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Je n'aime pas dans les vieux films américains quand les conducteurs ne regardent pas la route. Et de ratage en ratage, on s'habitue à ne jamais dépasser le stade du brouillon. La vie n'est que l'interminable répétition d'une représentation qui n'aura jamais lieu.

The Wages of Heroism: Making The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) - Charles de Lauzirika

I’m always interested in any kind of behind the scenes material on movies that end up being failures.  I’m always hoping for a documentary that will capture what exactly it was that was wrong behind the scenes.  The best of these is obviously that behind the scenes documentary about The Phantom Menace that was very fly-on-the-wall and revealed so much about Lucas and the production of the film that it was practically cringe-inducing.  This documentary is about an hour & forty minutes, but even at that length, it really isn’t particularly revelatory.  It’s very polished and has a lot of talking head interviews.  There are parts that are interesting.  I didn’t realize how much of the film was actually done practically with only minimal CGI; I think this is a problem of the new super-bright, super-processed vision of blockbuster filmmaking which is that even non-CGI material is polished to such a sheen that it looks like CGI.  The best part of the documentary is the fifteen to twenty minutes that focuses on the score and the weird super-group Zimmer assembled to create the music of the film.  And, yes, Zimmer is honest enough to actually admit himself that the Spider-Man fanfare is basically of no interest.  Anyway, I would have liked to see a more observational, less obviously promotional doc on this movie, but this is the one I got and it manages to reveal almost nothing of the behind the scenes disaster that resulted in the on-screen disaster.  1 stars.

tl;dr – behind the scenes documentary is too promotional to be honest & it reveals nothing of what led to the movie being such a failure; a few interesting bits, but not much.  1 star.

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