3:20 I did have a friend used a point in response to a video called “people are bad at criticizing Ms.Muslim,” in that video he used Sam Rami Spider-Man as an example of someone NOT struggling with getting their powers at first, compared to Kamala who got her magic bracelets in the attic. So I send it to my friend to help argue against him and he did say in another rebuttal that Spider-Man’s power losing mental block from Spider-Man 2 is actually a thing that happened before in the comics, I don’t know which one(my guess Spider-Man No More), but I won’t’ use that as a high and mighty defense since people would definitely not know that, and some people could be iffy when it comes to third party media and how it’s incorporated into arguments among other things. I just thought it would neat to share.
Thank you for addressing this. Peter’s video really bothered me, and what you talked about with regards to how he’s using a standard that a movie like Spider-Man 2 isn’t meant to be judged by put into words what I’ve been thinking better than I ever could. If you’re gonna judge a superhero movie in terms of how closely it adheres to our reality, then no movie in the genre will meet your standards. What ultimately matters is how well the movie adheres to its own reality. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies take place in a heightened, melodramatic reality and do a good job of staying largely consistent with that. It’s not that internal consistency is unimportant, as Southpaw would like to accuse his detractors of saying, but that it’s not meant to be taken 100% literally all the time, and as long as the metaphor is consistently developed, then the filmmaker is holding up their end of the contract they make with the audience (the other end being that the audience sets aside their disbelief over the fantastical things occurring onscreen). Part of the problem with guys like Southpaw is that they believe that their set of standards can be consistently applied across all media, like a movie is some kind of pre-determined checklist of things that always should or should not happen. The reality is that different stories have different goals in mind, and thus have different methods of accomplishing those goals. While there may be some general guidelines that work for most people, even these are not absolute dictates that must always be followed. In the case of Spider-Man 2, Raimi wanted to tell a story set in a heightened comic-book reality that explored the theme of “with great power comes great responsibility”, and the choices he made with that film helped him successfully accomplish his goals. I’d even go as far as to argue that an approach that took practical reality into account may have actually hindered that goal rather than helped. Conversely, to pivot to another film I also consider to be in the top tier of both 2000s superhero and summer blockbuster entertainment, Christopher Nolan did go with a more grounded, practical approach with ‘The Dark Knight’, through which he was able to accomplish his narrative goals with equally spectacular results. If he had taken an approach that had eschewed practicality to a greater degree than he did, than the movie may not have worked as well as it did. What I’m saying is that these two movies, even though they may be of the same genre and have some similarities as a result, cannot be judged by the exact same standards because what each one set out to accomplish was so different from the other. But Southpaw and co. would like you to believe that every movie can be subject to the same standardized robotic analysis that they specialize in, rather than looking at things on a case-by-case basis. To reiterate, this was a very cathartic watch for despite being only a little under six minutes long, and did a good job of succinctly encapsulating what I found so frustrating about Southpaw’s video.
