The Amazing Spider-Man – A Second Opinion

By: Too many to list—check out the review, then check out IMDB afterward.

The Story: Boy meets girl.  Girl likes boy.  Boy saves girl from mutant lizard.  Classic.

The Review: I’ve never seen (500) Days of Summer, but believe me when I say I have friends who are so obsessed with that movie that I feel like I’ve seen it—multiple times.  I gather it’s a wistful tale of love found and lost, of a hapless guy trying to win the heart of his dream girl.  Just that tagline alone should explain to some extent the film’s success.  Every decent guy can empathize with the story, and every decent girl has a puppy-dog compassion for it.

In Amazing Spider-Man, director Marc Webb may be capturing the spirit of the film that brought him to mainstream prominence, and certainly the script has shades of (500) Days all over it.  Again, I never even saw the latter film, but the fact that it cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel as the leads already tells me volumes about the quirky, finely-tuned awkwardness that movie must have generated.

Amazing Spider-Man definitely has that in surplus, with dialogue that strives so much for stumbling naturalism that it occasionally gets unnatural.  There’s a scene where Peter Parker finally asks Gwen to go out with him, sort of, maybe, in a way, when his nervous babbling and her well-meaning  attempts to help him through it definitely has this five-minutes-lasting-forever quality you can almost feel his flop sweat from.  And then you have Peter trapeze-swinging between mild-mannered defiance and apologetics as he debates Captain George Stacy about the merits of vigilantism, which goes on so long it almost manages to make a coherent point.

The entire success of this very specific style of dialogue lies in the charm of its two principals, Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone.  I hate to point out how out of touch with pop culture I am, but I had never heard of either before watching this movie, but I imagine they must have been perfectly cast in their roles.  I don’t know too many other young actors who can pull off the script’s oddball humor and tension, and together they make ideal examples of the hipster generation’s vision of the Everyman and the Girl Next Door.

The movie also succeeds in giving Spider-Man an epic scope, something nearly all his heroic peers in Marvel’s movies have in their world-saving adventures, but which escapes our luckless web-slinger trying his best to do good in the big city.  Peter’s joy in discovering his powers speaks to the deep, secret fantasies in all of us, and certainly towards the end of the film, he seems much bigger than himself when the very cogs of New York lend him their support.

Overall, though, the actual Spider-Man portions of the film drag in portions, where CGI and stuntwork sequences stretch out a bit too long, and where the antagonist shows all too clearly his one-dimensional nature.  The problem is at no point in the movie does anyone view Dr. Connors as anything less remarkable; he alone diminishes his own accomplishments by seeing his disability as defining.  So he really doesn’t have much motivation to his actions throughout the movie other than the mere fact that his serum simply turns him into a crazy-pants who wants to turn everyone else into lizards, too.  So no—we’re not talking Dark Knight schemes here.

My biggest complaint with the film has to do with a personal pet peeve of mine: movies which operate on assumption of a sequel.  There are clearly abandoned and unresolved plot threads in the movie: the mysterious disappearance and deaths of Peter’s parents and the search for Uncle Ben’s killer.  Both of these make up major focal points for the better part of the movie, delivering huge emotional drive—and then the costume comes on and a lot of that gets forgotten, never to be even mentioned again, put off for almost assuredly another film in a couple years.

Conclusion: You’ll come away liking Peter Parker a lot, and Spider-Man somewhat less.  The movie adapts emotional highs of the comics very well, but it unfortunately adopts a bit of the shallowness and wandering nature.

Grade: B+

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – Martin Sheen is such an accessible actor (he feels like my grandpa—my Asianness be damned!) that every time he gets shot (e.g. The Departed, The West Wing), my heart sobs a little.