Change Your Image
plagueis-68799
Reviews
The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Better Origin Story Than Spider-Man 2002
As much as I love the Sam Raimi trilogy, and I don't think any superhero movie has quite beaten Spider-Man 2 yet, I do think this is a better origin story than the 2002 film.
For one thing, I really appreciated the focus on his parents and what happened to them. This was something the previous films never touched on, almost as if he was adopted by his aunt and uncle before he was old enough to have any memory of his parents. It also sets up how sinister Norman Osborne and Oscorp are for future films. And seeing Peters interest in his fathers work leading to him getting his spider powers, rather than some random spider dropping off the ceiling on him by accident, was pretty neat.
Something else I liked was Peters aunt and uncle in this rendition. For one thing, they were a little more appropriately aged. They could seem to be his actual aunt and uncle whereas the Raimi films made them seem to be more like a great aunt and great uncle. Uncle Ben was also a lot more stern with Peter (which he was deserving of) but I liked to see him having to parent a more troubled youth.
The villain was alright. You only get to hear a little bit of his motivations, and they're basically: "I have a lizard voice in my brain now that tells me to turn all of humanity into lizards so that is what I'm going to do." However, I did like that it was sort of Peters fault because he gave Oscorp his fathers formula. This meant that stopping this guy was really Peters responsibility. And the fact that he was previously a newfound friend with a connection to his father made it sad as well.
Something really important to this movie was Gwen Stacy. She is a much better fit for Spider-Man than the Raimi Mary Jane. Gwen isn't a helpless screaming damsel in distress, she tries to stop the lizard twice, and although futile it was still pretty brave. And she's also the one who makes the antidote at the end of the movie so Peter can save the day. It was definitely cool to see Peter with another science nerd rather than a stuck-up theatre actress. And thank goodness Andrew Garfield isn't nearly as obnoxiously awkward as Tobey Maguire in some of their scenes together.
The only really disappointing thing was we never saw Spider-Man actually find his uncles killer. I didn't like that being left unresolved, although Captain Stacy was adamant Spider-Man stay out of that, so Peter had reason to leave that alone I guess.
I'll rate this a 9/10. It's a good superhero origin story and Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone were great.
Stargate SG-1: The Other Side (2000)
Hateful Episode
I absolutely loathe this episode. I hate it so much I lost sleep over it the night after I first watched it.
Basically, this episode is about SG-1 helping "a kindred race" win a war they know nothing about just so they can procure advanced technologies. To be given this technology, they just have to provide heavy water to the eurondans daily as a fuel supply. As the episode progresses, they become more and more suspicious of the eurondans even though they initially felt bad for them. By the end of the episode, it is revealed that the eurondans were a revolutionary eugenics faction who were planning to destroy "the breeders," those who bred without interest in Eurondan standards. However, the breeders escaped total annihilation by hiding in a giant bunker, just the same as the eurondans did. That is why their peoples are still both at war a generation later. SG-1 turns on the eurondans, destroying all of them and then refusing to save their leader, allowing him to die on impact of the Stargate iris.
Now taken at face value this sounds like: "SG-1 accidentally trusts space Nazis and then realizes they were wrong so they kill all the space Nazis." The problem is that the writers were horrendously incompetent at making the eurondans evil enough villains to warrant this destruction. I'll list my reasonings:
1:The eurondans are not the generation that planned the destruction of the breeders. Their leader was only a small boy who revered his father (their original dictator figure who plotted the breeders destruction) when the war began, which is what the writers used to immediately build sympathy for his character at the beginning of the episode. All of the eurondans are of this second generation, manning this bunker with the beliefs of their founders while the rest of their population is in criosleep. The current eurondans were only children when the war started, and have been indoctrinated in their beliefs their entire lives. Their only purpose in life is to finally win the war that has been so devastating for their people.
As a viewer, I was left sympathetic to the current situation of this generation of eurondans, because it was really no fault of their own. This awful history and their current situation was inherited from the sins of the previous generation. And because of this I cannot feel any sort of happiness when O'Neill blows up the entire base, genociding all their people, who we see screaming and dying as the bunker falls apart.
If the writers had done this correctly, SG-1 should have met the first generation who were the architects of the genocide against breeders. Then there wouldn't have been the conflicting sympathy that had been built earlier in the episode. SG-1 would have been tricked into helping people who were devising a genocide. Then, perhaps destroying them to put a stop to it would seem more justified to the audience. However, SG-1 was a generation too late.
2: We never meet the breeders. As quickly as O'Neill trusts the eurondans, he turns on them when he discovers that they hold ideas he doesn't like. But who is to say the eugenics were wrong? When I initially watched the episode I thought the eurondan woman explaining the breeders to Daniel was going to explain the breeders a bit more. I thought that when she said that they bred indiscriminately maybe she meant that they were horrible inbreeders and had become like vicious genetically-deformed people. The eurondans were evidently very superior in technology comparatively, so this is not a stretch at all. However, upon learning only that little bit about the breeders, SG-1 doesn't even ask any more questions about them. They immediately halt their treaty (while they are still present among these desperate people) and then O'Neill blows up their base. Wtf. There are so many questions here. If my theory was correct for instance, then perhaps they needed a eugenics program to correct what the breeders had done. But we don't know that because SG-1 immediately assumes they are space nazis, as we are meant to. Also, I'd like to know more about the breeders history. Are they really the good guys? Perhaps they have done even more atrocious things than the eurondans have done. Maybe the eurondans have reason to fear the breeders and feel that they needed to destroy them before they themselves were destroyed. However, we'll never know because SG-1 didn't ask that. We never meet the breeders to know for a certainty if they were being targeted wrongfully or if the situation was more complex. The writers didn't give us enough details to make this judgement, so I ultimately cannot feel much empathy for the breeders who I haven't seen and do not know. I have, however, met the eurondans, and have more reason to have sympathy for and trust them than the breeders, which is probably not what the writers intended.
So ultimately, these eurondans are not responsible for the earlier genocide and were only trying to win the war their forefathers started, which doesn't make them heinously evil, just stuck in an inherited position. We also don't know anything about the breeders, so it is difficult to know how much of a tragedy their attempted extermination really was, which means I don't even know how bad the eurondan forefathers really were. This episode failed to show me that SG-1 made the correct moral judgement in this case. In fact I would like to see O'Neill rot in a prison cell for the rest of his life after this episode.
Another thing that bothered me was Daniel's stupidity in this episode. He told the eurondans they weren't going to help them any more WHILE HE WAS STILL ON THE PLANET (how did you think they were going to respond nimrod?) being offered a collection of all their technical knowledge. Anyone with a functioning brain would have said "Gee, I don't like what these people are up to, but I need this technology. I will take it back to my world with the rest of my team and then we'll send a transmission to the eurondans telling them the deal is off because we don't like their war." I literally want to smash something when I think about how dumb this was.
Lastly, O'Neill's murder of the eurondan leader after he offered to share all of his knowledge with them in exchange for sanctuary was just childish and shortsighted. This was a hateful episode indeed.