Spider-man Month - Mini-review: The Amazing Spider-man

It's still Spider-man Month!

By now, you probably know what my opinion is of the Raimi movies, namely that they all suck. Not to say that there weren’t some good things. Spider-man doesn’t blame himself for everything that goes wrong in the world (like he seems to in the comics, according to Linkara) some of the villains were decent, I actually like the Green Goblin, and erm… erm… yeah, that’s about it for the compliments, I have very little else to applaud.

Contrary to popular belief, it was not the poor reception of Spider-man 3 that lead to the reboot, well, not exactly. Raimi was working on a Spider-man 4, with Maguire set to resume his role as Peter Parker and Spider-man, hell: they had plans to make Spider-man’s 5 and 6 concurrently, if Spider-man 4 was enough of a success. (Having said that, the idea of taking Felicia Hardy, a character who has an alter-ego as the Black Cat in the comics, and turning her into a female knock-off of the Vulture does not impress me, in fact, with rumours of the Lizard, and the real Vulture also making an appearance, means it may well have gone down the same route as Spider-man 3 in terms of overstuffed villains)

However, creative problems and Raimi’s inability to get his wanted budget or time frame lead to him leaving the franchise entirely. Sony decided to the reboot the franchise with new director Mark Webb (yes, we all know that joke, don’t say it)

So we have this reboot origin story, the Amazing Spider-man. Which it’s time to look into

I’ll address the major complaint most people have with this story to start with, the fact that it re-treads a lot of material from the Raimi Spider-man movie. And yeah, they’re probably right about that.  Parker losing Uncle Ben, with great power comes great responsibility and the spider-sense moments. It’s an unfortunate consequence of them doing a reboot with a retelling of Spider-man’s origin story. It’s inevitable that they’ll retread over some moments. There is some effort to make this a different story from the last one and some of it comes off quite well, whilst some of it is absolutely ridiculous.

Peter Parker is a skateboard riding, contacts wearing (sometimes), slightly popular with the ladies, not all that often bullied by Flash (accident in the morning, followed by being beaten up for defending another victim) teenaged loser. I don’t like the skateboard or the contact lenses. It kind of does dumb down his geeky image.

OK but we come to my biggest problem with this movie. Peter does a terrible job of hiding his secret identity. First he causes an incident on the train (which I’m surprised was never reported to the police to be honest, it may have been an accident but that’s not how it’d look to an onlooker) he then breaks just about everything in his house: windows, pipes, mirrors, alarm clocks etc. He also somehow manages to shatter a basket-ball net and bend a football post by throwing a football at it. Also, his mask comes off in every f*cking encounter he has with the main villains and sometimes even the minor ones.

You ever seen the Batman Beyond episode Unmasked? Terry McGinnis unmasked to make a kid confident enough to take his hand, in the process he makes that kid a target. Here, it never has any consequences.

So, Peter walks, rather too easily, into a high security lab and gets the spider-bite as you’d expect.

To try and differentiate it from the Raimi Trilogy, they try a different angle with Peter’s parents, making his father an Oscorp Scientist with Curt Connors, our soon to be exceptionally clichéd villain for the movies. It’s actually one of the least interesting parts of the movie; it doesn’t get much screen time either, so I won’t complain too much.

Gwen Stacey. I like her more than Mary Jane. Then again I like Playstation Move Heroes more than Mary Jane (shameless plug). She’s smart, able to use her own initiative, doesn’t cheat on anyone and more importantly, she doesn’t need to be rescued every other scene! Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone have great chemistry together. It actually does say something that they became a couple in real life as well.

Lack of Spider-man is expected in an origin story. But there’s a lot to like about Peter Parker. They show that he’s intelligent (if still socially awkward) and actually good-willed. He helps people, if only in small ways like standing up for the guy Flash was bullying, and… Standing up for the other guy Flash was bullying. It helps define Peter as a likeable character before adding Spidey to the mix, something I feel they rather failed at with the Raimi movies.

Oh and they’ve given him proper web-shooters. I cannot be happier about that. This way they can malfunction without it being contrived. (And I’ve also made it clear in my Spider-man 1 review that I thought that organic shooters is a really stupid idea anyway)

Ah and then we have the particularly good thing about this reboot. You know how there was always a sense that the city was against them, but never actually physical evidence. Here there’s actually physical evidence. The cops are hunting him (Marvel Universe for you) lead by Captain Stacey, Gwen’s father and prominent part of the Spider-man verse before his death. Oh and Spider-man is actually funny in this one.

Look, I’m not blind to the problems with this movie. The Lizard conveniently leaving his plan for Peter to see, Peter’s camera having a massive label revealing his identity, the retreads of another spider-man movie, the sheer number of times Peter reveals his secret. The backwards attempts to modernise the character (the skateboard etc), the overly dark colour scheme and the numerous others that I’m sure have been brought up in other reviews, but truth be told, I still prefer this to the Raimi movies.

Don’t get me wrong, the movie still needs work and I think some of the sequel does attempt to rectify these mistakes. It creates more problems in the process, but I’ll get to that during my review of the Amazing Spider-man 2.

Rating 65/100

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Images used in this review are from The Amazing Spider-man and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use.