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The narrator discusses their disappointment with non-MCU Spider-Man spin-off movies, specifically mentioning Madam Web. They criticize the film for its bad dialogue, weak performances, and underwritten characters. They believe that the movie was changed during the editing process, resulting in a disjointed and nonsensical plot. They speculate on potential changes made to the movie, particularly regarding the villain and the timeline. They also highlight issues with the character Ezekiel Sims and the lack of explanation for his premonitions. Overall, they consider Madam Web to be a poorly executed film. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Shower Scene, the podcast that I am still doing. Still here. Yeah, the promise marathon from a couple weeks ago was a much more dramatic undertaking than it should have been. It's done, but it's sitting in the purgatory that is my garbage editing software. I'm taking recommendations for better ones that are actually compatible with Apple products, not to sound too bitter about it. So that will be out soon, hopefully, and this week I'm back with regular reviews with a couple new movies from this week. Also, I watched Argyle, which was fine. I watched Orion in the Dark on Netflix, which was really good, and Lisa Frankenstein, which was also really good. But anyway, this week I watched one basic biopic and one busted superhero movie. Let's begin. Madam Web. The year is 2003. Cassandra Webb, played by Dakota Johnson, is a hardworking paramedic in New York City whose busy life is spun upside down when an incident on the job sends her plummeting off a bridge in a car and the accident almost kills her. Well, technically it did kill her. She was legally dead for just a few minutes, and when she wakes up, she experiences the effects of some strange new abilities. It seems that Cassie has the ability to experience future events before they happen, but these visions arrive suddenly and she has no clue how to control her new powers. Meanwhile, evil scientist Ezekiel Sims, played by Tahar Rahim, who also has clairvoyant abilities, has had recurring dreams for years that depict his own death, his own murder actually, at the hands of three spider-women he doesn't recognize, but he's certain these visions will eventually come to pass. His mission is to first track down and then kill the trio as the girls they currently are before they grow up to be the women who will take him down. The girls are played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabella Merced, and Celeste O'Connor. Eventually the girls fall into the protection of Cassie, who is now thrown into a conflict she never asked for, while she discovers certain secrets about her past before she can really understand how to control her visions of the future. So, I really can't understand what the deal is with these non-MCU Spider-Man spin-off projects released by Sony that when they come out, I never feel like I'm watching the movie that was made. Like, whether it's the first Venom, or Morbius, or now Madam Web, these movies are bad, but they're not just bad. They're broken. Madam Web, in particular, is a broken movie. Like, there's plenty of objective things that are stupid here, and these things will be well documented for years to come. There's the bad dialogue, and the weak performances, and the underwritten characters, but I feel like those things are not even really worth talking about because the real reason this movie fails is that, obviously, in the editing process, it was decided that they were going to take the movie into a different direction than what was intended when they shot it. And this is the third time this has happened. With Venom, it was pretty clear that they decided that they wanted to infuse some comedy into a movie that was originally more serious. And I guess we're pretending that the first Venom is good now, but no. There's some good stuff, but that first movie can't decide from one minute to the next what the tone is, and it's a mess. Same with Morbius, which underwent multiple reshoots that, who knows what was changed or taken out and for what reasons. Like we know some stuff was altered to align with the continuity of Spider-Man No Way Home, and it's hard to say what else. But you can plainly see watching it that this arrangement of scenes was not what this movie was supposed to be. And what makes it so difficult to judge the quality of a movie like that is that we judge quality based on the intended vision of a film and decide whether or not it was successful in executing that vision. But if there's no vision, if what we're watching is just the butchered version of what was made, arranged in a way that corporate decided last minute that they wanted the movie to be, like what am I supposed to even say about that? All to say, Madam Web is one of the worst examples of this I've ever seen. There are murmuring that in the case of this production, the movie was changed from taking place in the Andrew Garfield universe to the Tom Holland universe. Having seen the film, I don't see how that could have been the case. I'm a little confused about exactly what people thought was changed about this movie in order to do that. More on that in a second. But there's clearly a very significant side of this plot that was completely changed after a lot of the movie was shot that produced this Frankenstein variation of the film that was intended. And again, that's been the case with several movies in the past and it always sucks, but I was really, really put off by the laziness of this one. Watching Madam Web is just watching one decision after another. Major plot points, important character choices, important character motivations that the filmmakers just totally accepted didn't make any sense. It's like at every turn they were just like, fine, that decision was justified in the original script but we had to make a change that rendered it