The Need for a Revolutionary Cinema in the Belly of the Empire

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (2012)

Greetings, loyal fans! And welcome to my Throwback Review of The Amazing Spider-Man! Before I get into it, let’s begin with a little background. Now, I’m assuming that you have read my review of Spider-Man 3. And if you have read that review, or really any review of SM 3, you know that it’s a somewhat disorganized mess. Despite how problematic it was, though, a lot of people went to go see it, making it Sony’s highest grossing film at the time with $890 million worldwide (Skyfall now holds that title with $1 billion worldwide). Because of this, Sony was perfectly happy to release another Spider-Man film and Sam Raimi wanted to give fans a sequel that was as good as SM 2, if not better. However, Raimi and Sony kept on disagreeing over the story and Sony kept rushing Raimi to complete the film for a May 6, 2011 release date. Raimi departed the project, feeling that he couldn’t meet the release date while still making a good film, and the Rami Spider-Man series ended. However, this didn’t change the fact that Sony still had to make a Spider-Man film by 2012 or else they would lose the rights. So, because of Rami’s departure, their best course of action was to just start from scratch again with a new cast of actors and a director who didn’t have the clout to defy them. Mix this all together and, voila! You get The Amazing Spider-Man. This is a film that people either love or hate. While the critical reaction at the time was mostly positive, fans weren’t so uniform in their response. Some loved it for its new “cool” take on Spider-Man while others felt that it missed the point of the source material. As for me, I’m sort of in the “meh” category on this one. While it does have some standout moments and things that I really like, as a whole, the movie is just so…average.

The story: Peter Parker (played this time by Andrew Garfield) is a jaded teenager who lives with his Aunt May (Sally Field) and Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) after his mother and father (Campbell Scott) leave him under mysterious circumstances. One day, Peter happens upon a brief case that belonged to his father, which contains information about his research and partnership with a one-armed scientist named Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), and their work at Oscorp. So, Peter decides to seek out Connors by faking his identity at an internship tour, which goes awry when he happens upon a “biocable lab” containing genetically-altered spiders and is bitten by one of them. Over the next few days, Peter experiences some biological changes; he’s much stronger, his senses are heightened, and his fingers are very adhesive. However, this doesn’t stop Peter from seeking out Connors, who enlists Peter to help him in his “cross-species genetics” research, where he intends to cross the DNA of a human and lizard so he can grow his arm back. Meanwhile, a fellow classmate named Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone) has been charmed by Peter and begins a romantic relationship with him, much to the disapproval of her father, Captain George Stacey (Denis Leary).

However, Peter’s life is upended when an accident results in the death of his Uncle Ben. He then decides to set out on a path of revenge to capture the man who killed Uncle Ben, making a costume along the way, and adopting the mantle of “Spider-Man”…until he suddenly gets the idea to start saving other people and that plotline is completely forgotten about. Meanwhile, Dr. Connors tests a serum of lizard DNA on himself with the equation Peter gave him, and it works. Only one problem, though…it turns him into a giant monster lizard! So, it’s up to Spider-Man to stop the Lizard from...*snicker*…get a load of this…turning the entire city into lizards…yeah.

Folks, I gotta be honest, it was very hard for me to write up that synopsis because this film’s plot is just all over the place. And that’s one of the major problems with the movie. At first, the movie is about Peter learning about his father’s research. Then, it’s about Peter and Dr. Connors’ continued research. Then, it’s about Peter’s vendetta against the man who killed his Uncle. Then, it’s about Spider-Man trying to stop the Lizard. Oh, and did I mention that the reason that Connors is doing this research is because his superior (Irrfan Khan) is pushing him to find a cure for the dying Norman Osborn? Also, the storyline involving Captain Stacey and his mistrust for Spider-Man is very underdeveloped and gets solved in a sort of anti-climactic manner. Man, it’s as if this movie has ADD. This isn’t like SM 3, where the film just has too many plots going on at once. This is more like once the film decides it’s done with a certain plot, it will just throw another one in to pad out the runtime. Now, this is hardly surprising considering the film went through three different writers (James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent, and Steve Kloves; Sargent, incidentally, contributed to the scripts for SM 2 and SM 3).  Instead of all three of these writers’ stories creating a cohesive whole, the plot instead feels like pieces from separate jigsaw puzzles forced together. But that’s not the only problem.

The other major problem is the characterizations of the hero and the villain. We’ll start with the hero because his is the most problematic. Now keep in mind that I don’t blame Andrew Garfield for this. He’s a terrific actor and, for what he’s given, he does a good job. The problem is in the writing; in this film, Peter Parker doesn’t seem to go through much of a change. When we first meet him, he is a skateboarder hipster with the hairdo and cool clothes, making wisecracks and pissing off teachers by skateboarding in the halls, standing up to the school bully even though he gets the crap beat out of him, and successfully asking out the hottest girl in school. In other words, he’s basically Spider-Man before he becomes Spider-Man. And when he does finally become the wall-crawler, there’s no difference between the superhero and the normal guy.  One of the reasons that Spider-Man has endured so long is because the Peter Parker persona is one of the most relatable characters in comic book history. But I just cannot relate with this version of Peter Parker and I don’t think a lot of other nerds can, either. How many other nerds can honestly say that, in high school, they were socially awkward outcasts while simultaneously being hip skater dudes who stood up to bullies and successfully got the hottest girl/boy to go out with them? I’m guessing not very many. Peter Parker is supposed to be an awkward nerd who’s shy around girls and beloved by the teachers for his intellect, not some smoldering hot guy with popular girls who gets a free pass for being a nerd just because he wears glasses. It also doesn’t help that this film botched the origin, therefore robbing Peter of any further character development. How did they do it? Well, I’ll tell you (SPOILER ALERT…but this film is almost four years old, so that warning shouldn’t carry much weight).

