Zephyr's Movie Reviews! #2- The Amazing Spider-Man

Before I tell you my thoughts on this movie, how about a little story? Sit down everyone!

A long long time ago, in the mythical land of Hollywood, there was a director named Sam Raimi. Now, Mr. Raimi was hard at work on his next film, Spider-Man 3. He was doing a wonderful job, he had all the actors from the previous films coming back and he had two villians chosen: Sandman and the New Goblin. However, his producer Avi Arad and the big suits at Sony Pictures wanted a more famous villian than dumb ol' Sandman and a rehashed Goblin, so they pressured Raimi into including Venom. Raimi didn't really like Venom as a character, but he did cast his alter-ego, Eddie Brock, in the film so he relented.

That's how we got the travesty of Spider-man 3. Venom couldn't get enough character development because there were too may villains and we got stuck with "emo" Peter Parker. However, the tale doesn't end there. The film did well enough for Raimi to work on a sequel. this time, he wanted to include the Lizard as the villian, using his alter-ego Curt Conners, who was already established in the two previous movies. As a supporting villian, the Vulture was to be included. However, more meddling from the big wigs at Sony caused more troubles. they wanted to include a completely made up character known as the "Vulturess" to be in the film. Finally, Raimi had enough and stepped away from his Spider-man universe.

And that's how we ended up with this:



A complete reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man does the same old origin story over again, but this time with more Twilightesque romantic scenes! How fun....or not.

Now, the individual parts of the film aren't bad by themselves, but together as a whole they really give off a "bare-bones" kind of vibe to the whole movie. We have to go through the spider bite AGAIN, see Uncle Ben murdered AGAIN, and go through Peter's journey as he finds who he really is meant to be AGAIN. It got really tiresome and predictable.

Andrew Garfield, who plays Peter, obviously enjoyed doing it and the rest of the cast played their roles very well. It's just that the whole tone of this movie seems to be reaching out for a different audience. Peter seems overly gloomy and rebellious, nothing like the adorkable high-schooler in the comics. The romance between Peter and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) plays hugely in this whole film, which seems to me like an attempt to grab at the "Twilight" audience, and it's probably going to work. The film basically slaps you over the head with the teenage romantic angst. It also seems very dark and moody, not something that fits Spider-man at all. It's as if a working title for the movie was "Spider-man Begins"

The villain, the Lizard (which probably has Raimi riled up a bit), is given nothing to do. They completely dropped the misunderstood monster angle they were going for half-way into the movie, just so they could turn him into a lizard Nazi. However, I'm interested to see if this rebooted franchise will take a go at the villains Raimi used in his movies. The Green Goblin is basically a given.

All in all, the movie was....eh. The acting was ok (even if Spidey's jokes were a bit mean-spirited), the musical score was nice, and the visuals superb....but the whole story rehashed again when it was done only 10 years ago makes this film drag.... it's disappointing really....oh well, I'll be watching to see how they do a sequel, because this WILL get a sequel. Whether that is a good thing or not remains a mystery.

J. Jonah Jameson isn't even in this...*grumbles*