Sony and Marc Webb's Attempt to Recreate Perfection Swings and Misses.

Rating: 3/10 (1 June 2016)

When dealing with comic book characters, you know studios can't let a good thing die. Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man film is one of the greatest comic book adaptations ever made. Not only did it have groundbreaking special effects and action, but it had a perfect cast, a mature love story, and themes of growing up and becoming the man you will be for the rest of your life. It was a definitive take on the character. Yet, here we are with The Amazing Spider-Man. Just five years after Raimi finished his Spider-Man trilogy, this origin reboot was commissioned by Sony; and for what purpose? Marc Webb's Spider-Man brings nothing new to the table, instead opting to try its hand at its own version of Spider-Man's origin. You know what they say about trying to recreate perfection.
The Amazing Spider-Man is nothing more than a remake of Raimi's first movie. Sure, We get a half-baked romance between Peter and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), and a fully uncooked subplot about Peter's dead parents, but those plot threads are window dressing at best. It's another origin. The difference? This one sucks. In an effort to appeal to the nerds who equate comic book faithfulness to quality, some details are tweaked. For instance, Spidey uses mechanical web shooters instead of Raimi's more dramatically potent natural version (which worked as a symbol for bodily changes during puberty), because the comics are always right, right? In the end, these superfluous changes mean nothing. This is the 2002 film, just way worse.
The villain this time is The Lizard, one of my favorite spidey rogues. It's nice that he's in the movie, but he's completely wasted. Rhys Ifans plays a boring British scientist, who might as well be a parody of boring British scientists. He brings nothing of the warmth that Dylan Baker brought to the role in what was basically an extended cameo over 2 films, and as a special effect, The Lizard is even worse. The design is ugly (Webb went for a lizard/human hybrid look that would be more at home in the tie-in video game than the actual film), and the CGI is rudimentary. By 2012, I thought I had seen the last of that herky-jerky 90s era computer animation. I was wrong.
The problem with all the revisited plot points is that every single one of them has been done infinitely better ten years prior. Compare any scene to Raimi's version, and it's unmistakable, one is a work of giddy passion and the other is a contract. Forget the clearly inferior compositions, set design, cinematography, and casting. At some point, you have to step back from all the little details and realize, this is barely even a film compared to the original. It feels like a TV pilot for a direct-to-Netflix Spider-Man show. How can a film with such a big budget end up so cheap?
There is a fundamental problem with The Amazing Spider-Man. The handling of Andrew Garfield's Peter Parker is all wrong. There is something non-negotiable about the character of Peter Parker, something essential to his personality. He has to be uncool. Tobey Maguire brought to the role a sweet, boyish naiveté. Garfield's version is a sulky male-model. He skateboards, talks to girls, and rejects authority. You can't make Peter Parker edgy and hip. It goes completely against what the character is all about. He can't be "cool". Andrew Garfield is way off the mark with his performance, and he is not alone. His counterpart, Emma Stone, is equally repulsive to me, but that might have more to do with my general disdain for Stone as an actress. She's too gruff and crude for my liking. Unfortunately, the movie lives and dies by your connection between these two characters. I found them grating to an extreme. They're nails on the chalkboard whenever they're on screen.
There is action in The Amazing Spider-Man, but even it is no saving grace for the film. Director Marc Webb, another example of certain studios' inexplicable pattern of hiring quirky indie directors to helm big-budget action blockbusters, is apparently lost when it comes to envisioning or generating any kind of exciting sequence. The set-pieces are lame. I've seen all the rooftop fights and high-tech labs a person can see. If you're going to hang your hat on these set-pieces, you need to be a special kind of filmmaker. Raimi is, Webb is not. He handles the camera with nothing of Raimi's slick confidence. His action is diverting, but it is devoid of any style, any dynamism, any life. To make matters worse, almost all the action in the film is set at night, and its all smothered in this murky, dim sheen. The muted, gray, "realistic" cinematography represents The Amazing Spider-Man's head-scratching desire to be gritty (a Hollywood word meaning devoid of color, style, or individual artistic license), and it does nothing but hurt the film.
The Amazing Spider-Man was made to ensure that Sony could keep the rights to Spider-Man and it shows. There's no shaking the feeling of cold studio contract fulfillment that infects the film. Marc Webb was hired to get the script on screen and nothing more. The final product checks all the boxes Sony thought pertinent to check, but collectively, it is useless. There is no individuality, no heart, no soul, nothing to The Amazing Spider-Man. It might look nice here or there, and some of the effects are impressive, but The Amazing Spider-Man is an empty experience. It's a forgettable origin story, rendered downright antagonizing by a pair of extremely unlikable leads. Sony and Marc Webb set out to re-envision Spider-Man for a new generation. Newsflash, perfection doesn't need re-envisioning. The Amazing Spider-Man is one big mistake. I hoped Sony and Marc Webb could at least take Spider-Man in a fun, new direction. What they did was a cobble together a disposable imitation of Sam Raimi's game-changing original.
33/100