completely nonsensical and we're just going to have to be okay with that because it's too late to retool the entire movie. Let's call this the Ray Palpatine effect from now on. It's possible these adjustments were made to change Spider-Man's existence here. Good spoilers, I guess. This movie is pretty clear that it predates the birth of this universe's Peter Parker and what people are claiming is that it was supposed to foreshadow the birth of Andrew Garfield's Peter, but then the movie was changed to be set in 2003 so that it foreshadowed Tom Holland's. I don't believe that this movie taking place in 2003 was a last minute addition. Too many of the wardrobe choices and stuff in the design of this world and like offhanded jokes are consistently nodding to this story being set in the early 2000s. Also, the timeline doesn't check out. If Tom Holland's Peter was born in 2003, he would have been 13 in his first appearance in Civil War. And I'm not nitpicking, I just think if they were going to pick a new year to set up this Peter, they would have taken two seconds to do the math and pick the right year. But maybe they didn't. We'll probably never know. My real theory is that the changes that were made had to do with the villain. I think he was meant to be someone totally different and they were after our heroes for a completely different reason and someone brand new was just plugged into the movie. And I have this feeling because Ezekiel Sims is one of the worst superhero villains of all time, but not only that, it's mostly the scenes with Ezekiel that you can see the cracks in this movie. We keep cutting back to these scenes where Ezekiel is working with a hacker he's hired whose job it is to locate the girls so he can go to them and kill them before they kill him. I guess these scenes are supposed to establish why Ezekiel always knows where they are, but otherwise they always feel weirdly disconnected from the movie. I guess this hacker character never sleeps because she's at her computer around the clock and we continue to witness as day turns to night that she's doing this job by herself. And in these scenes between her and Ezekiel, we get some clumsy exposition that continues to justify the reason he's going after these girls. Like more than once he shouts at this hacker, I have to kill them or they'll kill me someday. For your sake, you better do a good job, you fool! And also in these scenes, although this isn't exclusive to these scenes or exclusive to his character, we get my favorite sign of a movie that's been heavily changed in editing. There's a whole lot of Ezekiel speaking, specifically explaining important aspects of the plot, and his mouth is not moving. Or his mouth is moving, and clear as day, he's mouthing different words than the words we're hearing. It's like you're watching Mr. Ed. So I think a lot of the changes to the story were just kind of being plugged into these scenes that just give a different context to the action sequences that were already shot. And then the real kicker to the whole villain storyline, as well as the dumbest thing in the movie, spoilers, don't watch this movie, but skip ahead like 30 seconds if you don't want to hear this. The resolution to the villain story comes in the final battle. Here we get the explanation that it was actually Cassie, not the girls, who was fated to kill Ezekiel. He got it wrong. She defeats him, and that's how the conflict is resolved. And this is where the movie really shows how dumb it thinks you are, and how it just gives negative shits about salvaging this plot in a way that makes any sense within any realm of logic that can survive more than 10 seconds of critical thought. And I'm going to slow myself down for this. How did Ezekiel get this wrong? How did this man have several vivid dreams featuring three real people who he's never met, correctly predicting that these three girls, who at this time don't know each other, will team up and will eventually wear the costumes that he imagined for them? And that premonition that he'll be killed, the premonition that informs all of his decisions in the movie, was correct. But the killer and the situation around his death was wrong. How can this be? How did he seemingly invent a different scenario in his head that randomly includes impossible insight into the future and about people he's never met? It's not explained. They literally just don't get into it. Like, I think you need to see this unfold in the context of the story that we've been watching, because I don't even know how to properly express how stupid and careless this decision is. Not only is this a giant element of this movie that it just never bothers to explain, but it's the catalyst for the entire conflict. It was at this point that I realized that this movie doesn't know the reason that the things in this story are happening. Because chances are, that reason was cut out of the final edit, having to do with a totally different villain and their totally different motivation. And this movie thinks that you're so stupid that it just doesn't bother to replace it with anything. So again, the people behind this movie just accepted that this didn't make any sense and they didn't care. This, uh, this is just such a new low. Like, I felt disrespected by movies before, but never to the extent, like, I feel like this movie actively hates me. And it sucks. And that air of carelessness is why I'm like, how can I seriously speak critically about a movie that's so transparently just the sloppy remodeling of the movie it once was? Because I'm not judging choices, I'm just kind of observing the different degrees of bad that things come off because of how this movie was made. Like Dakota Johnson, for instance, who's proven many times that she's one of our best actors, comes off very stale in this role. She's got moments where she's pulling it off, but other times she just looks like she wants to go home. And other times she's just not expressing