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Spider-Noir first episode (fairly negative)
I admit that I watched this mainly out of (morbid?) curiosity about what Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man would be like. Mostly I think it was about what you'd expect that to be like.
Honestly I guess I was also curious if it'd be like Wonder Man, a weird, quirky little show that feels nothing like the rest of the Marvel shows in a neat, different way. I mean, no. It's really not.
On the positive side, they did a nice job with the overall look of the show. It's a visual homage to black-and-white movies and noir detective comics, and it really does pull off the look, including a lot of interesting details. It's very fun to look at.
Unfortunately the rest of it is just - not that good. It fell out of a hybrid noir/superhero tree and hit every cliche on the way down. When we find out early on thatNic Cage Ben, the protagonist, quit being a superhero and became a depressed alcoholic because his fiancee died ... I was just like, well of course he did. Do we get a moody shot of her gravestone? Naturally! (Wondering if it's too early to call her coming back Not Dead But Evil in episode 4 or 5.) Every single plot twist is visible from a mile away. That guy? Definitely gonna die. (He did.) The detective agency? Failing! The sassy nice-girl secretary? Threatening to quit because of not being paid! (Of course she doesn't.) Hey, there's the morally gray femme fatale torch singer, right on time!
The real problem is not really that all of this exists as individual tropes. I like a lot of these tropes. But it's all paper thin. We never really see any of these characters do anything human, like get dinner or sleep. I don't even know whereNic Cage Ben lives because we only ever see him in his office or wandering the Mean Streets. I am guessing that this is at least partly intentional - it's supposed to be superficial and obvious, it's supposed to look like a stage play - but I feel like it's too conventional and not fundamentally weird enough to pull it off. So you want to know who these people are, and how things work, and it just doesn't tell you. It does that thing where it never really gives away anything basic about the characters (we don't know how Ben got his powers, how he feels about his powers, or anything at all about how superheroes work in this universe - are they known? Are superpowers a thing? Is he the only person he's ever met who has them, until other superpowered people start showing up?) ... and again, this easily can all work! I love it when media successfully drops you in the middle of things and only tells you what the protagonist knows, or doesn't tell you anything at all. But this is a little too free-floating, especially combined with the relative flatness of the characters. At least give me one single suggestion that someone around here is hiding a non-obvious secret or has a relationship in their life with more than one dimension to it!
FWIW, I will give it this: depressed middle-aged alcoholic retired superhero actually is a pretty good Nic Cage role. (I mean basically that's 50% of the characters he plays anyway, minus the superhero part.) I even managed to stop laughing at the Nic Cage Voice in the voiceovers after the first five minutes or so. I can easily imagine them in comics font floating in monochrome over a stark black and white city alleyscape.
I'm willing to give it another episode to see if it picks up, but if I don't like the second episode a lot better than this, I'm out.
Honestly I guess I was also curious if it'd be like Wonder Man, a weird, quirky little show that feels nothing like the rest of the Marvel shows in a neat, different way. I mean, no. It's really not.
On the positive side, they did a nice job with the overall look of the show. It's a visual homage to black-and-white movies and noir detective comics, and it really does pull off the look, including a lot of interesting details. It's very fun to look at.
Unfortunately the rest of it is just - not that good. It fell out of a hybrid noir/superhero tree and hit every cliche on the way down. When we find out early on that
The real problem is not really that all of this exists as individual tropes. I like a lot of these tropes. But it's all paper thin. We never really see any of these characters do anything human, like get dinner or sleep. I don't even know where
FWIW, I will give it this: depressed middle-aged alcoholic retired superhero actually is a pretty good Nic Cage role. (I mean basically that's 50% of the characters he plays anyway, minus the superhero part.) I even managed to stop laughing at the Nic Cage Voice in the voiceovers after the first five minutes or so. I can easily imagine them in comics font floating in monochrome over a stark black and white city alleyscape.
I'm willing to give it another episode to see if it picks up, but if I don't like the second episode a lot better than this, I'm out.
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I will definitely not enjoy it if it's just tickyboxing the lowest-hanging hardboiled/pulp/noir tropes without actually doing anything with them, including a noir that has a point and an existence beyond pastiche.
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That's all it is so far! I'm not sure if I really expected more, but I had hopes for it, which it is not delivering at all.
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Argh.
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