The Foreigner

If you are a Jackie Chan fan - and maybe even if you are not - you will like The Foreigner. It's a compelling story in the tradition of Taken. A father has lost his daughter, and he will do anything to bring the perpetrators to justice. From the shocking act of terrorism at the beginning to the end the audience knows is coming, the film keeps us engaged and (generally speaking) rooting for the right people for the right reasons.

There are several interesting elements to the story that deserve some serious thought. Pierce Brosnan's character (Liam Hennessy) is a morally compromised man trying to do the right thing for morally ambiguous reasons. He would be a great case study for an ethics class. Several affairs show what happens to individuals and situations when sex, which is meant to be an expression of love, becomes a weapon. As much as I am interested in pursuing those thoughts more deeply at some point, I am currently more interested in something that stood out to me in relation to Jackie Chan's character, Quan Minh.

Hell Or High Water

"They treated my people's wounds superficially, telling them, 'Peace, peace,' but there is no peace." (Jeremiah 6:14)

Hell Or High Water deserves the acclaim it has received from both critics and viewers. Here's a brief plot summary courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes:

Texas brothers--Toby (Chris Pine), and Tanner (Ben Foster), come together after years divided to rob branches of the bank threatening to foreclose on their family land. For them, the hold-ups are just part of a last-ditch scheme to take back a future that seemed to have been stolen from under them. Justice seems to be theirs, until they find themselves on the radar of Texas Ranger, Marcus (Jeff Bridges) looking for one last grand pursuit on the eve of his retirement, and his half-Comanche partner, Alberto (Gil Birmingham). As the brothers plot a final bank heist to complete their scheme, and with the Rangers on their heels, a showdown looms at the crossroads where the values of the Old and New West murderously collide.

Hell Or High Water is an exceptionally well made film: great cast, sharp dialogue, an excellent soundtrack, and a camera that captures the geographical and economic desolation of a place losing both direction and hope.

Of course, nailing the craft of filmmaking is only one kind of excellent. I view my entertainment through the rubric of good, true and nobleL is it made with excellence; does it tell an honest story about the world; and does it make me want to be a better man? I obviously think it's good, so let's consider true and noble.

Is Hell Or High Water true - Does it tell an honest story about the world? 

Absolutely. It's like watching the book of  Ecclesiastes unfold in the midwest. It's not hopeful, but it's honest about what life looks like when measured by money, sex and power. I found myself rooting for the protagonists not because they were good guys - Tanner in particular is most definitely not - but because they are so desperately in need of a glimmer of hope. They are overwhelmed by life: work is hard to find; banks are bullying small farmers into the ground; the Big Oil that makes some rich drives others into poverty; their families are either dying or deserting them. There is nothing that brings them peace. Vanity, says the Preacher. All is vanity.

Jupiter Ascending

“Can you make a modern-day fairy tale in the way you can make a modern-day science fiction story… Can you capture that sort of playfulness again?” - The Wachowskis in an interview with Buzzfeed 

Jupiter Ascending has taken a pounding in terms of art of filmmaking, and rightly so. It's incoherent at times; it's poorly paced; it's both silly and weird; the dialogue is at times woefully lacking; there are two brief scene of entirely gratuitous immodesty and nudity (PG-13); it borrows constantly from other movies (though some of that is meant to be an homage to classic directors or films); the plot holes are monumentally large; and Sean Bean's character inexplicably does NOT die, so that threw me off, too.

Having said that, I found Jupiter Ascending to be strangely endearing in spite of all its inadequacies. Somewhere within the beautifully epic and entirely implausible mishmash of space opera, reincarnation, beekeeping, manga homage and dinosaur evolution, there lurks a story - or at least part of a story - that resonated with me.

