Making movies is hard.
Virtually everyone knows that, and you don't even need any experience having worked on film sets to know that. Between the numerous problems that can plague you in preproduction, production to post, it's virtually impossible for a first-time director to completely stick the landing.
Spider-Man Lotus is no exception.
Even to ignore the controversy that (reasonably) has driven away thousands of potential viewers from this project, at a fundamental level Spider-Man Lotus sought to curate some of the most iconic Spider-Man scenes across media and combine them into a single cohesive narrative. And to do so with Instagram-model non-actors and only a handful of setpieces.
To have successfully strung the true emotional weight & setup for these scenes (in their original versions being built up to episodically -- and instead presented here to viewers non-familiar with the books with virtually no context) and to have done so along their tight budget would've been daunting for even the most experienced director. So while the ambition is admirable, it comes as no surprise to casual viewers that a shoestring fan film with a huge PR campaign was... precisely that.
Additionally, it just plain suffers from a number of should've-been-solved-in-film-school-type problems. While coverage & camera-work is proficient for someone the director's age, a college level screenwriting class might've solved some glaring issues.
The plot jumps around with a non-chronological order as scenes play intermittently with flashbacks. Every scene is paced far too slowly and the editing lingers far, far too long. (Even watching on 2x speed I imagine would still feel too long.) It's a kitsch recollection of moments that are deliberately stretched to fit to resemble moments from the bronze age comics and transplanting the 90's moodiness... and as mentioned, without a nerd-level understanding of Spider-Man, casual viewers (like my viewing party) are going to be completely, and totally, bored.
And no amount of music swelling over a cross-dissolving camera panning across (presumably the director's) Spider-man memorabilia-decorated bedroom can save it from being a forced, and far too drawn out, scene.
The end result is something that felt painful to have watched. My heart truly goes out to the director who made this, as I'm sure the controversy already sucked most the wind out of his sails and likely made his passion project hard to complete to begin with. But it also just sucks because what is so obviously a hyper-emotionally-charged passion project doesn't, and will likely never, reach the audiences the director sought to give this to. Both because of a (deservedly) self-imposed downfall and because the end product just plain isn't that technically nor narratively impressive.
In the end, as mentioned, it's just another Spidey fan film and will probably be the one to dominate Youtube for the decade, as Peter's Web did the decade prior and Dan Poole's Green Goblin's Last Stand (an ironically STILL better film despite being crudely made with home-sewn costumes and filmed on VHS) did for the '90s. (Last Stand ironically also still having a better and much more tonally faithful adaptation of a crucial scene featured here.)
Konop (the director) has proven himself technically proficient enough to have done what most aspiring directors his age typically haven't mastered - actually producing something -- and he need not worry for the greater path of his career as he will easily be able to nab most any directing/ film & video production job if he opts to continue working in the industry. The actors (or models) -- I can't really say as much given the low quality of the performances and the obvious controversy being more likely to more greatly effect the film's lead (provided they become the 'face' of any production they're tied to whereas a director with some controversy generally can still slip under the radar of public scrutiny and continue to find work).
All in all, Spider-Man Lotus amounted to mostly everything it promised to be: a fan production led by an amateur director who is serious about film, helmed by instagram actor-models, and retelling transplanted scenes from the comics. Does it work? Not really. But like its now emotionally-battered protagonist who limps about its prolonged runtime in sloggish confusion, it's trying, and maybe that's what counted.
