Andrew Garfield's
Amazing Spider-Man duology.
As a whole, I liked these more than the Raimi films as a whole. I was more engaged by the films, the actors, the cinematography and direction. Andrew Garfield is a compelling performer who demands you watch him and everyone and everything around him. I liked his take on Peter Parker, a broken young man who's bitter about being abandoned by his parents as a child and haunted by the deaths of Uncle Ben and Captain Stacy, who loses himself in the Spider-Man persona to become someone else without all of his baggage. Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy was a fascinating character in her own right, and, even though it's a bit CW-esque, I liked how Peter and Gwen became a bit of a team; Peter's a genius (which is something the Raimi trilogy kept telling us but never bothered to actually show), and Gwen's just a hair smarter and gives him a second set of eyes. There are also nice supporting turns by Sally Field, Denis Leary, and Martin Sheen.
The problem with these films, though, is in the story being told and the premise that underlies that story, namely that Peter Parker is (unintentionally) at the center of a power struggle over the secret research his father was engaged in when he was a child. That's a fascinating idea. It riffs off the old comics chestnut, "Everything you thought you knew is wrong!" I bought it into completely. But I'm not sure it's a Spider-Man story. Heck, the second half of
ASM is a loose adaptation of
Batman Year One! I could see the story working better as a television series -- heck, there's enough cut footage from both films that Marc Webb could do a
Zack Snyder's Justice League with the material -- than as a biennial blockbuster film series.
(A related problem is Sony's desire to build a whole cinematic universe around this, which comes close to overwhelming the second film, though I think the Orci/Kurtzman script with its trademark multiple climaxes is a bigger issue there. See also,
Star Trek Into Darkness which, like
ASM2, ends... and then keeps going.)
The Lizard's scheme in the first film -- "I've turned myself into a monster, so I'm going to turn all of Manhattan into monsters, too!" -- was dumb. And the absence of Rhys Ifans as Connors in Richard Parker's videos in the second film was noticeable, given the lengths the first film went to establish that Connors and Parker had been colleagues. (I thought it was a nice touch that Parker, not Connors, was the brains of the operation; Parker got the cross-species transfer to work, but Connors wasn't smart enough to recreate the work.)
The second film... I'm going to be a bit forgiving of Dane DeHaan's Harry Osborn as his performance reminded me of my best friend, who died fifteen years ago of a brian aneurysm. I wish the film hadn't crammed his introduction, backstory, and transformation into the Goblin into two hours, yet I understand why it was there. (The script is pretty mechanical in how it goes about things.) I wish the film had used the time instead on Max/Electro, who goes from an interesting figure in the first hour of the film to nothing more than muscle/lackey in the last half. There's so much going on in this film that nothing has time to breathe. It worked for me, it paid things off that it set up earlier in the film (Gwen's speech, the Russian terrorists, the little boy with the handmade windmill, which reminded me of the little girl with the glasses in
V for Vendetta), but I can understand why it didn't for most people. Who really wants to see Spider-Man in a conspiracy/business thriller where a major plotline is about who controls Oscorp and its secret facility?
Overall, I feel these films tried to give Peter Parker psychological depth that the Raimi films did not, though perhaps they went too far in the direction of making Peter dark and embittered. I think it's a valid take on the character, though, more interesting than simply continuing Tobey Maguire's characterization (which is what I thought at the time Sony should have done, just recast like a James Bond film and continue), and I would have been interested to see what Garfield would have done with the role in a subsequent film.
I liked these films. I found a genuine emotional core in them, and they were effective for me in that regard. I know that opinion on the Garfield duology is out of the mainstream. And that's okay.
I think they're pretty timeless (though some of the humor in 1 and 3 is cringey) at least 2 still feels innovative and daring for now.
What is "innovative and daring" about
Spider-Man 2?
But I've long accepted the fact that I'm in the minority regarding the Maguire films, or at least the second one at this point. I'm just glad I'm not as alone as I thought I was thanks to people like Allyn.
When Keith DeCandido
reviewed Spider-Man 2 for tor.com three years ago, his review boils down to, basically, "This isn't a good film, and I don't know why it's so revered."
