Chapter Two: Spider-Man 2 vs. X2
By Brett Beach
April 28, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
For my part, I struggled to come up with the top 10 picks required of me. In the end, my list is comprised of six major releases of varying blockbuster-ness and four “smaller” films in varying shades of artiness. (If I could have determined whether or not Lars Von Trier’s supremely nutty looking Melancholia was officially going to open this summer in the United States, that might have made my voting at least a little more interesting. Check out the international trailer, complete with full female nudity, two generations of Skarsgaards, AND Kiefer Sutherland, for what looks to be Von Trier’s 2012).
I won’t go and spoil my picks before BOP publishes the results, but I will admit that the overall lack of luster of the 2011 crop is what compels me to look back this week to summers past (2003 and 2004, specifically) to a pair of Chapter Twos from two of the biggest franchises of the ‘00s. This week, in the cage, it’s Spider-Man 2 vs. X2. Or, if you prefer to frame it in soundtrack terms (music in the film only!): Dashboard Confessional and Michael Buble vs. Conjure One featuring Poe and, um, *NSYNC? How do these middle installments stack up against one another? Does radioactive blood trump adamantium cosmetic surgery? Let’s stand them head-to-head in some key categories.
Tale of the Tape (Budgets, Grosses, Running Times, Etc.)
X-Men helped kick off a decade of supreme commercial viability for super-hero and comic book adaptations of all stripes with its $54 million opening and $157 million domestic tally in the summer of 2000. Two years later, Spider-Man exploded out of the gate with the first-ever $100 million plus weekend on its way to over $400 million in North America. Respectively, the web-slinger and Wolverine et al. grossed $2.5 billion and $1.1 billion worldwide with their trilogies — I am not counting X-Men Origins: Wolverine in that tally — against budgets that were surpassing $200 million by the time the third installments rolled around. I find it of note that only Spider-Man 3 made significantly more overseas than it did in North America. That exception aside, both franchises have tended to make slightly more than half of their hauls on the domestic front, a rarity in an age where many exportable Hollywood blockbusters can pull in anywhere from two-thirds to three-fourths of their final gross from foreign theaters.
Spider Man’s films have all exceeded two hours in length — Spider- Man 2 clocks in at 128 minutes — whereas, at 134 mins, X2 is a full half-hour longer than either the first and third installments or XO:W, a factor that can’t be discounted in determining if it will emerge victorious over its bug-eyed foe.
The Man in the Director’s Chair
Both sequels featured helmers returning from the first go-around — Sam Raimi and Bryan Singer. Raimi already had previous experience with a Chapter Two (eventually trilogy), guiding his Evil Dead antihero Ash out of the ‘80s and into the ‘90s, and he had dabbled in many different genre mashups in the ten years previous to Spider-Man: Southern gothic horror, revisionist Western, modern noir, sports/romance. Still, it was a big risk and leap of faith for Columbia Pictures entrusting the fate of a $150 million franchise launch in the hands of a man who, onscreen, had once had a tree attempt to rape a woman.
What Raimi did bring was an attunement to a comic-book sensibility, an ability to communicate a world of information and emotion with key bold images and visuals, an offbeat sense of humor, and a willingness to take the characters seriously without freighting the whole production down with the onus of being a BIG WOULD-BE BLOCKBUSTER. Since Spider-Man, Raimi has helmed only one non-Spidey flick, the justifiably awesome horror pic, Drag Me to Hell, which made my list of the best films of the past decade.
Singer only had three features under his belt, including the career-launching The Usual Suspects and the unsuccessful but unnerving Apt Pupil, before tackling X-Men, but he carried a genuine love for the source material coupled with an appreciation and affinity for how mutants can be metaphorically read as any “minority” or disenfranchised group of people who feel unable to be accepted for who they are, and must choose between remaining hidden in the shadows or stepping out into the open, working within the world that judges them, or seeking vengeance. After X2, Singer attempted to invigorate another comic book franchise with the flawed Superman Returns, followed by a slam-bang return to form with Valkyrie (which shows Singer’s touch in how it adapts many themes from the X-Men world into its depiction of a real-life WWII plot by Hitler’s countrymen to assassinate him.
Wet Kirsten Dunst
Just seeing if you are paying attention! It was a memorable moment in the first film, a drenched Mary Jane Watson sharing a sexy smooch with a hanging upside down Spidey, so the thought probably was, “Can we find a way to get water on her again?” A team of writers, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon and Academy-Award winning/half-century Hollywood veteran Alvin Sargent, does not disappoint in that regard.
This category is a trifle unfair, seeing as how Ms. Dunst is not in X2, but the latter film does feature Rebecca Rojmin-Stamos, out of her Mystique outfit briefly, in a scene that illustrates the truism that any man, no matter how unattractive, will throw all such relativism out the window when a hot chick sidles on over from the bar, wraps her legs around him, and suggests getting busy in a bathroom stall. This proves doubly so if she comes bearing beer.
