It is my pleasure to report that The Amazing Spider-Man isn’t a bad movie.
It’s fun, it’s true to the characters, it works generally well. Some parts work better than others and what it gets right, it gets very right. What it misses on, it misses widely.
The story is exactly the same one we got in the trailers. It’s the origin story of Peter Parker and how he got his powers, only this time his parents are vaguely kind of involved. He’s abandoned with his Uncle Ben and Aunt May and his selfishness costs him everything and his drive for vengeance turns him into a hero.
The broad strokes are the same as you’ve seen a hundred times. The details are different. Some of them work remarkably well. I think Martin Sheen did as well as anybody could following up Cliff Robertson as Uncle Ben and sold the part with a heart and resonance that you need out of the character. Andrew Garfield, for his part, worked very well both as Peter and as Spider-Man. I really liked Tobey Maguire’s dopey Peter act, Garfield is much more wry, witty, and slightly more self-assure.
I’m not trying to compare the Raimi and Webb Spider-Man movies. I’m really not. I did everything I could to banish them from my head before I went into the theatre, but they’re just too fresh in the lexicon of superhero films. It was hard to divorce myself completely from making comparisons.
As for the villain, The Lizard works well enough. His best moments were the most comic-booky, from his sewer lair.
Emma Stone and Dennis Leary as Gwen Stacy and her father Captain Stacy are probably the aspect of this film I like the most. She works better as a love interest for Spider-Man than anyone has and Captain Stacy is so perfect to his comic iterations and his place in the story that it’s impossible to dislike him. And it’s the story of the Stacy family I want to see continued into the sequel. I will instantly forgive all the complaints about this film I’ve had if it is, indeed, setting the stage for a dramatic film version of The Death of Gwen Stacy.
For me, this movie easily surpassed Raimi’s Spider-Man and Spider-Man 3, but it just didn’t have the runway space to fly above Spider-Man 2, which is hailed in most competent circles as a masterpiece of superhero cinema. There is no single moment in The Amazing Spider-Man that is better than the fight on the subway or Peter inadvertently revealing his identity to Mary Jane in the boat house. But I think moments that powerful take time. And if Marc Webb and the cast stays on, and there’s minimal interference from Sony, and the writers do their job well, we’ll have a sequel full of those moments to look forward to.
More than anything, that’s what I’m excited to see. Past the origin, I want the sequel. I suppose that’s as high of praise as you can give a movie.
ALSO: Do NOT see this movie in 3D. I don’t easily get headaches, but this film in 3D gave me one. And the colors were so much more rich and vivid when I took the glasses off. And since so much of the film was set at night, it was impossible to see what was happening with the 3D glasses. Even when it was bright it was hard to make out finer details. At one point, Flash Thompson arrives in a Spider-Man shirt and I couldn’t even tell with the glasses on.
The Amazing Spider-Man
7/10 on the Big Shiny Superhero Scale
Bryan Young is the author of Operation: Montauk.