From Greg: My rant is about the coincidences. I hope the director is using them
tongue in cheek, but I fear it's just lazy writing. Octavious just happens
to be funded by the Green Goblin's son? Peter Parker just happens to want
to do an article on Octavious? Peter just happens to be in the bank
Octavious robs? The newspaper editor's son is marrying Peter's girlfriend?
Why such a contrived effort to get Peter Parker at the pre-wedding party
(to take pictures?) just to set up--what?? If this were taken to a higher
asburd level it might be acceptable but ends up just being silly, and
wearying, and leaving me like I've seen it all before. Couldn't there be at
least one surprise?
Well, it's a movie about a guy who sticks to walls and shoots webs out of his wrists. Reality? The stuff about Oscorp funding Octavious and Parker wanting to write about him can be just narrative economy: How long would it take to make the connections if this was "realistic" and why waste the time? In any case both of these elements are setup in the first film. (The comic book version of this is that superheroes go "on patrol" and constantly interrupt robberies, muggings, fires, etc though in the real world where there may be a few hundred police officers active in a city they are rarely able to appear when the crime is occuring. Again who wants to see several pages of Batman trying to get to a hold-up?)
Yeah, Parker being in the bank is a stretch and by the way how did Ock know which cafe Parker and MJ were having their little chat in? Also stretching is the connection to Jameson's son (who was also mentioned in passing in the first film and in the comics becomes the villain Man-Wolf); where on earth did he run into MJ? But in the end I don't think this is important to what the film is about. A well-constructed plot would matter more in a mystery (where in fact it's pretty much the entire point) but here not so much. There's a lot of coincidences in Dickens too--Oliver Twist is practically structured around them--and not as mistakes but key elements.
I did like the film; it's pretty much a B+ type of work and while I would rather a lot of this stuff not be in it I think the ending is a bigger mistake because it undermines the themes of sacrifice and "great responsibility." (Which come to think of it are pretty much the themes of Babylon 5 though there pretty much nobody gets a happy ending, at least in a conventional sense.) I guess what I'm getting at is that usually our responses are more important than reasoned critique. There are lots of well-made, intelligent films that I think are worthless (most of Bergman's for instance) and plenty that are sloppy but also important.
(And unfortunately the nature of blogs means that I have the last word, at least temporarily, when this is merely my response and not a rebuttal. Clearly Greg is right about much of this; the difference is that it didn't really affect my reaction to the film but did his.)