The Amazing Spider-Man

Overly Devoted Archivist Uncategorized movies, spider-man, spiderman 3 Comments

Hey, I saw it!

I still prefer the Raimi ones- I LOVE the Raimi ones. But this was pretty good too.

What I liked:
-Gwen! I love Emma Stone and her Gwen was brilliant. And she got to do stuff and be all sciency. (Okay, we didn’t see her do that much sciency stuff, but still.) Please don’t let her die! Although I suspect it’ll end up that way anyway. Poor Gwen is doomed in every continuity.
-Andrew Garfield’s adorable performance
-Making Uncle Ben’s death even more heartwrenching, because if Peter hadn’t gotten angry and stormed off Ben wouldn’t have been out there in the first place. It was doubly Peter’s fault. Poor sod.
-Collllldplay. (Yeah, I like Coldplay. Sue me.)
-asdfghjkl was that Norman at the end? It was! (Wasn’t he lit in a green light? Gotta be him.)

What I didn’t like
-The sidelining of Aunt May. She’s so important in the comics and the original movies, but she was hardly in it! And at the end, where the Lizard’s going ‘You have no father, no mother, no uncle,’ I was so hoping the interrupting gunshot was Aunt May come to rescue her nephew. (That’s what Ultimate-verse May would have done.) But it wasn’t, it was Captain Stacey. Bah.
-On a similar note, (and Batman Begins suffers from this as well) both Peter’s parents were killed that night. Why does it only ever mention his father? Do we really need another father/son story, Hollywood? Why isn’t his mother just as important?

Also:
-If Norman’s dying, why is he spending all his money on funky glowing screens and holograms? IS THAT REALLY NECESSARY.
-Where was Jonah? He needs to be there. It doesn’t feel like a Spider-Man movie without him.
-And HARRY. Give me Harry so I can ship Peter/Harry some more.
-Can we have Karen Gillan as Mary Jane? Oh please oh please oh please.

I still think it’s missing the essential ingredients that made the original movies so great, though. The cheesiness, the crash-pow-comic-book-ness…plus the overriding theme of everyone just being good and pulling together and Spider-Man having help all the time and the villains never being entirely bad. (Except for Venom, I suppose.) I remember on my first day of Film Studies class, when we were asked to talk about our favourite movies, I said of Spider-Man 2, “It feels like it was made just for me,” and that’s a pretty rare thing, something I didn’t get with this movie. Still liked it, though.