This Week in Movie Nights

Spider-Man and The Adam Project

We had a relatively normal weekend this week, with two movies with the kids; there’s an outside chance that a third squeaks in, as SteelyKid is reading “Romeo and Juliet” in English class, and has complained that it’s hard to figure out without seeing. So there’s a chance that we might fire one of those up this afternoon; if you would like to weigh in on which adaptation to watch, the comments will be open.

Spider-Man: No Way Home:

(No screenshot because they only do title cards at the end, and I was fed up by then…)

The kids asked repeatedly to go see this in the theater, but at the height of the omicron-variant peak, we declined. It hit Amazon Prime for purchase in the last week or so, though, so we fired it up Friday night. This was a huge hit with the kids, but I kind of hated the MCU of it all.

This is not a knock on the people involved— everyone in the cast is very charming and the film is very competently put together, modulo the usual complaint about poorly lit CGI climaxes. But the cinematic-multiverse thing is just overwhelming; there are way too many things that are obviously jokes that you need to have seen a twenty-year-old movie that wasn’t all that great to understand.

Also, there’s a kind of fundamental incoherence to Spider-Man in the MCU that is really hard to get past. The thing that makes Spider-Man stories distinctive is the mixing of superhero exploits with teen angst, and that works really well in, say, the Raimi movies, where Peter Parker is the only superhero in business. It makes no sense at all in a world where he’s teamed up with the Avengers. They’re incredibly rich and famous, and they just leave him hanging? Tony Stark left him control of amazing tech, but no cash? Stark’s company doesn’t have a media team that can step in to deal with the Jonah Jameson situation?

The first two Tom Holland movies largely duck this because he and Zendaya and Jacob Batalon are very charming, and the stories keep the focus pretty narrow (at least until the conclusion of the second movie). This one expands the scope to a point where you can’t not think about it, and this is not a scenario that rewards thinking deeply about.

The Adam Project:

The actual title card is just white text on a black screen, so I like this better.

This is a Netflix original starring Ryan Reynolds as himself and Walker Scobell as 12-year-old Ryan Reynolds. Well, OK, their characters actually have a different name (Adam Reed, for what little difference it makes), but it’s very much just Ryan Reynolds doing his particular fast-talking sarcastic shtick in the company of a child actor doing a very credible version of the same shtick. We watched this because I had been served approximately one billion ads for it, and it seemed like the most my-kids movie imaginable; it’s targeted particularly well at The Pip’s demographic (ten-year-old boys).

This is also not a movie that rewards careful thought— it’s a time-travel story, and it’s really difficult to make those make sense when you’re actually trying, and they’re pretty clearly not. It moves fast, though, and is unencumbered with multiversal continuity, so it’s relatively easy to ignore the complete incoherence of the plot and setting.

I know that, on some level, I’m supposed to hate on Reynolds and his shtick, but honestly, I kind of enjoy what he’s doing, in a ludicrous-80’s-action-movie sort of way. The fights and setpieces are fun, and the density of jokes is very high, so when one doesn’t land, it’s no big deal, because there’s another coming in five seconds or so. Or possibly an explosion. Maybe both.

Anyway, the kids loved this, and I thought it was dumb but fun.

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And that’s it for media consumption this weekend; we’ve been enjoying Fake Spring since I finished Reacher, so there hasn’t been any biking-to-nowhere to pick up anything new. Here are some buttons:

And if you want to ridicule my takes on these two movies, the comments will be open.