The Amazing Spider-Man 2

I have no issues with the scene about the blood...Peter had three options: 1. Handling over the blood, knowing fully well that it might have dire consequences (bad idea) 2. Pretending to never have found Spiderman (slightly better, but cowardly and would keep Harry with no hope at all) 3. Talking to Harry, trying to explain the dangers and promising to look for a cure...and that's another reason why the whole second half of the movie would have worked better in part three. Because if Norman Osborn lived long enough for Harry to grow up, why exactly is Harry acting as if he drops dead any minute? A longer built up for him getting so desperate that he ignores all caution would have made more sense. But Peter is actually doing the right thing...which makes the whole matter so tragic. The first movie was about Peter making mistakes with tragic consequences. But the second movie is all about Peter doing the right thing with tragic consequence. Poor guy can't win, but he has to accept those failures as part of the deal.

On the topic of Jameson casting, what about Nick Offerman?

That's the best idea you've had all week, Johnson.

Just giving Harry the blood was a bad idea, but electing to work together with him on it? Where's the harm in that?

"I don't trust your company but I want to help you, and I'm a bit of scientist myself, so here's the compromise: every afternoon, I'm going to come over here and you and I are going to work on analyzing my blood. I keep control of the sample to ensure none of the extracurricular stuff your dad was doing like the experiment that wound up being the Lizard gets done by some of the less scrupulous guys you're working with - which, by the way, watch out for less scrupulous guys you're working with - and together we'll see if we can't save your life. Deal?"

It wouldn't work for the movie because it wouldn't lead to Harry becoming the Green Goblin and murdering Gwen, but it's what Spider-Man would do. And that is why this entire plot point should never have existed in the first place - because the only way for the movie to get to where it needs to be with this scene in the middle of it is for Spider-Man to act unrecognizably out-of-character to the point that he ceases to even be a hero at all. Like Gwen's death, it was very apparent that this scene was driven solely by the consequences the writers wanted to come out of it, and had nothing to do with the characters actually involved in it.

edited 29th Aug '14 8:22:37 PM by TobiasDrake

So, in your opinion, it's far more worth it to play nurse to one man who happens to be his friend and spend endless hours working on something that he's 50% sure isn't possible while the city burns under people like Electro and Rhino and countless other criminals.

He did the right thing. He said he'd work on it in private when he can while he protects his city.

Rhino didn't get the suit until after Harry turned evil.

Helping Harry and protecting the city are not mutually exclusive. If Peter can spend time doing relatively mundane things like attending school, he has time to help his friend not die.

Barely attending school, and he did say he was going to spend time working on Harry's problem.lol

Exactly.

So Peter goes to school, then when school lets out at 3ish he goes to the lab and works with Harry for a few hours - say, until 8 or 9, then does a couple hours of patrolling as Spider-Man, and then goes home, does homework, and goes to bed. If he comes clean to Harry about being Spider-Man, the whole thing works perfectly - and he can even tell his Aunt May that he took a job working with Harry and that's why he's out late, thereby solving his home problems as well, and if a supervillain emergency comes up, it will be on the News, so just having a TV in the lab means he can run out and deal with that.

Everyone's life improves if Peter refrains from telling Harry that he's shit out of luck.

EDIT: Hell, have Harry start pulling strings to bring Curt Connors in on a work-release program. There is no one who knows the material quite like Connors, and the only reason Connors' experiments went cock-up is because Harry's dad is an evil shithead. Norman's gone. There is no reason Oscorp NEEDS to be a teeming hive of scum and villainy when Harry is now in control of its direction, and before he became desperate due to Spider-Man's abandonment, Harry was a pretty okay guy.

If this is going to be one of those adaptations where Oscorp is responsible for everything supervillainous that happens, then every villain in the entire franchise could have been avoided if Peter and Harry were working together at fixing Harry, fixing Oscorp, and saving the city at the root of the trouble.

edited 30th Aug '14 7:36:36 AM by TobiasDrake

Peter no doubt owes all of his good fortune to his dark lord, Satan.

Turns out he and Gwen were actually married, right up until Peter sold his marriage to Mephisto.

Great idea...tell the guy who is desperate your true identity, so that he has an easier time stealing it when he looses his patience. NOT!

Osborn taking so long to find out who Spider-Man is anyway, already violates my sense of what would actually happen. He's a fricking billionaire or has access to that kind of money. Those kinds of people would be able to find out who anyone was in days in our world. Super hero or no. Does great wealth come with great stupidity in the Marvel 'verse? I've been reading Marvel comics for decades and I never could figure that out.

