Jonathan:

All right, I admit, I was venting. SPIDERMAN 2 bored me, and I don’t take

kindly to being bored. Vex me, annoy me, burn my house, steal my car, drink

my likker from that ol’ fruit jar, but don’t bore me.

I got arguments, though. Even comic-book movies must obey certain unities.

In the realm of science fiction — and c/b movies are a species, even if a

low one, of science fiction — the golden rule is: You can have one

highly implausible bit of science. The rest of the science should be sound,

or at least should follow logically from the central implausibility. THE

TIME MACHINE is a great sci-fi novel because, once you have granted the

central, fairly preposterous, premise that time travel is possible,

everything else is just basic Darwinism and stellar evolution, as it was

understood at the time.

The central notion in SPIDERMAN is that if you get bitten by a spider whose

genes have been messed about with in a certain way, you will develop the

ability to shoot 100-ft silk threads from your wrists (without, apparently,

any loss of body mass). This is preposterous — though not at a

sensationally high level, as spider genes can be messed around with in an

infinity of ways, and we don’t actually know what would happen if you were

bitten by a spider whose genes had been messed around with in way No.

29,485,672.

Having been persuaded to suspend our disbelief with respect to Spidey’s

powers, we should not then be asked to swallow any more preposterosities.

And we know perfectly well what whould happen if you dumped a fusion

reaction into the East River — ka-BOOM.

I was also put off by Doc Oc’s striking resemblance to the late Tony Hancock.