Now, in all iterations and interpretations of Spider-Man, Peter Parker becomes a hero because of the guilt he feels for not stopping the thief in the hallway, resulting in Uncle Ben’s murder. But in this film, Peter doesn’t stop a thief from robbing a grocery store as revenge, and the thief runs into Uncle Ben and drops his gun. Uncle Ben and the thief wrestle for the gun and Ben gets shot and killed in the process. Instead of feeling guilty about not stopping the thief, Peter sets out on a personal vendetta to find the murderer until Captain Stacey inadvertently inspires him to stop his journey of revenge and broaden his scope to help other people. OK, here’s the main reason why this doesn’t work. In Spider-Man’s origin story, finding out that the thief who killed Uncle Ben is the same guy Peter let go is a major shock to Peter! It drives home the point that it was his fault that Uncle Ben is dead. This is the main reason why he’s Spider-Man: guilt. In ASM, I never got the sense that Peter felt it was his fault that Uncle Ben died, but rather he just felt the regular pain that anyone would feel after losing a loved one. And the whole “becoming a superhero for revenge then learning a lesson about helping other people” storyline feels like it was lifted from Nolan’s Batman series. Also, it robs Peter of the chance to learn about responsibility throughout the course of the film. In fact, I’m not even sure what Peter learned by the end of this film other than how to break a promise while also not breaking it at the same time.

There’s a lot more I could go into with Peter, but I wanna get to the other guy: the Lizard. Curt Connors starts out as a very sympathetic character. We understand why this cross-species research is so important to him: he just wants to gain back something he lost and we really feel for him. However, when he injects the serum and becomes the Lizard, his character changes on a dime. Now all of the sudden, he is completely insane and wants to turn the entire populace of New York into lizards. I guess one could argue that the serum is messing with his mind, but it’s just so sudden that it almost feels unnatural. Surprisingly, though, the problem with Connors isn’t with the writing, but with the editing. This film was edited to death and a lot of scenes were left on the cutting room floor. I mean, seriously. It’s almost as if the trailers were selling a completely different movie. In fact, one of the deleted scenes on the DVD shows Dr. Connors with his young son. This totally surprised me because the final cut of the film didn’t even make mention of Connors having a family. I really wish that these scenes could have been added back into the film so we could see Connors’ descent into madness, sort of like a “Jekyll and Hyde” kind of a deal. But instead, we are stuck with an inconsistent villain with possibly the DUMBEST PLOT IN VILLAIN HISTORY (turning everyone into lizards…seriously?).

Despite those two major problems, everything else about the movie just doesn’t leave that much of an impact on me. The rest of the actors do a good job with what they’re given, but their acting isn’t really that memorable. I guess in trying to be more ‘realistic’ than the Raimi series, none of the actors are allowed to go over-the-top and leave any standout performances. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing memorable to take away from this. In fact, there are three elements which I enjoy:

1). The musical score: the film’s soundtrack was composed by the late, great James Horner, who is one of my favorite composers. I love how he was able to compose a score that was the traditional superhero music, but also mix in a few of his own elements. For example, there’s a heavy lean towards pianos in this score, most of it coming in during the tender moments and romantic scenes. But a standout piano moment in the score is during the final battle where Gwen is hiding from the Lizard and all we hear is a dissonant cluster chord, which is a great callback to older style film scores. I also like how Horner was able to make use of vocals in his scores, from a full-on choir to a singular soprano voice. All in all, the soundtrack gets my utmost recommendation.

2). The romance: I have said in my reviews of the Raimi series that the weakest link was Mary-Jane. She was a very underdeveloped character and that only gave way to a terrible one-sided romance between her and Peter. But the character of Gwen in this film is much better written and serves a less stereotypical role. She’s smart as a whip, resourceful during a time of crisis, and gets in on the action, even if it means risking her life. And the romance between her and Peter is much more realistic than what a lot of comic book movies give us. It’s awkward but cute, like a lot of teenage romances. And even though Peter appears to be stalking her and any other girl in real life would issue a restraining order out on him, I have no problem believing that these two are in love. They are actually kind of cute together (yes, I just used the word ‘cute’; so what?).

3). The visuals: One of the few things I like about the Amazing series in general is the fact that it retains the colorfulness of the comic book aesthetic, despite the fact that it’s trying to be realistic. Even though a lot of this film is shot in nighttime and is trying to be “gritty”, the colors just pop out whenever they are present, especially in the Oscorp scenes. Not only that, but the webslinging scenes are a lot of fun; this time, instead of simply keeping a medium shot on Spider-Man as he swings around, we get close-ups, POVs, slow-mo shots, and any other shot that gives us the feeling that we are swinging around with Spider-Man. And finally, the costume. Yes, the mask does make Spider-Man’s head look like a basketball, but I quite like it. It’s definitely a new take, but it doesn’t stray too far from the original costume (though, I don’t know why the webshooters have muzzle flares on them).

But those good things I mentioned can’t make up for a film that doesn’t have a consistent storyline or too many unique elements about it.

Bottom line: I think this movie is just OK. If you’re looking for a standard superhero film with a few unique aspects in it, this will probably fill your need. Anyone else, I’d say just skip it.