The Amazing Spider-Man 2012
I’ve always liked Spider-Man, going back to watching the animated version on TV after school. When the 2002 movie came out with Tobey Maguire, I thought it was pretty good, but one thing that bothered me was that after he was bitten by the spider he naturally had the ability to shoot webs, whereas in the cartoon and at least some of the comic books I had seen, it was a device he had invented. I liked that because it showed that he was smart and good at chemistry, which I thought I was interested in at the time.
In 2012, they started all over with the Spider-Man movies, hiring British actor Andrew Garfield (who had previously starred as a Brazilian in The Social Network) to play Spider-Man. While it didn’t seem like that big of a movie at the time, it still did pretty well, and I was glad to learn the web shooters this time are artificial, though in the movie it doesn’t really go into that at all. It just shows him sitting down with a screwdriver and all of the sudden he has a web shooter.
Emma Stone, who I usually really like, plays Peter Parker’s love interest this time, but she is supposed to be a high school student and looks more like she is in her 30’s (in reality she is in her mid-20’s while Garfield is closer to 30). These people are just too old to be believable as high school students. Another kind of odd choice was the police chief, played by Denis Leary, who I mistook initially as being Willem Dafoe, who played the Green Goblin in the earlier series. I know they are different people, but commonly mixed up, so maybe they could have picked someone else. That said, Leary is good in a subdued role. Peter doesn’t work at the newspaper in this one, so there is no J. Jonah Jameson. I was surprised to see A-list stars as Peter’s Aunt May and Uncle Ben in Sally Field and Martin Sheen. It’s not much of a part for Sally Field, but Sheen gets some good scenes.
I don’t want to give too much away about the bad guy because I went in totally unspoiled and was glad to have done so. I will say it wasn’t a great bad guy and it leads to my biggest problem with the movie which is the overuse of CGI for almost everything. I know it can’t be easy to show someone swinging through a city from webs, but the CGI here makes everything look fake and the movement is usually too fast or just unrealistic. I never did get around to seeing the third installment of the last series of movies, but to me, this movie fell short of the original, and fell pretty much in line with the second which I thought was much worse (though l looking back, I still gave it an A-, which seems overly generous), the bad guy here being entirely too similar to Doc Ock of that movie. There should be more mystery, more figuring stuff out, and not so many huge CGI fight scenes where they plow each other through walls. Instead they tried to balance out the CGI action scenes with some sappy personal stuff that was laid on too thick, especially at the end.
In the end, this is a good summer action movie, and I like the Spider-man story, but I also feel like this was a weak effort and the entire idea of starting all over just 10 years after the initial movie makes it feel like they just didn’t have any better ideas.
Written: 09 Feb 2013
Owned on: Digital