Worldviews in Entertainment: Starting the Conversation

This past week, I had the opportunity to engage with middle and high school students on the topic of entertainment. In the course of four 2 ½ hour sessions, we talked about some popular YA fiction and watched four movies: Maleficent; Captain America: Winter Soldier; The Amazing Spiderman, and Ender’s Game. (Most of them had read or seen Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Guardians of the Galaxy and Divergent,  I was looking for something that was new to them and wasn't about sparkly vampires).

In order to explore the worldviews, we used the following template of questions for a discussion at the end of each movie:

• What’s wrong with the world according to the story? What’s the proposed solution?
• Who are the heroes/villains, and why?
• What does the story suggest are important virtues and unfortunate vices?
• What things does the story just assume (rather than argue) are true or real?
• What does it mean to be human?
• Does the story make a difference between someone who does heroic things vs. someone who is a hero (or someone who does villainous things vs. someone who is a villain)? Is there a difference to be made? 
• What does this movie want you to believe is the secret to a good or meaningful life? Does that work in the real world?
• Does the story make sin/goodness look compelling? Boring? Revolting? Irrelevant?
• Many popular stories confirm either what we hope is true about the world or what we fear it true about the world. Do you see that in this story?
• Is God (or are Christians) present in the story? If so, is the portrayal honest? What about representations of the people and beliefs in other worldviews?

Dracula Untold

Dracula Untold looks to do for Dracula what Maleficent did for its title character. What if there is more to Dracula than we thought? What if he is a hero (albeit a problematic one)? Dracula Untold suggests that he is just that – a misunderstood monster who has become what he is for love. And make no mistake, Vlad the Impaler is a monster. 

His childhood is tragic. He and 999 other kids were impressed into the service of the Sultan of Turkey, who brutally turned them into killers devoid of moral or a conscience. Vlad eventually made his reputation by impaling entire villages of people (much like the real Vlad, who apparently skewered 20,000 people - in one day).

When the film begins, he has apparently put that behind him. He’s now a prince of Transylvania, a tribute country of Turkey.  He has a beautiful wife and child and a populace who believes in him. When the Turks return and ask for another 1,000 kids, he’s not about to let that happen. Unfortunately, his army is vastly outnumbered. If he is going to save his people, he needs the kind of power that brings armies to its knees.

The Equalizer: Gotta Be Who You Are In This World

Robert McCall is a nice guy. He challenges people to succeed with "Progress, not perfection," and he doesn't shame them for their failures. He befriends people whom others reject or ignore, like an overweight employee and a young prostitute named Teri. He's a great boss, a good neighbor, and a voracious reader of classic literature. He's also - unbeknownst to them - a mix of Repairman Jack, Jack Reacher, and Liam "I Have A Very Particular Set Of Skills" Neeson.

One night, during one of the frequent times his path crosses with Teri's at a diner, Robert asks her why she hasn't pursued a music career.

"You and I know what I really am."
"I think you can be anything you want to be."
"Maybe in your world, Robert. It doesn't really happen that way in mine."
"Change your world."

If only life were that simple. When it becomes painfully clear that her world will kill her, he decides to change it for her. The bad guys drag other people for whom he cares into the conflict, and he unleashes a one-man war of vigilante justice. In spite of his anger, he gives those deserving of judgment a chance to do the right thing. He might do justice, but he offers mercy. Most of them refuse it. It's a bad call on their part, because Robert is going to make sure they reap what they sowed. He stays true to his life philosophy: "When somebody does something unspeakable, you do something about it, 'cause you can."

He's a vigilante knight in shining but tarnished armor, fighting for good in a world that believes his kind of noble warrior only appears in fictional books. Teri sure doesn't think men like him exist when she meets him. She believes by the end of the movie.

Pixar and Personhood

I don't think it's a secret that media has a tremendous impact on our view of reality. The medium is the message;  all entertainment contains messages both overt and covert. In many ways, the most impactful messages are the ones the story assumes about the world, not the messages that subtly embellish a clever plot.  Even shows about nothing are about something. 

