While playing through the Coney Island set piece inSpider-Man 2, something hit me: this fight was being staged in a tangible place, not a featureless gray wasteland. What a novel idea.
Blockbuster movies have largely moved away from setting their climactic battles in real places where regular people are at risk from plasma blasts and collapsing buildings. This year, The Flash andTransformers: Rise of the Beastsboth set their big final showdowns in detail-free apocalyptic landscapes. You can track this shift back to Man of Steel, and the incredulous audience reaction to that film’s indiscriminate destruction of Metropolis. But it’s also just easier to shoot this stuff on a soundstage and not hire extras.
Insomniac, though, is focused on people. When Peter thinks that he won’t be able to save the last few people on a rollercoaster car falling off the tracks, he apologizes to them before [redacted] comes to save the day. One of the people in the car is a girl that the game cuts back to throughout, who is clutching a stuffed animal she was given by Harry earlier on through the moments of peril. This stake-setting used to be common. The firstAvengersmovie introduces Ashley Johnson’s waitress character Beth before the battle of New York, then cuts to her during the fight (and she has an extended arc in the deleted scenes). She isn’t an important character for the plot, but she is important in making us feel that the Avengers’ success matters. If Loki wins, we understand, she (and the other eight million people living in New York) lose.
The result of big-budget IP action movies moving away from populated places is that many of our biggest blockbusters no longer feel tied to our reality at all. Though Avengers: Endgame had cemented the film’s current reality with Captain America leading a support group for regular people, his final battle against Thanos takes place in a barren, gray battlefield where everyone is a superhero. These movies have, with a few exceptions, lost touch with the people their god-like heroes are supposed to be protecting, the people they’re doing this all for.
Spider-Man 2 is a breath of fresh air, and it emerges from the strengths that video games have as a medium that movies don’t. Whereas superhero movies often need to build CG environments for their real stars to act in, in video games, everything is computer-generated. It’s as easy to stage an action scene in Spider-Man 2’s New York as it is to stage a dialogue scene. So, instead of building a flat landscape because it’s easy to realize in post-production, Spider-Man 2 has interesting environments because they need to be interesting for the game to be interesting. Avengers: Endgame could stage its big conclusion in a featureless wasteland because its directors and audience didn’t see its geography as being important to the drama. The extended Avengers teaming up to defeat Thanos was the exciting part. In an action game, level design matters a hell of a lot.
And because Insomniac built New York, they filled it with New Yorkers. Marvel’sSpider-ManandMiles Moraleshad a decent amount of NPCs, but Spider-Man 2 is significantly more bustling and dense with crowds. Quests frequently tie in to this. I’ve taken pictures of people dancing and standing in line for food. As Miles, I helped a gay high school student pull off an elaborate promposal (well, homecoming-posal, but I don’t know what the word is for that). I saved a dude from getting branded, then swung him over to the hospital.
The Spider-Man games constantly put the focus on average New Yorkers and what life in the city means to them. It’s bizarre that so many superhero movies have left this element of superheroism behind. Caring about protecting people is what makes superheroes human, and I’m glad that Spider-Man is web yanking regular people back into focus.
