The Amazing Spider-Man Films Are A Collision Of Promise And Tragedy

 Five years ago this month, Sony announced Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy would be rebooted. enraging fans of that trilogy around the globe. My reaction at the time was disappointment, but also open-mindedness; Spider-Man 3 was flawed (though quite a bit better than people give it credit for) and the bits and pieces that had come out about Raimi's purported Spider-Man 4 sounded iffy (though John Malkovich as The Vulture sounded awesome). So I kept a close track as a director (Marc Webb) and actors were hired for this new series of films focusing on the web-slinger dubbed The Amazing Spider-Man.

From the get-go, the series of films had promise in the cast and crew it nabbed. Marc Webb was coming off the 2009 hit (500) Days Of Summer, while the picks for the roles of Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy were stars of 2010 features from Columbia Pictures that certainly had chops. Andrew Garfield would star as Peter Parker, after being outstanding in The Social Network, in only his tenth feature film, while Emma Stone would play Gwen Stacy.

I find it kind of interesting to see how this particular duo transformed from before these movies and after. Stone was in The House Bunny, Zombieland, Easy A and Marmaduke prior to being casted, and before the first rebooted Peter Parker film would arrive, she also starred in the $160+ million grossing feature The Help, which grabbed her an Oscar nomination, and sleeper summer hit Crazy, Stupid, Love. Since these films, she's managed to star in two Woody Allen movies (one released, one coming this summer), had a supporting role in Birdman that's gotten huge awards recognition and was in Movie 43.

Andrew Garfield on the other hand has remained surprisingly quiet since he was chosen to be Tobey Maguires successor. He did no movies in between October 2010's The Social Network and July 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man, and has done only non-Spider-Man movie since The Social Network. He will star in Martin Scorsese's next movie, which is a huge coup, but the lack of roles he's gotten since then is interesting to see, if only because it's likely to do with how these Amazing Spider-Man features have been received by the public. 

After a year long marketing plan, The Amazing Spider-Man debuted on July 3, 2012 to pretty good reviews and solid box office. I myself found the film to be pretty good, but flawed. The feature was overlong, and felt at once too torn and devoted to the Spider-Man mythology. Peter Parkers "updated" outcast personality that clashed with his traditional persona from comics and prior films. Garfield felt like he was channeling Poochie instead of giving Parker an actual personality an audience could latch onto.

At the same time, the film's overlong running time can be attributed to it trying to put a spin on every part of Spider-Mans well-known mythology, namely Uncle Ben. Martin Sheen plays him well in several moments, but their reinterpretation of the "With Great Power" adage is clunky, while his death scene is directed surprisingly poorly. It's also hard to see how the murder of his Uncle actually affects the plot overall, as aside from a voice-mail message in the movies final moments, it's never really brought up after the middle section.

Still, the movie does find excellent chemistry between Garfield and Stone, the latter being the best actor in the film with her charming and realistic personality. Webb also handles action scenes well, even if the center of many of these scenes, the primary villain of the film (The Lizard who has a cool design but little else), doesn't fit into the movies overall style or atmosphere. But any flaws found here are mere tuppence compared to what The Amazing Spider-Man 2 would wrought.

A lack of focus overwhelms the sequel, as an extraneous sequence depicting the demise of Peter's parents opens the film. After that, a wealth of information is tossed at the viewer within just a few minutes; a criminal is on the loose! Peter is late for graduation! Denis Leary is a very unfriendly ghost! There's a way to get across all this exposition in a short period of time in an effective manner, but Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzmans script bypasses all clarity in favor of just tossing everything they can at the audience.

That approach carries over to the rest of the movie, as Jamie Foxx's extremely abysmal villain, Electro, takes up tons of screentime without ever leaving an impression. His lack of connection to other heroes or antagonists in the film makes him feel like the most shoehorned element in a film overloaded with extraneous content. Even the Garfield/Stone chemistry falls flat this time around, as Spider-Man's creepy moment of stalking from the previous film is taken to new extremes here, with Peter stalking Gwen constantly as Spider-Man. When she discovers this, her reaction is that of acceptance, even slight flattery, which guarantees the movie reaches that rare combo of being both poorly made and offensive!

Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield deserve better than this sequel, and Marc Webb's obvious passion for Spider-Man on social media and in interviews should be rewarded with him getting to make a Spidey film that doesn't have so many executives and folks like Avi Arad muddling with it. Who knows where the Spider-Man franchise goes from here (maybe to Infinity War and beyond????) but it's hard to imagine it could get worse than the potential squandering mess that is The Amazing Spider-Man 2.