I recently read an interesting article over at Discover Magazine called "The Hidden Message in Pixars' Films." The author makes an interesting case that Pixar's movies are changing the way the next generation thinks about what it means to be a person - or even what it means to be human:

Popular culture is often dismissed as empty “popcorn” fare. Animated films find themselves doubly-dismissed as “for the kids” and therefore nothing to take too seriously. Pixar has shattered those expectations by producing commercially successful cinematic art about the fishes in our fish tanks and the bugs in our backyards. Pixar films contain a complex, nuanced, philosophical and political essence that, when viewed across the company’s complete corpus, begins to emerge with some clarity. Buried within that constant  and complex goodness is a hidden message...

What if I told you they were preparing us for the future? What if I told you Pixar’s films will affect how we define the rights of millions, perhaps billions, in the coming century? Only by analyzing the collection as a whole can we see the subliminal concept being drilled into our collective mind...

An entire generation has been reared with the subconscious seeds of these ideas planted down deep. As history moves forward and technology with it, these issues will no longer be the imaginings of films and fiction, but of politics and policy. But Pixar has settled the personhood debate before it arrives. By watching our favorite films, we have been taught that being human is not the same as being a person. We have been shown that new persons and forms of personhood can come from anywhere….

Andrew Fletcher, a Scottish writer and politician, is credited with saying, "I said I knew a very wise man [who]... believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation, and we find that most of the ancient legislators thought that they could not well reform the manners of any city without the help of a lyric, and sometimes of a dramatic poet."And a good script writer. 

Please don't misunderstand - I like Pixar's films. The Toy Story series is fantastic; Up starts with some of the most heart-wrenching and beautiful 10 minutes you can find in film; Finding Nemo never gets old; The Incredibles was both entertaining and thoughtful; and Brave - okay, I could have done without Brave.  In general, I think Pixar films have some of the best overtly good messages in the industry.

I'm not even sure I agree with this article's final conclusions. The author may be giving Pixar more power than it's due. Nonetheless, it's a good reminder that those who tell our most winsome and engaging cultural stories  - books, movies, music - are settling our deepest debates in ways we often don't fully appreciate. 

Guardians of the Galaxy

Marvel Comics is on a roll. Guardians of the Galaxy opened with a stunning $94 million dollar weekend, breaking the previous August record for a movie opening. In spite of bewilderment within the entertainment industry leading up to its release (check out Rotten Tomatoes' discussion), critics and audiences have been giving it well-deserved reviews.


It's funny, surprisingly moving at time, and loaded with great special effects. It's not perfect (it's got some crude language, and the scope and severity of the violence was minimized and at times too light-hearted), but as far as summer blockbusters go, it's very good. I was certainly entertained. I was equally challenged by a thought-provoking scene near the end of the movie.

When Peter Quill realizes that he finally has a chance to stop running from hardship and do something truly noble, he tells the other soon-to-be guardians of the galaxy what he has in mind. Rocket soberly summarizes what is painfully clear to all of them:

 “You’re asking us to die.”

As I left the theater, a line from a very different kind of hero kept running through my head: “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship. Don’t get me wrong –  Guardians of the Galaxy isn’t meant to be a spiritual parable. But that unexpected, sobering moment lingers with me.*

Days of Future Past: Do Our Choices Matter?

“So many battles waged over the years... and yet, none like this. Are we destined to destroy each other, or can we change each other and unite? Is the future truly set?” – Charles Xavier

X-Men: Days of Future Past is a story about free will and human nature.  Sure, it’s many other

things as well – an excellently crafted movie, an equal rights parable, a commentary on human atrocities, a discussion starter about evolution – but  the latest installment in this thought-provoking franchise is perhaps the most cerebral of all.

