With the new, lighter, Julie Taymor–less version of Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark starting previews on Thursday, Bono has opened up a bit about what failed with the original take. He tells the New York Times: “What was great about ‘Turn Off the Dark’ 1.0 was unusual and rare: magic, a pop-up Pop-Art opera with a bit of rock ’n’ roll circus thrown in. What was not right about it was a catalog of commonplace problems — story knots, bad sound and finally a failure to cohere, meaning that the whole was not greater than the sum of the parts, as wonderful as some of those parts were.” Also, “In ‘Turn Off the Dark’ 2.0, the myth of Arachne” — a villain given a smaller role in the new version — “does not overpower the reason people are there … to discover what makes Peter Parker a superhero, which in the end turns out not to be his spider senses, but his personal integrity and especially his humility — something I hope all of us in this process have learned from.” So they made it less weird and more like the comic book? Sounds like this should work just fine. [NYT]
