Nerdy kid bit by a sciency spider gets spider-based super powers. His uncle dies due to his irresponsibility, teaching him responsibility. Then this newfound sense of responsibility makes him feel compelled to save people from the evil plans of a super powered bad guy. At this point, you know what a Spider-Man origin story looks like. The difference, this time around, is that Spider-Man and his alter-ego, Peter Parker, are being portrayed by The Social Network’s Andrew Garfield, his girlfriend is the blonde one, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), and the bad guy he’s facing is the one-armed scientist turned rampaging were-lizard, Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans). Plus, it’s all being put together by (500) Days of Summer director Marc Webb, so it’s got something of a teen romance vibe going for it.
The question everyone seems to be asking about The Amazing Spider-Man is whether or not we needed a new telling of the Spider-Man origin, seeing as everyone has already read it in countless comic books, and a film version of the tale was made just ten years ago—very famously—by Sam Raimi. In order for a complete reboot of the Spider-Man story to not feel like a retread, Webb was going to have to take a radically new approach to the material, risk alienating comic book purists, and prove to everyone that his vision of the Spider-Man world couldn’t have been brought to the screen any other way. So, how does he do? Not well. The only difference between this Spider-Man and Raimi’s seems to be that the hero’s web shooters have been restored to their rightful, mechanical origins, and the chronology of his girlfriends has been restored to its rightful, Gwen first order. Other than that, you get all the same uncle drama, all the same getting to know his powers sequences, all of the same nervous flirting, and all of the same rooftop crises. Asking us to be wowed by Spider-Man’s powers coming to life on the big screen is a little ridiculous, seeing as we’ve just watched it happen in three recent movies. But asking us to once again sit through the same origin story that everybody already knows, for seemingly no reason, is kind of unforgivable. Webb and company would have been better off just doing their recasting and treating this as an unofficial sequel to Spider-Man 3 that doesn’t explicitly reference Raimi’s take on the material.
But, that’s not what happened, so it’s up to us to try and focus on how The Amazing Spider-Man fares as a stand-alone film. Sure, it can feel kind of old hat and boring because we’ve just seen huge chunks of the story in a film that came out ten years ago, but is it fast-paced and thrilling other than that? Not so much. If there’s one big problem that will keep the public from being enthusiastically in support of this film, it’s going to be that it’s too long and too slow. The first act, especially, builds very deliberately, and by the time Parker was finally getting his super powers I could sense people around me squirming in their seats and looking at the time. Things pick up a bit once the super powers come into play and the Lizard starts rampaging through the city, sure, but by the time the final action sequence was kicking off it had felt like we’d all been sitting there for so long that skipping it all and leaving early wouldn’t have been such a bad idea. The Amazing Spider-Man isn’t awful—there aren’t any embarrassing missteps that sink the film like the worst of Spider-Man 3—but the material does such a poor job of sticking with you that I can’t for the life of me remember how such a thin story managed to fill up two hours and sixteen minutes of movie. It seemed like fairly simple re-writes could have got the whole thing down to under two hours, easy.
Aside from the pacing problems, the rest of the writing is kind of dumb too. There are so many coincidences necessary to make this story happen that you can’t help but dwell on them, no matter how much you want to suspend disbelief and just enjoy. You’re telling me the guy who worked with Parker’s parents is the same guy who works with the girl he ends up liking, whose father is the same guy trying to hunt down Spider-Man? Are there only ten people living in this version of New York? And why does nobody bat an eyelash when Peter does ridiculously unbelievable things in front of huge crowds, like jumping across half a gym and breaking a backboard with a dunk, or rocketing a football at a thousand miles an hour and bending a goal post? The whole school can’t tell that he’s the super powered freak running around town after that? Really? And did we really need to see another superhero movie where a device that’s going to cause mass destruction is set to go off on top of a building in New York? Is this the only climax anyone who writes superhero movies is able to come up with? After the first act feeling like a rehash, a little ingenuity in the third would have went a long way.
