction (the vitellogenesis, the development of gonads, egg production). Still, data about this sesquiterpenoid hormone in spiders (Araneae) are rudimentary and equivocal. The presence of the JH or its precursors (e.g. methyl farnesoate) is not confirmed in spiders. The site of synthesis of its is still undetermined. No receptors of the JH are identified in spiders and thus, the molecular mechanism of action of this group of hormones is still unknown.

How exciting that Peter Parker has not only discovered these hormones, but has invented tools to monitor them in vivo.

So he goes to talk to a physics professor at the local university about it. Why, it’s Bruce Banner, the Incredible Hulk! He has no qualifications to talk about arthropod endocrinology, but it’s a way to shoehorn another IP into the story. They discuss using short interfering RNA to downregulate these crazy hormonal fluctuations, and don’t really say anything sensible. It’s all technobabble.

Also, Banner is the smarmiest physics professor ever. He’s giving a lecture on the multiverse physics, I guess, and asks for questions, and one student raises her hands to ask something irrelevant about the Hulk, and some other student in costume says “Hulk Smash”, and Banner smirks and indulges them in some absurd comments about the Hulk. Fire him. He’s wasting the students’ time.

He wasn’t in the movie to be a smug professor anyway, later he gets in a fight with Spider-Man, his one true purpose.

After their conversation, Peter Parker scurries off to build some sophisticated nanotechnology in his apartment, a small device he sticks on his neck to monitor and modify levels of whole body gene expression. He makes it with a soldering iron. I may have been the only person in the theater to stifle a shriek at these scenes.

Oh, yeah, the Punisher is also in this movie. It’s a real hodge-podge of random characters with little reason.

OK, to wrap up the chaos engine that is the plot, without giving away any major spoilers…there are various buildings demolished in the big fights that we have to suffer through. Eventually we discover that the mystery X-Man was a good guy all along, and the villain was a boring guy who I recognized from the instant they were introduced, and knew was going to prove to be up to no good. It is sort of a spoiler, but trust me: if you’ve got sufficient intelligence to understand what I’m saying here, you’ll recognize who the bad guy is as soon as he asks Spidey for help.

What about what I thought would be the main plot? All Spider-Man had to do to restore the memories of his old friends Ned and MJ was to have a short, revealing conversation with them, no magic involved. Remember Ned and MJ? Their lack of memory of Peter Parker was the instigating phenomenon from the previous movie that led to this one. It turns out be the most trivial problem of them all! Stupid magic.

I am about to give another quick spoiler: in the after-credits scene, we discover that the next movie will be about Spider-Man in Space. No big deal, especially since if Brand New Day sets the example, that actual sequel movie will be about, say, Hawkeye, Ant-Man, and Colossus joining forces to fight an accountant who has been scamming Professor X. It’s all about combinatorial rebranding to breathe life into a dying franchise.

In summary, I was deeply disappointed that a movie about my favorite super-hero was a disjointed mess that needed to toss a bunch of unrelated superheroes to inflate it. Yuck. It doesn’t promise much for the future.

One last thing: I know these movies are just a grand CGI-fest, but it disappointed me even there. The scenes of Spider-Man swinging about the city are supposed to be awesome, but for some reason they included one over-the-shoulder of Spidey flying along, flinging his left arm out to throw a splatter of webbing, then doing a bored-looking flip of his hand to release, then the right arm doing the same thing, then the left, then the right –it was ugly and awkward and made me wonder why they included a scene that looked so drab and stupid. Didn’t like it. Don’t do that anymore.

Also get writers who know how to tell a coherent story rather than mashing IPs together.

OK, that’s all folks. I’m currently doing this with an inflamed ulnar nerve, so I’m operating one-handed, and am also doped with steroids and painkillers, making this a half-brained project. Please clap. I should be fully recovered next week.

I’m not proud, if you want to give me a pity click and subscribe, I’ll take it.