Monday, May 7, 2007

Spider-Man 3

I saw it today. There is one ultra-serious problem with it.

When you see a comic book movie, you walk in knowing that your suspension of disbelief is going to take a beating. Radioactive (or genetically-altered) spiders can give super powers to people when they bite. Sure. Crazy super soldier serum can make people regenerate wounds quickly. No problem. I'm prepared to buy into all of that to enjoy the movie.

But the trade-off is that you can't just randomly abuse suspension of disbelief to compensate for lazy or nonsensical writing. Radioactive spiders cause me no problems, but very, very early on, a villain fleeing from the cops enters an "Experimental Particle Physics Test Site." Except that it's the middle of the night, and the place is still fully staffed and doing their experiments. No attempts to explain what exactly they were working on is made, nor do the writers ever deem to tell us why there is apparently a 24 hour demand for particle physics. Aren't these things usually 9-5 operations? Or done at large research universities? Also, the scientists and lab techs detect the prisoner's presence in their big scary science apparatus, and the response is "Oh, it's probably just a bird and it'll fly away." Right. Not like advanced particle physics experiments of the experimental variety need to be done in controlled environments or anything. I keep forgetting that the first rule of science is "The Show Must Go On." Every bit of the villain was vaporized and reduced to sand, but somehow that cheap locket he was carrying survived the onslaught of particle physics.

That was in the first 15 minutes or so, and I was already done.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In all fairness high power particle physics experiments do tend to be done at night so not to knock out power in local areas but that is the only logical bit and probably a lucky coincidence.

But yes open air particle physics experiments with zero security and no staff concerns for objects in their machine is very very stupid

Then there is the even worse crane scene with a crane that defies most laws of physics...