Sony unveiled the first trailer for Madame Web today. It looks pretty bad, but the specific way it looks bad means that I'll be there day one.
Sony's series of Spider-Man villain spin-off movies aren't necessarily good, but I have a special place in my heart for their variety of junkiness, which feels like a throwback to a pre-MCU era. I'm a big defender of the first Venom movie, largely because it really surprised me when I watched it. As MCU movies increasingly became blobs of very expensive CGI, with the live-action bits shot on sound stages and composited poorly into the mix, I had sort of forgotten that superhero movies didn't need to look like that. So, when I finally caught Venom a few years after its theatrical release, I was shocked by how much it looked like a real movie.
It ended with the usual orgy of CGI as Venom and Riot tore at each other like two sentient diarrhea tornadoes duking it out. But the𓆉 rest of the movie did a far better job than most MCU flicks of making it feel like the action took place in the real-world. Most of the film was shot in Atlanta and New York City, but the location shooting that director Ruben Fleischer and his team did in San Francisco went a long way toward making the movie feel more specific and grounded.
I really loved the movie when I saw it, and a few years out, I can recognize that I was mostly responding to it feeling the way superhero movies felt when I was growing up in the 2000s. That was a scattershot landscape for cape flicks, and you were just as likely to catch a Catwoman as you were to spy Spider-Man 2. But because the technology wasn't as advanced as it is now, it took a higher degree of craft to pull blockbuster action scenes off. This was before movies staged their big battles 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:in gray CG wastelands, wheꦦn a prop on a set still mattered🧔 and could still influence a scene.
Venom feels like that. It's best moment — Eddie Brock climbing into a lobster tank to cool off — wasn't pre-vizzed months in advance. It came from Tom Hardy seeing the prop on set and having an idea. That's a different ethos than has been guiding the MCU movies for years, and it's one that I enjoy.
Madame Web, similarly, doesn't look good. Dakota Johnson's awkward ADRed delivery of "he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died" instantly became a meme on Twitter. The editing and staging of a dialogue scene set in a forest just seems off. And the costumes have a kind of pre-Iron Man look, and feel like a throwback to when studios were too ashamed to put comics-accurate get-ups on the big screen. I wouldn't necessarily categorize any of that as good.
But, it does look like a movie your one friend would bring over in a stack of bootleg DVDs circa 2010 and that you might throw on during a party while half your friends were making out with their significant others, and the other half were playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty: Black Ops' Zombies mode. It doesn't look like high art, but it could believably serve as the second half of a double-bill with Zombieland in your parents' basement, and that's something, isn't it? Throw in a dude in the trailer playing a PSP on the subway, and the augh꧅ts vibes are off the charts.
It has the Venom thing going on where it looks like it was actually shot in real locations, not a soundstage. At one point, Johnson's paramedic character runs up to a flipped car teetering off the edge of a bridge and I actually believe that she and the car were there on location at the same time. That may seem like a low bar to clear — and it is — but it makes these movies feel like a salve to me. They weren't shot in the Volume. They didn't composite two actors on opposite sides of the world into a dialogue scene in a third location to avoid eager fans snapping pics of spoiler-y moments. It feels like it could have come out during Obama's first term. It doesn't take Madame Web's ability to see the future to predict that that vibe will be a bad thing for many (most?) people. But, I say, bring on the glorious trash.
