Successfully answering the question
"What if Spider-Man was a generic, mid-grade young adult novel?"
I don’t recall if I had any expectations about The Amazing Spider-Man when it was
released. I do recall that whatever interest I may have had in the movie
disappeared once I read Ty Burr’s negative review of it for the Boston Globe.
According to Burr, the film was essentially a lesser rehash of the Sam Raimi-directed/Tobey
Maguire-starring Spider-Man movies with bad dialogue, cruddy special effects,
and a wasted cast. He suspect the movie was probably made so Sony could hold on
to the film rights for Spider-Man. This is supported by how it’s mercenary nature
bled through every aspect of the film. As a consequence of this profoundly
negative review, I gave the movie a skip and didn’t really think about it that
much since then. But, I recently had an opportunity to see it, thought “Why
not?”, and gave it a shot. So what’s my takeaway?
I didn’t hate it as much as Ty Burr did. I also didn’t like
it nearly as much as Roger Ebert, who gave it a surprisingly glowing review
where he praised the film’s action scenes and rather relaxed pacing. Despite
some strong elements and a good cast, I mostly found The Amazing Spider-Man to be...frustrating more than anything else.
For starters, the movie is a reboot (at least technically speaking) of a series
that was only a little over 10 years old at the time. Much of that first half
of the movie spends its time going over material that this movie’s target
audience is likely already familiar with, if only in a general sense. I realize
that the movie wants to be as accessible as possible and not just assume the
audience already knows Spider-Man’s backstory well enough that they can just
skip it or gloss over it. That is, in of itself, not a big problem, especially
since The Amazing Spider-Man wants to
establish a different status quo than the earlier films and, if nothing else,
be its own thing separate from the Raimi-directed movies.
However, this desire to make themselves distinct from the
Raimi movies often ends up backfiring on them. The movie makes several changes
to how Spider-Man’s origin story plays out. Most of them, like how Peter
encounters the spider that gives him his power and how he first reacts to
having powers, are fairly minor, mostly differing in terms of specific details.
The changes they make aren’t bad, per say, but hey do feel a little arbitrary
and unnecessary. Again, it seems like an
attempt to make the film not feel like a complete retread of first Raimi movie,
which is fine. But this is undercut by how some of them pay off. For example,
The way that Peter reacts to getting his powers is played for both for horror
and for comedy, but doesn’t succeed at selling either feeling very well. When
his new powers cause him to stick to bathroom sink and accidentally tip it off
the wall, it works okay, but comes off as more goofy rather than actually
funny. Similarly, when the film shows how painful and weird the changes that
Peter goes through when he first gets his powers are, it ends up being too
brief to have any real impact for the audience. They just end up feeling like
difference made for the sake of being different, without any significant weight
behind them.
And then there are the changes that really don’t work. Such as how Uncle Ben dies and how that affects
Peter’s motivation and his decision to become a superhero. While I’m not a huge
Spider-Man fan personally, I do like him enough that I have opinions about how
what makes him an interesting character and how he should work within a piece
of fiction. And, as far as I’m concerned, Spider-Man has some pretty good
motivation and backstory: being a selfish jerk who only cares about himself got
one of the most important people in his life killed and trying to make up for
that by being a superhero is what drives him. Now, broadly, that is what
happens here, but there’s one big difference that significantly changes the
character of Spider-Man and how the audience view him.
In this film adaptation, Uncle Ben getting killed has nothing whatsoever to do with Peter
being Spider-Man. Which, as far as I’m concerned, completely misses the entire
point of what makes Spider-Man Spider-Man.
In the original comic, and the Raimi movies for that matter,
Peter has already become Spider-Man when he first encounters Ben’s killer and
infamously refuses to stop him for incredibly petty reasons. I like this! It
helps emphasize how Peter isn’t using his power in any particularly special way
outside of getting famous and making money. It’s a blatantly selfish use of his
gifts and when it ends up biting him in the ass and indirectly causing the
death of one of the most important people in his life, it gives his change of
heart and behavior far more weight. In this telling, Peter fails to stop the thief for equally
petty reasons, but it has nothing to do with his powers, being Spider-Man, or
anything even vaguely related to that aspect of his life. Furthermore, he only
becomes Spider-Man and goes after the thief in order to get revenge. I think
that being motivated by guilt and wanting to use his powers for more productive
reasons than “make money” is one of the thing that make Spider-Man an
interesting character. Removing that aspect of the story and failing to replace with anything even slightly as compelling is
a big failing on the movie’s part. It just ends up emphasizing that this film
seems to have been made largely so Sony could keep their film rights and not
because anyone involved particularly cared about Spider-Man and what kind of
stories you can tell with his character.1 In addition to all this, it
also serves to make Spider-Man a less distinctive character in another way.