As he considers the carnage of the Mutant/Human war, Xavier wonders, “Are we destined to destroy each other? Or can we change who we are?” The Mutants have found a way to jump a few days into the past and avoid small catastrophes, but changing single events cannot alter the larger arc of stubbornly insistent history. All seems lost; both the characters and the conflict are succumbing to the chaos. Bryan Singer noted in an interview:

“[Days of Future Past] confronts the notions of hope and second chances. It's characters that are lost trying to find themselves. In X-Men one and two, the characters had come into their own and knew who they were. In this one, they're all lost. And they're trying to keep it together.” 

The World's End: A Review

As far as apocalyptic movies in 2013, The World’s End has been even more popular than This Is The End ( the most recent numbers posted at Rotten Tomatoes show an 89% critic and 77% audience approval). It's the last film in a clever, entertaining trilogy begun by Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Simon Pegg is a great comic actor, and this movie highlights his talent. I really wanted to like it - and parts of it were hilarious - but I kept getting distracted by the increasing incoherence of the worldview and message.

The main plot is simple. Gary King (Pegg) gathers some high school buddies twenty years after their graduation for another shot at the Golden Mile, a pub crawl that finishes at The World's End. Unfortunately, the town is being taken over by aliens. Chaos ensues.

This Is The End: A Review

I like apocalyptic entertainment. From sci/fi horror (28 Days Later, Resident Evil, The Walking Dead, The Terminator) to natural disasters (Melancholia, Deep Impact, 2012, ) to war (The Road, Book of Eli) to aliens (War of the Worlds, Independence Day, Ender's Game), there's nothing like the end of the world as we know it to bring out the best - or worst - in people.

 This Is The End drew quite a bit of critical and audience acclaim this past year. It received a 83% critic and 75% audience rating atRotten Tomatoes. I'm not sure why. By about thirty minutes in to the movie, I was thinking that "Please Make It End!" would have been a better title.

Every character falls on a sliding scale of shallow, self-centered, egomaniacal people. They are so self-deluded that when Hell arrives on earth, they are the only ones surprised they don’t get raptured. Yes, the movie is a self-referential commentary on the Hollywood crowd featuring ironic self-debasement (Channing Tatum), stereotype-busting character twists (Emma Watson) and a hyperbolic - and perhaps even cautionary - presentation of what life is like in Hollywood.  I get it. I doubt the audience in general took that mesmerizing point away from the film by the time the credits rolled.

The Importance of Being Ender: A Closer Look at Orson Scott Card's Modern Classic

If the awards given to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game are any indication, he has written a novel that may well become part of the canon of science fiction:

• Nebula Award for best novel in 1985
• Hugo Award for best novel in 1986
• Nominated for a Locus Award in 1986
• American Library Association's "100 Best Books for Teens."
• Margaret A. Edwards Award in 2008

It’s been translated into thirty-three languages, ranked #59 on the reader's list of Modern Library100 Best Novels in 1999, and included on the Marine Corps Professional Reading List. Oh, and the movie (starring Harrison Ford) is opening in just a few weeks. 

If you enjoy analyzing stories such as Ender’s Game, there are a lot of excellent commentaries online.*  Rather than replicating their content, I would like to offer some thoughts on why I believe this story is so compelling. 

After the climatic battle that ends the Game, Ender discovers the Hive Queen has survived his accidental genocide. She communicates the story of her and her people to him, and in this knowledge Ender finds truth, empathy, and a path toward a form of redemption. As he records her story for all to know, he becomes the first of many Speakers of the Dead, people who speak the truth of a person’s life at their funeral.

Ender's story continues in Speaker of the Dead. He begins what will be (thanks to the quirks of space travel) centuries of searching to find the Hive Queen a new home, a new place to begin rebuilding the civilization he once destroyed. Meanwhile, he continues to "speak" the lives of those who have died as sort of a prophet in a new religion that seeks to bring truth, peace and honor to life in all its forms.

