The Spider-Man Retrospective Series - The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

Written In May 2014

Plot Summary Taken From Wikipedia:

A young Peter Parker discovers his father Richard Parker’s study has been burgled. Gathering up hidden documents, Peter’s parents take him to the home of his Aunt May (Sally Field) and Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen), then mysteriously depart.

Years later, a teenaged Peter (Andrew Garfield) attends Midtown Science High School, where he is bullied by Flash Thompson (Chris Zylka) and has caught the eye of the beautiful Gwen Stacy(Emma Stone). At home, Peter finds his father’s papers and learns he worked with fellow scientist Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) at Oscorp. Sneaking into Oscorp, Peter enters a lab where a “biocable” is under development from genetically modified spiders, one of which bites him. On the subway ride home, he discovers that he has developed spider-like abilities.

After studying Richard’s papers, Peter visits the one-armed Connors, reveals he is Richard Parker’s son and gives Connors his father’s “decay rate algorithm”, the missing piece in Connors’ experiments on regenerating limbs. Connors is being pressed by his superior, Dr. Ratha (Irrfan Khan), to devise a cure for the dying (but unseen) head of Oscorp, Norman Osborn. In school, Peter gets into trouble after a basketball challenge with Flash in which Peter accidentally shatters the backboard glass. His uncle changes work shifts to meet with the principal and asks Peter to replace him walking home with Aunt May that night. Peter gets distracted and helps Connors regenerate the limb of a laboratory mouse. Peter’s failure causes an argument with his uncle and he leaves. At a nearby deli, a cashier refuses to let Peter buy a chocolate milk since Peter is two cents short; when a thief suddenly raids the store, Peter indifferently observes. While searching for Peter, Uncle Ben attempts to stop the thief and is killed. The thief escapes as Peter finds Ben on the sidewalk.

Afterward, Peter uses his new abilities to hunt criminals matching the killer’s description. After a fall lands him inside an abandoned gym, a luchador-wrestling poster inspires him to create a mask to hide his identity. He adds a spandex suit and builds mechanical devices to attach to his wrists to shoot a biocable “web”. Peter accepts a dinner invitation from Gwen, where he meets and has a tense conversation with her father, police captain George Stacy (Dennis Leary), over Spider-Man’s motives. After dinner, Peter reveals his identity to Gwen and they kiss.

After seeing success with the mouse using lizardDNA, Ratha demands Connors begin human trials immediately if Osborn is to survive. Connors refuses to rush the drug-testing procedure and put innocent people at risk. Ratha fires Connors and decides to test Connors’ serum at a VA hospital under the guise of a flu shot. In an act of desperation, Connors tries the formula on himself. After passing out, he awakens to find his missing arm has regenerated. Discovering that Ratha is on his way to the VA hospital, Connors, whose skin is turning green and scaly, goes to intercept him. By the time he gets to the Williamsburg Bridge Connors has become a violent hybrid of lizard and man, tossing cars, including Ratha’s, over the side of the bridge. Peter, now calling himself Spider-Man, snatches each falling car with his web-lines.

Spider-Man suspects Connors is Lizard and unsuccessfully confronts the creature in the sewers. Lizard learns Spider-Man’s real identity via the name on an abandoned camera and follows Peter to school where they fight. In response, the police start a manhunt for both Spider-Man and Lizard. The police corner Spider-Man and Captain Stacy discovers that he is really Peter. Lizard plans to make all humans lizard-like by releasing a chemical cloud from Oscorp’s tower, to eliminate the weaknesses he believes plague humanity. Spider-Man confronts and battles the Lizard on the roof of Oscorp Tower and eventually disperses an antidote cloud instead, restoring Connors and earlier victims to normal, but not before Lizard mortally wounds Captain Stacy. Before his death, Captain Stacy makes Peter vow to keep Gwen safe by leaving her out of it. Peter initially does so by avoiding to go to Captain Stacey’s funeral, but later at school suggests to Gwen he may see her again.

In a closing-credits scene, Connors, in a prison cell, speaks with a man in the shadows who asks if Peter knows the truth about his father. Connors replies, “No”, and demands Peter be left alone before the man disappears.

Nothing anyone says or does is gonna make Spider-Man 4 happen. I’ve heard some fans talk about the idea of the two Spider-Men being in a movie together, which I’d love to see happen, but let’s face it folks, It won’t. You know what’s gonna happen when The Amazing Spider-Man 2 makes it’s money back, they’re gonna start pre-production on The Amazing Spider-Man 3. And you know what they’re gonna do if Marc Webb and Andrew Garfield don’t come back for Part 4? They’ll either recast or re-reboot. Unless TASM3 tanks at the box office so much that they have to sell the rights back to Marvel to make a profit on it. But that probably won’t happen because superhero movies are the in thing right now.