Tell me: does a hero who becomes a costumed vigilante driven by vengeance
because he witnesses a loved one get murder in front of him sound familiar? It
should. It’s the origin story of Batman, one of the most enduring and
popular superheroes of the 20th and 21st centuries and main character of what
was, for a while, the highest grossing superhero movie ever made. Look, there
are a lot of ways that you can change Spider-Man origin story to make him an
equally, if not more, compelling character than he already is. Turning him into
Batman isn’t one of them.
This leads to another of the film’s issues, which is that
the movie clearly takes a lot of cues from various of movie adaptations of
popular young adult novels. In particular, this means a more melodramatic tone,
a greater focus on the more “teenage” aspects of Peter’s character (i.e.
whenever he fights with his aunt and uncle, his angst over his missing parents,
etc.), and a romance plotline that seems to be given more prominence that it
probably needs given that this is (at least in general) an action movie. Now,
none of this is a problem by itself, as this is a movie about a teenage
superhero and all of those elements can work in a setting like that without any
problem. It might even help the movie, as YA tropes and the concepts could be
used to highlight and strengthen the aspects of Spider-Man and his world that
would already pretty YA-compatible in the first place (again, teenage superhero).
Unfortunately, the YA-derived aspects of the film aren’t particularly well
done. Instead of helping the movie, it just makes it feel like the creators
took a generic young adult-oriented superhero story, changed all the names to
their appropriate Spider-Man equivalents, and didn’t even try to rewrite
anything so it felt more distinctly like a Spider-Man movie. As a consequence,
the movie often feels very generic. Not necessarily bad, but also lacking a
real identify, which ends up significantly hindering the movie. It almost
suggests that the studio came to the rather condescending conclusion that the
primary audience of teenagers and young adults would watch any superhero movie
they put out so long as it resembled other popular movies that appealed to that
age bracket.
Aside from these story issues, there are some weird
structural problems that movie has. For one, the whole movies feels needlessly
drawn out. It spends a lot of time going over Peter’s motivation and backstory.
Apart from one brief action scene that mostly played for comedy, almost an hour
passes before he gets to put on the Spider-Man suit and do anything remotely
resembling, you know, actual Spider-Man behaviour. Swinging around, making dumb
jokes, hassling criminals, etc. Now, this would not be a problem in of
itself...if the movie were about three or four hours long or if this was the
pilot to a longer TV series. As it stands, the movie is only a little over two
hours with credits and spending half the movie going over character beats that
the audience is likely to be already familiar with doesn’t do it any favors.
Worse yet, all this early character-building and plot set up is just...okay to
watch. It feels very workmanlike, competently made without having an
particularly spark or punch to it. It’s not painful to sit through, but it does
feel like time that could have been spent on almost anything else instead.
Another issue is that, ironically, the second half of the
movie feels very rushed.2
Once Peter becomes Spider-Man, it speeds through a how bunch of plot and
character development. This includes setting up and developing the main
villain, exploring Peter’s relationship with Gwen Stacy and her dad, Captain
Stacy, dropping hints about villains and plot lines that are going to pay-off
in future sequels, examining the effect of being Spider-Man on Peter’s
relationship with Aunt May, how the public reacts to Spider-Man, and it just
never ends. It’s like the movie suddenly realized it had spent too much time on
the pre-Spider-Man story and had to go through everything else as quick as it
could so the movie could still clock in at about two hours. This is compounded
by the apparent shift in the genre at the center of the movie, which makes the
film feel unbalanced. As it stands, the movie watches like half of a teen drama
movie and half of an action movie that were badly edited together rather than a
successful blending of the two styles.
