TheBoost said:Vaderisnothayden said:TheBoost said:When adapting a character who's been published non-stop for 40+ years, it's IMPOSSIBLE to be 'faithful' to the work.
I don't think that's an excuse for not being faithful. You can zero in on the best material or the best-known or most archetypical stuff and be faithful to that. The films made the characters into totally different people from what they were in the comics and reduced the story to a load of crap. Peter Parker in the comics never came off like a self-satisfied creepy twerp who probably stalks little girls, but that's how he was played in the films.
What's the single best known most archtypal momen in SpiderMan? When he realizes that with great power comes great responsibility. A self satisfied creepy twerp is EXACTLY who Peter Parker was. That's the entire point of his character. He's a loser, and the moment he gets some power he becomes an jerk (letting the robber go) and spends the rest of his life regretting it. A cool, charming, humble, or pleasent Peter would have missed the point.
He was a self-satisfied twerp for like 5 seconds yeah, but not a guy whose whole nature is self-satisfied twerp. Nor creepy the way I mean it, like paedophile creepy. Nor even self-satisfied the way I'm talking about. No, the character in the movies is not at all the one in the comics. The guy in the movies could never grow into the good guy he became in the comics. The guy in the movies would be stuck forever as a creepy self-satisfied twerp. Total warping of the character. It's bogus to say the character in the comics was like that.
And no WAY is being a self-satisfied twerp the whole point of the character. It was the point of one brief stage in his development. Then he moved past that to something very different. He acted like an idiot because he was a downtrodden teenager who suddenly got a lot of power. But he quickly learned his lesson and changed. He wasn't a self-satisfied twerp by nature. The movie version was. Different character.
C3PX said:I am really curious in what way the first Spider-Man film is not accurate to the comic, or in what way Toby's Peter Parker is completely different from the comics? The origin of Spider-Man and the Green Goblin are both spot on.
Peter changes quite a lot in the comics, depending on who is writing him. To me, the characters in the film come off very much like they were in The Amazing Spider-Man volume one era.
The Peter Parker character in the comics did not come off like he was going to start pinching little girls' bottoms. The character in the movie did. Similarly, the other characters in the movie do not come off like their on-paper versions. You seriously want to tell me that Kirsten Dunst came off like Mary Jane Watson? Dunst's lifeless performance was nothing like the character.
That the origin of the Spider Man and Green Goblin characters fitted the comic book story doesn't mean that everything else in the film fitted to the tone and mentality of the comics or made the best use of the comics' material. The idea with a comic book movie is to make something with as much depth as the comic story, or, better yet, to elevate the story by maximizing its virtues to effect of improving its depth (after all, film is a medium that can go farther than comics -why not use that potential to make the most out of the comic book material?). Why not make the best one can out of the material? But here we get lets make dumb shit out of the material.