Ender's Game was the first novel in the Ender saga, but Speaker of the Dead was always meant to be the heart of the story. Card explains in the introduction to SOTD why this aspect of Ender's life is so important to him:

“I grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived…To understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story – what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That’s the story we never know, the story that we never can know – and yet, at the time of death, it’s the only true story worth telling.”

Speaking for the dead wasn’t always pretty, but it was always powerful. Ender becomes passionate about telling “what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in.”

Not until I read Speaker did I begin to understand what I found so compelling about Ender's Game. The heart of the story of how a deceived, brainwashed, abused child accidentally becomes the bane of the universe became clear only in light of Card’s previously cited explanation about Ender himself. The only story worth telling cannot show merely what Ender meant to do, it must show what he actually did. 

Elysium: Fighting For Paradise

According to Brittanica Online,

"Elysium, also called Elysian Fields or Elysian Plain, in Greek mythology, originally the paradise to which heroes on whom the gods conferred immortality were sent... In Homer’s writings the Elysian Plain was a land of perfect happiness at the end of the earth.. In the earlier authors, only those specially favored by the gods entered Elysium and were made immortal."

In Neill Blomkamp's latest incarnation of this story, the "specially favored" are not heroes at all; they are, however, extremely wealthy. When the earth went to environmental and political hell in an overcrowded hand basket, the 1% built a bourgeois paradise in space, leaving the 99% on a decrepit earth to gaze longingly at the home of their betters. The rich got everything money could buy: perfect health, longevity, luxury and ease. Those left behind inherited a hard life that creates harder people, and the camera does not look away (see Focus on the Family's review for more detail on the relentless portrayal of very fallen world). 

As far as social, economic and political commentary go, Elysium is intended to be a sci-fi parable of health care and immigration in much the same way Blomkamp's disturbing District 9 dealt with racism. It's caricatured class warfare and naive revolution are a distraction at best and dishonest at worst, but they will certainly generate discussion about the morality of wealth disparity.

I am more interested in Max.

"The Wolverine": Of Dark Roads, Monsters And Men

"The great battle, I always thought with Wolverine, is the battle within himself."  - Hugh Jackman, aka Wolverine

____________________________________________________________________________

Since the disastrous events at the end of the last X-Men film, Logan (aka Wolverine) has retreated into the woods, living a life of solitude among the another animals. His past haunts him every night as the ghost of the woman he both loved and killed lingers. He's a Ronin, a samuri without a master and thus without a cause. Even worse, he's basically immortal, and the events of the past promise a future full of ruin and despair.

I left The Wolverine with mixed emotions (you'll see why in a moment). I ran an early version of my review past a good friend, Karl Meszaros, who has made appearances on this blog before. He knows the Marvel mythology behind Wolverine far better than I do, and he completely disagreed with my reaction to the film. Rather than rewriting my review, I have decided to post both: my response as a casual fan of the X-Men movies, and his insight as a follower of the Wolverine mythos for quite some time.

Perhaps our opposite reactions are inevitable considering the difference in knowledge about the story; perhaps we simply bring the very disparate circumstances that formed our lives into our analysis. After you have read these two perspectives, I'm interested hearing your response. 

World War Z

"The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts.”

In an attempt to enter into and better understand the entertainment shaping my kids and the rest of today's youth, I submit my latest review of books effecting a primarily YA audience. My goal is not to critique the art form as much as look at how the story reflects and shapes the readers' worldview.

This review will look at World War Z a novel by Max Brooks. Inspired by Studs Terkel's The Good War, this book is being rightly credited with transforming the zombie genre.*  Paramount's film starring Brad Pitt hits theaters on June 21st. It remains to be see how well this movie will translate onto the screen.

There will be spoilers.

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World War Z unfolds through a series of interviews with the key players who helped humanity survive the zombie apocalypse. It's been 12 years since VA day in America, and the UN has commissioned a Postwar Commission Report. This book chronicles the interviews of one reporter as he journeys around the world to get to the truth about what really happened.