Those are nitpicking little things compared to the plot threads that get started and never finished, however. After Parker’s uncle gets killed he goes on a rampage through the city, shaking down muggers in an obsessive attempt at finding the guy responsible. Then, before the guy gets found or Peter ever makes an explicit decision to give up his search... it just gets dropped. The secret of who Parker’s parents are gets constantly teased for the first half of the film as well. It’s clear that the scope of what they were working on and why they disappeared when Peter was a boy is being hidden from us, and though the marketing materials promised us that this untold story was pretty much the entire point of the movie... any answers get put off for a sequel. It almost feels like the film went through last minute rewrites, last minute edits, and a whole wealth of material will someday be reinserted to create an even longer director’s cut.
Of course, despite all of my whining, there were good things in here as well. One of the big reasons people go to superhero movies is to take in some spectacle, and the special effects in this film blow away what we got in Raimi’s trilogy (other than a scene where a car is on fire, I’ve still yet to see anyone use CG fire that doesn’t look awful). All of the Spidey action, where he’s mid-air twisting, turning, and rocketing through the city at high speeds, is absolutely seamless, and there was more than one scene where he pulled off a move that I had seen play out in my head 1000 times as a child but had never actually seen realized in the real world. The best special effects are supposed to sweep you away without letting you realize that you’re watching a movie, and some of the work in this one completely recreated the experience of being a little kid reading a comic book. The hand-to-hand fights Spider-Man has with the Lizard are especially impressive. Despite being a computer creation, the Lizard feels like he has real weight and heft, and you can feel the impact in your teeth when he and Spidey start slamming each other around.
But, if there’s any reason to go see this one and suffer through the slow parts, it’s the cast that Webb has assembled. This is, by far, the most talented group of people who have ever been put together to tell a Spider-Man story, and they go a long way toward elevating the shoddy screenwriting. Martin Sheen and Sally Field are a better Uncle Ben and Aunt May than I’ve ever imagined possible. These are characters who are rarely used to be anything other than cartoon representations of the perfect kindly old couple, and somehow Sheen and Field capture that element of the duo, but they also make them feel like real, three-dimensional people who you might actually meet. Similarly, Garfield and Stone create versions of Peter and Gwen who feel like real teenagers with hopes, dreams, and personalities apart from just being your standard movie hero and heroine. Garfield has a unique charisma about him, and he imbues Parker with a strange, mumble-mouthed charm that sets his portrayal of the character apart from any other we’ve seen in any medium. It felt like he was channeling Mark Ruffalo’s scruffy portrayal of Bruce Banner in The Avengers and coloring it with a dash of Ryan Gosling’s awkward pauses in Drive. Gwen Stacy could have been something of an annoyance, as—on paper—she’s little more than a beautiful, smart, kind, perfect dream girl who lacks any easily definable personality traits; but Stone is one of the most charming and naturally likable actresses working today, so she manages to give the character the nervous energy of a girl experiencing her first crush—solely through her delivery—and make the romance scenes work out far better than they probably should have. There were some things that Webb could have done better as far as his relaunch of the Spider-Man property is concerned, but I can’t imagine coming up with anyone better than Garfield and Stone for these lead roles. Their casting was a master stroke.
Which will be fortuitous for the inevitable Amazing Spider-Man sequel. If there’s one truly exciting thing that this movie did, it’s create a strong foundation for future films to come. What we got here feels a lot like Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie, which was watchable but felt hampered by too many studio notes and scheduling limitations. When that film did well and Singer was able to get free reign over X2, the results were a much better movie. Also, comparisons could be made to Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. There were good things about that first film, but it felt a little slow, and once he got all of the introductions out of the way and was able to hit the ground running for Spider-Man 2, he was able to make something that was a marked improvement over the original. The Spectacular Spider-Man—or whatever they’re going to call it—could be the now-classic case of a superhero sequel being far better than its predecessor. Webb has already set up a world that feels slightly less lame and cartoony than Raimi’s did, and he has a far superior cast tackling the lead roles, so all he needs is a better script and a little more time to plan, and I could see him knocking the ball out of the park with his next effort.
And how cool would it be if they took the Avengers approach and kept building Spider-Man movies up to a climactic team-up film where all of the villains he fights form the Sinister Six? I’ll tell you how cool: so cool.
