Or a brief discussion on the intrinsic flaws of Amazing
Spider-Man
Amazing Spider-Man isn’t a bad movie. The broad strokes of
the story can be followed, the character’s motivations are clear enough, and the
actors do a pretty good job bringing the characters to life. There are a few
great moments in the film and some of the departures from Spider-Man dogma they
presented were pretty clever. At no point in
this movie was I infuriated.
Amazing Spider-Man also isn’t a particularly good movie. The
plot overall felt very unoriginal. If you saw Spider-Man, the Sam Rami film,
you pretty much saw a bigger, campier and Spider-Manier film adaptation of
Spider-Man with a similar collection of plot beats. In fact, much of Amazing Spider-Man is an
origin retread so a third of the movie is almost literally the same as Rami's Spider-Man. It also felt very… by the numbers? Things happened because the genre
demands it without a lot of substance or explanation. I’d go so far as to argue
that whole plot threads of the movie rely on our prior knowledge and
expectations to make sense.1 So, while Amazing Spider-Man never made
me go all geek-hulk, it didn’t really illicit any positive emotional reactions
either. I’ve heard the whole Spider-meh joke, and I buy into that.
But there is more to my apathetic reaction to this film than
its kind of lackadaisical take on the character. In my opinion Amazing
Spider-Man is further brought down by two key general problems: it gets the
soul of Spider-Man wrong and it makes ham-fisted attempts to tell instead of
show. My analysis after the cut.
It should be noted that after the cut is going to be
*SPOILER* rich… so go on at your peril.
