I finished watching Spider-Noir last night, which wasn't bad, but not at all a show I was inclined to binge. Not even when I finished the penultimate episode did I feel like muscling the rest of the way through, though maybe that's because I knew the last episode would be badly written.
I'm noticing a pattern on Amazon Prime shows. On Fallout, Rings of Power, and Spider-Noir, there was a showrunner who had a proven track record of mediocrity and then some writers in the middle episodes who'd actually written something truly successful. I suppose it must be the competing desires in the studio to have someone they could easily manipulate and yet also to have someone who could deliver a quality product.
In this case, the showrunner was Oren Uziel whose credits include being one of five or six screenwriters in a few somewhat successful movies and being sole writer on the infamously dull Cloverfield Paradox. It turns out that he's good friends with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the pair behind the Spider-Verse movies, which Spider-Noir is kind of a spin-off of (Lord and Miller also directed the recent sci-fi movie Project Hail Mary).
As I kind of expected, the first couple episodes of Spider-Noir feel like they were written by someone whose idea of noir primarily comes from Sin City and Who Framed Roger Rabbit and maybe Chinatown.
Nicolas Cage is excellent as Ben Reilly, a hard boiled private detective who also happens to be a superhero known as "The Spider", an alternate universe version of Spider-Man. At one point in the series, he talks about trying to become human again after the encounter that gave him superpowers. He does so by watching movies and imitating actors. Cage has some funny moments where he does impressions of famous noir actors, even doing a version of the book shop scene from The Big Sleep when Bogart wore glasses and did a funny voice. At other times, Cage's Ben Reilly speaks with a slow, stiff diction like he's forcing out the communication. It works terrifically well.
Brendan Gleeson is excellent as the gangster Silvermane despite some inconsistent writing on his character from episode to episode. The rest of the cast is good enough though Li Jun Li is disappointing as Cat Hardy. She's based on Black Cat, Felicia Hardy, from the comics, which is odd because in terms of personality, background, costume, and physical appearance, she bears absolutely no resemblance to her comic counterpart. They decided not to make Spider-Man Peter Parker so it's puzzling that they chose this route for Cat. She's described as a "femme fatale" but she's written as more of a tsundere in the first couple episodes.
However, the series really starts to hit its stride halfway through when Steve Lightfoot starts contributing. Apparently, part of the way through production, Amazon brought Lightfoot on as "co-showrunner". Lightfoot is best known as showrunner on the first two seasons of Punisher.
This development somewhat resembles the development of Daredevil: Born Again. Disney originally hired a purportedly weak showrunner for that one and then brought in Dario Scardapane, who'd been a writer on Punisher, to take over. I'm starting to wonder if the situation had been the reverse of the one on Spider-Noir, though. Maybe the original writers on Born Again had too much creative vision and Disney/Marvel brought in Scardapane because they knew he'd do whatever stupid thing they told him to do.
Spider-Noir is available on Amazon Prime in both colour and black and white versions. I mostly watched it in colour but watched one episode in black and white. I gather it was originally intended to be only in black and white though it was originally shot in colour. After the decision was made, partway through production, to make a colour version, there were extensive reshoots. This indecision means that both versions frequently look odd. The colour version has too many harsh keylights in some shots and the black and white version sometimes looks too diffuse. But the studios will tell you that sometimes their meddling is really helpful.
No comments:
Post a Comment