Additionally, none of this meshes well with the movie’s
attempt to be a kind of “Spider-Man’s Greatest
Hits Vol. 1,” what with introducing a love interest that knows Peter is
Spider-Man and Captain Stacy dying, as well as doing a surprising amount of
set-up for both future sequels and the now cancelled Secret Six movie that Sony was clearly hoping this series would
lead to. As you might guess, most of this doesn’t work very well due to the
aforementioned pacing issues. The whole things comes off as being just crammed
full of various badly-executed highlights from Spider-Man’s long history as a
comic book character. Case in point: having Captain Stacy die is indeed a
dramatic climax to the movie, and is a famous enough bit from the comics that
you can buy multiple collections that contain that storyline, but
it probably would have worked better if we hadn’t first met him only an hour or
so before he kicks it. Why not save his death for a sequel or at least
introduce the character earlier in the film so his death has actual impact?
Similarly, while Curt Connors/The Lizard’s motivation is explored during the
movie, it feels rather haphazard and thrown together in a way that makes a lot
of what drives the character seem underdeveloped and not terribly compelling as
a result.3
However, I don’t want to give the impression that this movie
is all garbage; if it were that bad, I wouldn’t have bothered writing such a
lengthy review. There are good things about the film which prevent it from
being a complete slog, although they do make it a little frustrating instead.
Most of the cast seem to being doing the best they can with the roles they
have. In particularly, Andrew Garfield does an excellent job as Peter and
Spidey. He really captures the kind of smart-alack energy that helps makes
Spider-Man superheroics so fun to watch and read. Another highlight is Martin
Sheen and Sally Field as Uncle Ben and Aunt May, who make the couple seem real
and believable and give the early scenes of the movie some nice, if perhaps
overly drawn-out, dramatic heft.4
There’s also quite a bit of talent behind the camera as well. In addition to
well regarded director Marc Webb, the movie was co-written by Zodiac writer James Vanderbilt, two-time
Oscar winner Alvin Sargent, and Steve Kloves, best known for writing the
screenplays of the Harry Potter
movies. (Though one does wonder if some of the movie’s flaws may be a product
of a “too many cooks in the kitchen” kind of problem.) Beyond that, most of the
film’s action scenes are very well done and a lot of fun to watch. Unlike so
much of the film, which are often content to present this Spider-Man story in
the most bland and generic terms possible, the fight scenes seems to have been
made by people who wanted to focus what makes Spider-Man unique and choreograph
fights that you could only see in a Spider-Man movie. They never feel strongly
derivative of any of the recent Marvel Studio movies that the film so
desperately wants to be and actually succeed at being their own thing. If you
are a fan of solid action film making, you may want to seek the movie out just
for those sections, which were by far my favorite parts of the entire movie.
Sadly, those highlights aren’t enough to save the film. I
can’t really recommend The Amazing
Spider-Man. In the end, the few things that it does well can’t make up for
the many flaws the movie has. You might seek it out if the actions scenes sound
like your thing or if you’re just interested in seeing adaptations of
well-known stories play out, but there isn’t a lot else to commend. The movie
doesn’t even have the benefit of being part of a popular franchise anymore, as
Sony is rebooting Spider-Man yet again following the relative box-office
failure of The Amazing Spider-Man 2
and the agreement they reached with Marvel Studios to have Spider-Man start
appear in Marvel Cinematic Universe films. The
Amazing Spider-Man simply remains a strange, vestigial stump from a
franchise that tried to build itself up far too quickly and ended up destroying
its own future before it really got off the ground.
1
Ironically, Sony seems to have had the same motivation for making this movie
that Peter had to become Spider-Man in the comics: to make money with little
regard to the consequences.
2
Curiously, this is a problem this movie shares with Fox’s 2015 Fantastic Four movie, an equally
disappointing Marvel adaptation that has many of the exact same issues despite
not having any overlapping creative people.
3 Also: not a big fan of the Lizard’s design here. Aside from looking a
little too much like either Voldemort's green cousin or one of the Koopa’s from
the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, I
miss the reptilian snout that he usually has in the comics and cartoons. It was
a nice design choice there and its presence here may have helped the movie, if
only in a very minor way.
4
That said, their presence does feel like some kind of weird stunt casting,
given the ratio between their own star power and how much they appear in the
film. Plus, Sally Field is basically wasted on what ends up being a pretty
minor role in the overall movie.