Patient Zero, a 12-year-old Chinese boy, was bitten by an animal.  That much is pretty clear. The how and why of the spread is a story of human ineptitude, greed, misinformation, and tragedy. As opposed to much of current zombie lore, World War Z for the most part looks away from the gore and looks instead at how the world as we know it would change as people perpetuate or fight the plague. In the process, the author’s literary eye scans entire nations as well as the most heartbreaking individual stories. 

The approach is nothing short of brilliant. Brooks examines religion, politics, family structures, international tensions, the pharmacutical industry, the military, economic systems, the impact of geography, weather, and national mindsets…the list goes on. I expected a predictable story of gore and despair; I found a thought-provoking and honest look at death, life, hope and the human condition.

Star Trek: Into (Hearts Of) Darkness

Star Trek Into Darkness seems to give a nod to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness not only in its title but in the journey through the moral murkiness that lurks in even the best of us. The book is primarily about the twilight of souls unable to see the light of morality, goodness and virtue. The movie highlights the fact that it's not the galactic space around us that is the true final frontier of undiscovered country. It's the moral space within us.

When Kirk’s mentor is killed by Khan, Kirk understandably wants to get revenge. Though the law requires him to arrest Khan and bring him to trial, he’s ready and willing to subvert the system and just kill him.  Well aware that his actions may start a war, he speeds toward Klingon territory to exact his revenge. Spock challenges him to do the right thing.  Sure, Kirk’s anger is understandable, and his harsh revenge is a rough kind of justice, but at what point would Kirk become the evil he was trying to fight? Do noble ends justify ignoble means, or must both be good?

A Tale of Two Hushpuppies: "Beasts of the Southern Wild"

"Everybody loses the thing that made them. The brave men stay and watch it happen. They don't run." 

There are stories that tap into a deep, haunting place inside where we yearn to be a part of  all that is right with the world. Beasts of the Southern Wild attempts to do this. I choose my words carefully here, because "attempts" is not the same as "accomplishes" - and yet every attempt is laudable.
   
In struggling to write down my thoughts, I realized I needed to write two reviews: One that captures a story that moves me; the other that reflects a worldview that unsettles me.

When Dark Knights Finally Rise

I watched two movies this past weekend that showed a sharp worldview contrast:

• In  The Dark Knight Rises, Batman returns to a captive Gotham City to save the people from Bane's annihilation.  He didn't have to risk so much; he had already dedicated much of his life to helping Gotham. Catwoman wants him to escape with her. "Save yourself," she advises. "You've given these people everything." Batman refuses. "Not everything," he says."Not yet." In the end, Batman is prepared to give everything as he offers his life to protect those for whom he cares - not because they are innocent or because he is obligated, but because he can not ignore his responsibility to those who need him.
• In Cabin in the Woods, one man ends up holding the fate of the entire human race in his hand. If he gives his life, everyone lives. If not, everyone dies horribly. He is given a stark contrast: "You can die with them, or you can die for them." He's not about to give his life for them, and so the apocalypse begins. "I'm sorry I ended the world," he apologizes to a friend as they get high and wait for the world to die with them. He's not about to give anything so that others can escape their fate. 

When brought to account for the life of his brother, Cain asked the classic question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Well, yes, to some degree. It's why we have Good Samaritan laws. As the story of the Good Samaritan points out, we have neighbors both near and far, people whose lives are intertwined with ours by geography, vocation, family ties, or simple human dignity.  In every case, something is required of us that transcends our individual preferences and proclivities.  The fate of the entire world will never rest on our shoulders, but things much smaller than a world also require courage and self-sacrifice on our behalf.

Fabrications and Forgiveness

In Father of Invention, Kevin Spacey plays a businessman/inventor who spends more time with his career than his family, and ultimately loses them both when one of his criminally negligent “fabrications” results in a 10 year jail sentence.  When he gets out of jail, he moves in with his daughter as he tries to get his life back together.

