The Science Of Hyperbole

One day maybe I'll get around to even starting to think about just how bad Spider-Man 3 was. I've got the DVD on preorder already. Because despite it's overwhelming badness, there was a lot of good stuff in there. It was just crushed beneath the wight of all the crap. A lot like Star Trek: Nemesis.

But did I only think it was so bad because my expectations were so high? I mean, Spidey 2 is ne of the best movies ever made, never mind one of the best comic books movies. It's almost beat perfect. The only misstep it makes is that the train sequence (the most perfect action sequence of the last ten years, possibly of ever) isn't the finale. Superman Returns makes the same mistake, with the airplane rescue that is so pulse-poundingly brilliant pretty much everything afterward seems like an anti-climax.

So, in the three years since the last film, has my obsession with Spidey grown and grown until nothing could sate it? And if so, is it my fault? In order, possibly and certainly not. You see, I thought Spidey 2 was brilliant, I love Batman Begins more than is entirely healthy and both are movies I was desperate to see. But just because I love a certain comic or hero or Kirsten Dunst (and on a bizarre sidenote, isn't it funny how they get Dunst - a blonde - to play Mary Jane, a redhead, and the lovely Bryce Dallas Howard - a redhead - to play Gwen Stacy, a blonde?) doesn't mean that I'm going to be blind to any faults of the film.

I was perhaps more critical of Spidey 3 than I was of, say Ghost Rider or Hulk (both, in my opinion, massively underrated films) because my expectations were so high. Going in to watch Ghost Rider I didn't have much in the way of preconceptions. Sure, Mark Steven Johnsand on had directed Daredevil (which I adore and which made my sister's fiance loudly proclaim that he wanted to slit his own wrists) but one film does not make a resume. Whereas Spidey 3 had the previous two installments and the combined force of Sam Raimi's back catalogue. Everything from the genius of Evil Dead 2 to the 'Katie Holmes gets her norks out' film The Gift. I think it's fair to say that Raimi has never actually made a truly bad film. He probably doesn't know how to. Most of us have blood running in our viens, he probably has liquid celluloid. And added to that it had Tobey Maguire's back catalogue, and Kirsten Dunst's, and, well, probably not Topher Grace, I mean, I doubt anyone went into the auditorium expecting Eric Foreman to become Venom.

Ghost Rider had Johnson, Nicolas Cage (a brilliant actor, but one whose quality bounces from one end of the spectrum to the other - on one hand you have Leaving Las Vegas and Wild At Heart and on the other you have Captain Corelli's Mandolin and The Wicker Man), Eva Mendes (sure she's pretty, but can she act - the jury is still out) and Wes Bentley (who started out so promisingly in American Beauty and then stumbled down the career path marked "WTF?" with starring roles in, among others, Soul Survivors and the lackadaisal remake of The Four Feathers in which he sprouted a ludicrous moustache, and moustaches are never a good idea unless you're Sam Elliot). So I went into Ghost Rider expecting a mildly enjoyable B-movie starring a guy with a burning skull instead of a head. And you know what, that's why I got. It's never going to win any awards (indeed, SFX gave the DVD two stars out of five, which, if I recall correctly, is worse than what they gave Spidey 3). Whereas with Raimi's effort, I expected a world-changing, orgasmic cinema experience and nothing could reasonably be expected to live up to that.

I used to work with a guy who spent a fortune on pirate DVD's. He said he liked getting them and watching them before the hype. Without the hype, he ruminated, you can enjoy a film on its own merits without having the posters shoved down your face at every opprtunity, every magazine proclaiming it to be the best thing ever. And I agree with his philosophy. Some of my favourite films have been ones that have caught my eye that I'd never really even heard of before.

But can you avoid hype? In this media saturated day and age, no you can't. We get teaser trailers months before the film has even been finished, previews and making ofs on any one of the dozens of channels we get, every time we log on and go to Yahoo or any one of millions of websites we're bombarded with advertising. It's impossible to escape. Even the BBC, once the great bastion of anti-commercialism is whoring itself simply because it has to, in order to survive.

Hype. Like death and taxes, it's something we can't avoid. And damn it, I'm really looking forward to the new Harry Potter film. And the new Harry Potter book. And the Christmas special. And Stephen King's next book. And the next Doctor Who. And the next Indiana Jones. And the Star Wars TV series. Fuck, I'm even looking forward to the inveitable Spider-Man 4.