Spiderman Review

I originally had no interest in seeing “The Amazing Spiderman”. When I heard about it, my first reaction was, “Really?”. Anothe remake so soon after the previous ones seemed excessive.  It has only been 5 years since “Spiderman 3”, and 10 years since the first one.  That’s not a lot of time.

For comparison, there were 8 years between “Batman and Robin” and “Batman Begins” and 16 years since that series began.  That was kind of pushing the limits of being to close together. But at least “Batman” wasn’t an origin story like “Batman Begins”, so they were different movies.

But, I heard a lot of positive buzz about “The Amazing Spiderman”. People were saying it was better than any of the last ones. I liked the last ones so if this one was better, I thought it might be worth a viewing.

And you know what? It turned out to be exactly what I had originally predicted. It was the same damn movie. Don’t get me wrong, it was pretty good, well done and Andrew Garfield makes a decent Peter Parker.  But it was the same movie as we saw in 2002.

*SPOILER ALERT*

So it starts out with Peter Parker being a loser kid. This was one area it did a little bit better job than 2002 Spiderman in that he wasn’t a complete loser. Just kind of an unpopular kid. The bully was slightly more believable since he wasn’t a completely irredeemable character.

Then Peter gets bit by a spider in an Oscorp lab. Instead of a school field trip, he’s there investigating his parents death. Nice little change that may have more impact in later movies. Also a little bit more believable in that he gets bit when going to an off-limits area instead of a radioactive spider roaming around in the open.

You have your usual training montage where he learns to use his powers. They’ve reverted to the webslingers being mechanical rather than a power. This is a bit iffy. A kid manages to turn this stuff into a wrist mounted launcher? At least he didn’t invent the webbing, just the launcher.

The bad guy was also essentially the same. Misguided scientist performs experiment on himself, turns into a crazy monster. They fight a few times.

The movies were so similar that they even had a fight scene on a bridge and Spiderman has to save some kid(s). This directly leads to the people of New York banding together to help the hero in his hour of need. All very touching, but really, it was just to similar.

One of the few nice additions was Dennis Leary as a cop out to get him, who also happened to be the love interests father. Dennis Leary is always good as a New York civil servant (cop or fireman). This added a nice dynamic. But it also made the ending less sensible.

In “Spiderman”, Peter decides to pretend he doesn’t love Mary Jane because she had been put into danger in that very movie because the Green Goblin figured out who he was. It was a noble sacrifice because he had been in love with her forever. And it was sorta believable because he had never told her his feelings.

In this movie, Gwen’s father makes him promise to leave the girl alone because he might make enemies and put her in danger. Instead of making a sacrifice of his one true love, Peter agreed to a dying man’s, a dying man who had just saved his ass, last request to leave his daughter alone. So he does the douchey thing and just never calls her again.

And then the girl figures it out and just accepts it. No argument. Bleh.

So, overall, not a bad movie, even a pretty good Spiderman movie. It was just the same Spiderman movie we saw 10 years ago with a few small changes.