It's not just Marvel. Lex Luthor once hired a guy to find out Superman's secret identity and immediately fired him when he told Lex it was Clark Kent.

edited 30th Aug '14 2:26:27 PM by Eagal

It kinda made sense, 'cause in Luthor's mind, why would someone with the infinite power of Superman be a fuckin putz?

Yeah. Now that you mention it, I had heard that about Luthor before.

Pity. Being rich = you are as thick as pig droppings in the Marvel/D.C verses. Bit stupid really. Seeing as how there are stupid rich folks in our world but tonnes more smart rich ones.

Well, Ra's al Ghul is also rich, and he figured out Batman's secret identity almost immediately. So... he gets a prize or something, right?

Uh...aren't Batman and Iron Man obscenely rich? For that matter, isn't Charles Motherfucking Xavier member of a very wealthy family?

I should have clarified that I meant EVIL rich people in the Marvel/D.C verse were stupid. Though I very much implied that to be the case.

Though I suppose it depends on your interpretation of "rich" and "clever". Doctor Doom owns a goddamn country and is a Magnificent Bastard to Memetic Badass levels, Red Skull seems to posess an infinite amount of resources and has also taken over the world several times (only to be undone, possibly by his own stupidity, later on), Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker leads an organization wealthy enough to literally buy and sell a country, and has Out-Gambitted the likes of Nick Fury a few times, Wilson Fisk/The Kingpin is obscenely rich and so clever he might as well be precognitive, the list goes on.

The only reason he became desperate in the first place was because Spider-Man refused to help him.

Are we remembering the same scene? Spiderman said "I can't give you my blood /right now/ but I can try and run some tests-" and then Harry threw a glass bottle at his head and screamed at him.

He used crap reasoning, though. "I can't give you my blood; we don't know what it will do to you?" No shit. That's what the desperate billionaire and his army of admittedly amoral, discipline-vague (Seriously, what does Oscorp even do? Bio-therapy? Green energy? Weapons? Prosthetics? Wing prosthetics? A genius electrician goes missing right as their uber-huge electrical project—that used his designs—goes live, and nobody bats a goddamn eye. Not even his apparently-nonexistent coworkers. I mean, he was being paid for something, right? Was he the janitor? And you know that at some point, someone said, "Hey, we're working on electricity this month, right? Brilliant idea—let's build an electric eel aquarium. It'll be so cool!" and it got approved. Oscorp is chaos incarnate. Fitting, really) scientists are for.

Also, "Fate worse than death," really only applies if there's no one willing/able to put you out of your gobliny misery.

edited 30th Aug '14 9:24:46 PM by Rem

The last time Oscorp had something in line with this the result was a giant killing lizard, and Peter knew that there were people at Oscorp who were ruthless enough to do human testing way too early. As I said beforehand, talking with Harry was the only option Spiderman had...and if Harry had listened, asking from Spiderman's reasoning why the whole stuff is so dangerous instead of just assuming the worst, if Harry had been more stable overall, nothing would have happened. To me, this is the whole theme of the movie...Spiderman does nothing wrong concerning Electro. He treats him decently when he is still human, and later on, he tries his very best to talk him down. But Electro is way to far gone at this point. He also does nothing wrong concerning Harry...he offers him comfort, he tries to talk to him in both of his identity, but Harry is at this point already pathological paranoid and desperate.

Under Norman Osborn's command, yes, there are people who place what their boss tells them to do as a higher priority than human life. With Harry in charge and Peter taking an active interest in helping stabilize him, that shouldn't be a problem. Oscorp is only a problem if Harry himself is.

And no, Electro wasn't too far gone. He was listening. It was a random Diabolus ex Machina in the form of a police sniper - who was so stupid that he would be fired in the real world - that turned the situation with Electro hostile.

This is the problem with the movie, that the villains only exist because people force them into existence. Both Electro and Harry had to be shocked with the Cattle Prod of Plot several times in order to give the film a villain, and as a consequence it doesn't really have heroes and villains at all; just victims of bad writing all around.

• WRITER: And now you're the bad guy.
• ELECTRO: But I don't want to be the bad guy.
• WRITER: An idiot panicked and shot at you!
• ELECTRO: Why would he do that? It's the middle of a police negotiation. That doesn't make sense.
• WRITER: *smack* Because FUCK YOU, that's why. Go kill some people.
• ELECTRO: Can't I at least be a deranged, obsessive maniac trying to kidnap the object of my affections, Spider-Man, or something? Does my motivation really have to be, "Mad because stupid people did stuff?"
• WRITER: I don't need this, I'm already getting crap from Harry about nonsensically portraying his illness as an immediate panic when he's probably got decades to find a cure. Do I need to hit you again?
• ELECTRO: No! Please! I'll go kill some people.

edited 31st Aug '14 7:04:28 AM by TobiasDrake