Other than the fact that both the characters and situations were shallow and false, I was bothered by the way he constantly asked his adult daughter to forgive him. This doesn’t sound bad on the surface, but the movie presented it as, “You need to get over all the years and years of neglect and emotional abuse and just move on now as if nothing happened.”  When his daughter’s roommate needed some advice about the emotional turmoil she was experiencing because of her parent’s impending divorcing, Spacey’s character told her basically to get over it immediately.

I think that’s bad advice. That’s not forgiveness or compassion; that’s denial - about what happened, about the emotional tumult that comes with the dissolution of relationships, about what the ripple effect has been and will be in their lives.  It's an attempt to craft a world in which people sow what they want - and then reap what they want too!  Life without consequences! It's a win/win for the perpetrators of thoughtless and destructive deeds; meanwhile, everyone who has been victimized must bravely endure the fallout as if nothing at all went wrong.  The ones who can't get over it that quickly are portrayed as immature, hardened, and just a bit mean.

Superpowers and Sins

 Question: When is it acceptable for a young man to pretend to respect authority but not actually do so; get revenge on people who embarrass him; break promises just because he doesn't like them; believe himself to be smarter than everyone else; act as a vigilante instead of working within the system; sneak his girlfriend out against her parents' wishes; and steal from other people so he can get what he wants.

Answer: When he is the new version of the Amazing Spider-Man.  Being a superhero, it seems, covers a multitude of sins.

    

There was a time in which superheroes put their true personality on display.  Who they were when they put the mask on matched who they were when they took the mask off.  The recent movie Chronicle did a great job showing how power magnifies who we already are, and for that reason must be used with caution. The ordinary moments matter.  Not so with the new and improved Amazing Spider-Man.

Here's the thing about Peter Parker in all the other tellings of his of origin:  Peter is a really good guy. He is smart, hard working and devoted to his aunt and uncle.  He usually makes the right choice.  His defining moment is when he dosen't stop the thief who eventually kills Uncle Ben.  Peter realizes that a lifetime of good choices can be wiped out by one lapse of judgement, and he spends the rest of his life making up for it. Whereas Batman was driven by vengance, Spiderman was driven by guilt.  In the Ultimate Spiderman arc, Peter is killed while saving everyone on his block.  As he dies he tells his aunt May, "It's ok, I couldn't save uncle Ben, but I could save you."

The Peter Parker in this movie gets his powers by breaking the rules. He takes no personal responsibility. The famous "With great power comes great responsibility" does not even make an appearance.  He goes after his uncle's killer for vengance.  He breaks a promise to Captain Stacey - who the comic book arc shows to be prescient about the danger Spidey poses to his daughter. This Peter is a mix of Twilight's Edward and Bruce Wayne.  He is brooding, mean-spirited, and full of anger.  Even his quips feel angry.

The first Spiderman ended with Peter saying it was his curse to be alone.  This Spiderman ends with Peter saying that he doesn't care about promises or the risk that Gwen is taking.  He just cares about himself. The new breed of superhero can apparently be self-absorbed, arrogant and dishonest when the mask is off, then transform into someone awesome when the mask is on.

Two scenes stood out to me. In one scene, Spider-Man stands framed in front of the American flag.  It was a great movie shot, but I wonder: what did Spider-Man stand for that mirrors the American Dream?  Arrogance?  Self-aggrandizing? Dishonesty?  Revenge? In the second scene, Aunt May says, "If there's one thing you are, it's good."  Really?  Good how? And at what, exactly?  In order for that statement to even make sense, I had to draw from the older version of Spider-Man, a hero who was kind, honest, empathetic, and sincere.

Being a superhero is a burden and a privilege. Since it magnifies sins, weaknesses and failures along with strengths, the truly heroic seek to become better people in the ordinary moments of life.  There is no better marker for learning who you will be when the great moments arise.