the feelings her character should be at a given moment. But in these moments I have to wonder, like, Cassie is mourning the death of her friend for a second and then she seems fine in the next scene. And at that moment I have to wonder, is that Dakota Johnson failing the character? Or is this scene a product of the reshoots? Or was it just shuffled around in editing? And she's acting weird because she literally didn't know where the scene would be placed in the film. Which is constantly to the detriment of all the characters because you never get the feeling that these actors are aware of what happened in the previous scene. But the same reason it's hard to seriously critique some of the worst writing moments in the film. Because I understand that sometimes I'm missing the real context for some of the bad dialogue and some of the story beats that feel the most contrived, like everything that happens from the sequence in the subway to when they go to the woods, Jesus Christ. I understand that this probably wasn't written that way, it was just the clumsy way they had to get from point A to point B after a hole was punched in the script. So there's a lot of dumb stuff to name Cassie's troubled relationship with her mother that isn't established until less than a minute before it's ready to be resolved. The fact that Cassie's powers are never really defined or given any rules that anchor us in reality. So any time a moment we think is real can turn out to be a vision. There's no consistency in the time frame of how far she can see in the future. Her visions always just kind of last the length of a significant story moment and they can happen without warning. And then there's the scene where Cassie teaches the girls CPR for no reason. And then you're like, oh, I wonder if this will come back in some kind of climactic moment. Whatever. I'm not CinemaSins, I have no interest in being CinemaSins, and my point is that this isn't the kind of movie that should even be judged with serious critiques on the basis of serious choices. There are no serious choices here, only a tangled web of desperate, careless masking over a broken movie. Bob Marley, One Love. The year is 1976. A 31-year-old Bob Marley, played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, is a hugely successful reggae artist in Jamaica at the time he decides to perform a concert to make a statement promoting peace during an especially turbulent political conflict. This time period is the focus of Bob Marley, One Love, directed by Reynaldo Marcus Green. And if you don't know where 1976 is placed on the timeline of Marley's life, I guess I won't spoil it, but this movie chronicles the next few years. After an assassination attempt during the development of his peace concert, Marley struggles with making music that endorses his message of peace during a period of such conflict while he's also competing with certain standards in the music industry from executives that don't always see his vision. We see how these pressures impact his private life, including his relationship with his wife Rita, played by LaShonna Lynch, in a story showing the immense risks, but also the immense rewards, of an artist taking a stand against the odds. I'm alive. So, in the interest of full disclosure, I had a really terrible headache watching this movie in the theater. I skipped breakfast. I was probably dehydrated, because I usually am. And then that afternoon, I endured the cinematic lobotomy that was Madame Web, and then in the theater for One Love, someone was smoking weed, and I hate that smell, and it made me feel worse. I don't feel that this changed how I responded to this movie, but I'm not here to lie to you, so I just wanted you to have that information. That said, this movie isn't very good. It's not terrible, it's just an extremely mediocre, extremely basic biopic. Before the movie starts, you're greeted with a message from Bob Marley's son Ziggy, who talks a little about watching the movie get made every day on set. He says that he was keeping an eye on things every day to make sure that they were doing his father justice, and this statement kind of sets the tone for the kind of biopic you're about to watch. This is a movie that's made to recognize the achievements and the vision of a great artist, but it's not made to challenge him or really recognize any flaws, and I don't really know that much about Bob Marley's private life. I wasn't looking for, like, the dramatic Bob Marley exposé, but that's not the reason that we include flaws in the depiction of a revered figure in the dramatic retelling of their lives. We do it to humanize them. Like, I'm judging the writing from Marley here as a depiction of a real-life figure, but also as a movie character, and on that end, I basically have nothing to connect to with this character. I guess that's not true. I agree that peace is good, and you should be able to make the music that you're passionate about. So my values align with his, as they're depicted here, but it's a problem that his character basically boils down to those two values. And this movie does this thing that always bothers me in depictions of iconic figures. I hate when we have to pretend that famous figures who took risks in their career and made powerful statements with their work were somehow these all-knowing, omniscient beings who had this wisdom that words just can't describe. Like, this movie depicts Marley producing his 1977 album Exodus, which tackles themes of religious faith at a moment Marley thought the world needed to hear this message. This album would go on to be a success, and at the time, he had executives telling him that it wouldn't sell and that young people wouldn't respond to the music, at least that's how this movie plays it. And they can't just depict Marley and his collaborators as experienced artists who are knowledgeable about their audience or have insights into the climate that they're putting their music out into.