A couple of weeks ago while looking through the “What’s Hot” panel on my WordPress dashboard, I found a link to an article about the upcoming Spider-Man reboot. The article also contained a photo of the costume that will be used in the movie. It is claimed to be the actor, Andrew Garfield, in costume but, like many of the people who commented on the article, I don’t believe it. Yes, the suit is an overall step up from the last, but I find that the way the suit clings to the depressions in between the muscles doesn’t look real, especially when compared to other photos of the actor in costume, in which we can actually see his face and his much less bulging muscles.
In the previous Spider-Man films, I always thought that the costume they used looked awfully “cartoony”. The colors were very bright, the material looked like plastic, and the eyes seemed overly bulbous. The new suit looks to be an improvement (at least in those areas), employing darker colors, and having a more fabric-like appearance, not to mention the use of real, mechanical web shooters this time around.
I’ll admit that in the photo from the article, the suit does look kind of cool, but in the other pictures that I mentioned, it still seems to have retained some of its silliness, probably due to its unrelenting grasp on its comic book roots. All super hero costumes, even if they’re made of brightly colored spandex, look awesome in the pages of comic books because they cling unnaturally to every single groove between each shiny, inhuman muscle. Many comic-based films, such as X-Men and the new Batman series, have used a little creative licence to come up with slightly altered versions of the costumes, probably because they knew that trying to mimic a spandex-type material would wind up detracting from the intimidating aspect that many of the characters are supposed to have. I didn’t mind seeing Wolverine in an all black protective leather outfit because I knew I would have been out of breath laughing had they gone with his classic yellow spandex. They even gave a comical little nod to the costume change by referencing it in the movie.
Such creative changes weren’t attempted for any of the Spider-Man films, I suppose because they assumed that the lack of skin-tight red and blue would cause people to be confused as to what character they were looking at. Personally, the radio-active spider bite and the swinging through New York City on strands of web would have been enough of an identifier for me.
Walking the Pattern 