(It's also worth noting that the movies seem to be taking elements from the Miles Morales Ultimate Spider-Man comics, so the changes are arguably rooted in authenticity. Also, from the trailer, I think the supporting cast seem to be working well on their own terms.)
Which just makes me wish they'd gone ahead and used Miles Morales as the MCU Spider-Man, instead of grafting his story onto Peter Parker.
Maybe. I never had a problem with Maguire.
He was fine for what he was. He was just a version of Peter Parker that was changed to be Tobey Maguire-like. Not bad, but different.
My biggest problem with the Raimi/Maguire Spidey is that he almost never engaged in quips and banter as Spider-Man -- just one or two feeble jokes here and there, and otherwise silence. Spider-Man without the nonstop banter is like Thor without a hammer. It just doesn't feel complete.
My main problem with Garfield was in the writing. He came off as brooding and angry; a rebel without a cause. While other version of Peter do angst, it comes across more reflective and/or focused on non-anger-related emotions. Unlike Maguire, he felt nothing like any of the versions of the characters from the comics.
I see it very differently. There's a lot of anger and frustration in Peter/Spidey. You can't really grow up as a bullied nerd without having some pent-up rage and resentment. It's just that he usually directs his anger at himself, at his own failures, or channels it positively into his crimefighting. I agree Garfield's Peter was edgier than usual, but I felt he was closer to the mark than Maguire was, because he was a wiseass. Maybe a bit too much of one, but he still was one.
Although it might've been better if Garfield's Peter had been more subdued as Peter and only let the full wiseass out as Spidey. That's the usual approach -- that being in the mask loosens his inhibitions and lets him be more bold and assertive.
(I think Garfield was a decent casting choice; he's clearly a good actor, gave his best, and the fact that he loved the character came through. Like Emma Stone, he was hobbled with a script that really botched the characters.)
I think ASM2 did a great job with Spidey/Peter as a character, and Stone's Gwen in both movies was a far more effective character than she ever was in the comics. The problem with ASM2 is that it got Peter, Gwen, and May so right and got everything else so wrong.
I've tried reading Dan Slott's stuff. The man does not demonstrate a good understanding of Spider-Man from what I've read of his comics.
Again, I disagree. Just because someone's interpretation doesn't agree with yours, that doesn't mean they "don't understand" the character, just that they understand the character differently than you do.
In other words, the whole point of the story was to prove something we already knew? Sorry, not interested.
Define "we." The audience is not monolithic in its familiarity with the characters or its attitudes toward them. In any fandom, in any audience, there will be multiple conflicting points of view. As I said, in the '90s, a lot of comics readers argued vocally that a Batman who didn't kill was quaint and unbelievable and that the character "needed" to become another Punisher or the like, some overblown, gun-laden vigilante drenched in blood and testosterone.
Knightfall was the Batman writers' and editors' counterargument to that perception. The fact that many in the audience
didn't already know or accept that is why they felt the story needed to be told.
Understanding is not a given. It's something that needs to be worked for and earned. Sometimes people lose track of the real essence of an idea because they take it too much for granted. And so the core messages need to be restated from time to time, the core ideas re-examined. Repeating the exercise helps to maintain the strength of the idea, just as with a muscle or a skill.
(I may be unfairly biased, but the modern Spider-Man comics have torn out everything that I loved about this character and his world, and Slott is responsible for most of those decisions. Since Spider-Man is my all-time favorite superhero, this is an extremely sore subject for me. So, I apologize in advance if I offended anyone.)
I don't know if this is part of what you're talking about, but just to be clear, Slott wasn't responsible for ending Peter and MJ's marriage. That happened while J. Michael Straczynski was still the head writer, and it was mostly Joe Quesada's decision, IIRC. Slott was just one of the team of writers who came on board
after that to restart the series with its new status quo, along with Mark Waid, Marc Guggenheim, Bob Gale, Joe Kelly, and others. Slott didn't become the solo writer until about three years later. And as much as I hated the decision to end the marriage -- and as utterly dreadful as the writing in that story was -- I felt that the subsequent work by those writers in the wake of the change was good enough that it made amends for the awfulness of the change itself. It's like they were the team brought in to rebuild a city after a hurricane wrecked it, and I think they did a good job of that. Yes, it was different from what came before, but it was interesting in its own right.