Both Raimi and Singer prove astonishingly adept at staging forceful and vigorous action sequences that serve the dual purposes of offering up the spectacle the audience has come to see, and carrying the story forward in the midst of all the flash and smash. After multiple viewings, the subway car fight between Doc Ock and Spider-Man has now taken its place among my all-time favorite action scenes. Raimi and his cinematographer Bill Pope find the balance between the claustrophobia of the fight in and on the top of the out of control car, and the wide-open city spaces that loom just out of reach, but that seem to offer Spider-Man his only hope at slowing down the vehicle before everyone inside is hurtled to their death at the end of the line. The emotional payoff at the end is the clincher, however, a reminder of how Spider-Man is one of the few heroes embraced by the public at large. The dynamic of that relationship, how it both tests and redeems Spider-Man, is at the emotional heart of Spider-Man 2.
Back to that running time on X2. The first and third films clock in at barely over an hour-and-a-half after closing credits are subtracted out. Whatever other flaws they may separately rate, they both suffer from the strain of cramming in more than a dozen heroes and at least as many villains and giving them all something to do. X2 uses its extended length wisely, first by reducing its mutant “villains” roster down to Magneto and Mystique and positing the corrupt and mad General Stryker as the center of the heart of darkness. X2 throws in just enough emotion and character-driven moments in the first half (love how Wolverine lets Iceman hand-chill his beverage as a symbol of détente between the two) that Singer is able to indulge the final hour as one extended action set piece, with ever-increasing levels of climax. That it proves exhausting, but not wearying, even with notable visual referencing to The Last Temptation of Christ’s closing moments included in the mix, is a testament to Singer’s skill at staging moments of never-flagging momentum.
My choice for the best action sequence in X2 would have to be the night attack on the School for Gifted Children. Singer, like Raimi, refuses to chop this scene into bursts of violence and terror devoid of any sense of where our heroes stand in relation to the threat they face. The audience has been given some sense of the layout here and even going back to X-Men, and the scene feels like it plays fair with that design.
Normally, I squawk about the level of violence that PG-13 films get away solely by refraining from showing blood. Here though, even as Wolverine slaughters somewhere around three dozen covert military personnel with nary a flicker of viscera, the sound design and Hugh Jackman’s forceful presence render the notion of visible bloodshed moot. When we hear his claws tear into some anonymous intruder, or chop down a trio of hapless goons in one fell swoop, it’s both exhilarating and disconcerting.
Give It Up for the Villains
Spider-Man 2 continues in the vein of the first film, focusing on another man of science (and mentor/role model of Peter Parker) who winds up destroyed by his creation and transmuted from a benign force into an arch villain who threatens the city’s inhabitants. (On a side note, it seemed to me that the only way the third film could and should go would be to have Dr. Connors, the last of Peter’s positive father figures, assume the mantle of the Lizard. Dylan Baker’s performance in the first two films seems geared towards just this. Alas, we get three brand-new villains, evil space goo, and a musical number.) Alfred Molina only has a few scenes as Dr. Octavius to make a warm and lasting impression and he utterly succeeds. I felt even more empathy for him than I did for Willem Dafoe’s descent into Green Goblin-hood.
As William Stryker, military man gone mad in the X2 universe, the irreplaceable character actor Brian Cox is as cold and steely as his salt and pepper beard. Using his own son as a pawn in a plan to wipe out all the mutants of the world, manipulating an attack on the President in order to further his own agenda, using that badgering superior voice of his to wear down any who might get in his way, the foundation of his actions is not entirely without sympathy, but the means he pursues to reach his ends begin to rise from distressing to globally destructive.
Final Analysis
The key distinction between X2 and Spider-Man 2 is that the former is a damn fine comic book movie that finds time for its characters in the midst of incredible action and benefits from a strong directorial vision, and the latter is a work of art that just happens to have a superhero as its main character. X2 is dark but hopeful, over plotted but steady in its course, fierce in its violence but also in its tenderness, cast so well with such archetypically perfect character/actor fits that it doesn’t matter whether they have enough to do sometimes, it’s fun just to watch them all inhabit their universe.
What few complaints I could lodge against Spider-Man 2 — the fittingness of that Dashboard Confessional song after the overwhelmingly Emo tone of the first half-hour, a slight sense of narrative wheel-spinning — melt away in the face of how much I enjoy the film each time I watch it. From the comic book panel highlights that recap the first film’s plot, to Raimi’s multiple Evil Dead nods, to the decision to cast two hosts of E’s The Soup, it finds sincerity and couples it with a friendly wink, presents drama and balances it with a gratuitous jiggle shot, champions redemption, and has the balls to push for the happy ending, and then push past that for a gloriously ambivalent final shot. What comes after “happily ever after?” Oddly enough, it looks a lot like what came before...
Next time: Chapter Two delves into a months-long sub-theme I am calling “Long Time Coming.” These are sequels that came anywhere from 13 to 30 years later. In the next three months, I’ll look at the second cinematic chapters of a pool shark, a compulsive killer, a business tycoon, a videogame designer, and the unheralded follow-ups to an eight-time Oscar nominee from 1971 and an 11-time nominee from 1983.