And regardless of whether or not we like the fact that we’ll have to see Peter Parker get bit by a different spider every few years, what we can accept is that right now, this reboot ain’t half bad. In fact, it’s pretty good. In fact, I’d say it’s better than Spider-Man 3. Not kind of better, but not a lot better, just… Better. Regardless of the behind the scenes stuff, this movie justifies it’s own existence. The movie looks us fans of the Raimi movies dead in the eye, and says, to quote Rhodey in Iron Man 2, “It’s me, and I’m here, so get over it and move on!”

I think the best way to put it is to actually get into my review, time for the pros and cons.

PROS:

• Andrew Garfield, this guy has said in every interview he’s ever done about Spider-Man that he adores the character, you can see the guy is having an absolute BALL! Playing this character! He brings such joy to the role that you just can’t help but adore every second you see his precious face. His joy is almost infectious, you just smile big whenever you see him as Spider-Man being Spider-Man! It’s energetic performance that even shines through in the more dramatic segments, such as when he and Uncle Ben are getting into it when Ben mentions that his father had personal philosophy about responsibility and Peter asks him where is his father, and even comments if responsibility was so important to him why the hell isn’t he here telling him why it’s important. Why the hell is his father not here. When I go see the sequel on my birthday, I shall not be wearing my “Fuck You Flip-Flops.”
• Emma Stone. Is there anything this girl can’t do? She is just delightful as Gwen, it’s not even that the character on the page is any good, not to discredit the writers, but it is purely Emma’s own energy and charm that makes this character great. I think if someone else had played this character, we may have had less of a rival for Kirsten’s Mary-Jane, and more of a rival to Mary-Sue. Again, not because the character is poorly written, but she’s made to be that sort of “I’m perfect at everything.” Type of character. She’s implied to the top of her class (I say implied because it’s never explicitly said, but she does note that Peter is SECOND in his class and she does have an internship at a major science research corporation and under the tutelage of a well respected scientist who has his own Wikipedia page, while also being one of the most popular and beautiful girls in her school, and is the only woman amazing enough to win the main hero’s affection. But guess what? Emma Stone destroys the very possibility that you could call this character here a Mary-Sue.
• I get the feeling, from the behind the scenes material, that Rhys Ifans was mailing it in as Doctor Conners/The Lizard, but if he truly was, then I’d file Rhys under “Actors Who Can Pull Fantastical Roles Despite Phoning It In!” Other actors I would put in are Alec Guinness as Ben Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy, Alan Rickman in anything, and Anthony Hopkins in the first Thor. He is incredibly likable when he first appears as Dr. Conners, and you even sort of get how incomplete he feels without his other arm. I don’t recall ever knowing an amputee, and I’m certainly not one myself, otherwise typing this would be even more difficult than getting you to actually care about what I think. But, I really get the feeling that this is the kind of guy who can maintain the sheen of a someone who has it all figured out, when in actuality they’re kind of broken and hoping to be fixed. And when he becomes The Lizard, good God is this guy intimidating. I can honestly say that while I don’t think he was as entertaining as Dafoe’s Goblin, sympathetic as Church’s Sandman, intriguing as Molina’s Doc Ock, or even as visually unnerving as Grace’s Venom, he is definitely the most intimidating and physically threatening of Spidey’s cinematic villains. And when he’s just not being the Lizard but still hopped on the serum, he’s a clearly unnerving presence, what with his going on about how pathetic normal humans are and such. And when he gets to finally turn it off after being cured, he seems genuinely appalled by what his actions have wrought. When he helps Peter back onto the building while falling, he takes a very brief moment to go over what just happened, then in horror he realizes he just killed a man. And not only did he kill any man, he killed a police captain who was the father of his best student! And his final scene, in the admittedly underwhelming post credits scene, you really feel his indignation when he tells the man in the shadows to leave Peter the hell alone.
• Dennis Leary as Captain George Stacy. This is fucking perfect casting for a smaller role, I haven’t seen a movie cop this good since… Well… Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon. He makes for a great cop and makes for a great cop dad. Also, I have a police detective for a close family member (my uncle) and Dennis kind of gives me a similar vibe as well. I thought a great highlight of him was his final scene where he tells Peter that he’s a good kid who’s bound to become a great man, but being a great man means making enemies, and having enemies means endangered loved ones, and endangered loved ones means him being with his daughter means he could end getting her killed. And so he tells her, leave her out of this.
• Martin Sheen. You know, I’m pretty sure this is still the only role I’ve seen Martin Sheen in and at the time I heard he was playing uncle Ben I didn’t know of his well known or well respected roles. At that point my only real thought was “The guy who raised the man who always says ‘winning’ is our new Uncle Ben, what could possibly go wrong?” Turns out, nothing went wrong. The guy was fantastic!
• Sally Field is terrific as Aunt May, seeing her here makes really reconsider if I would honestly call Rosemary the definitive May Parker because Goddamn does this woman feel motherly! She could give fucking Katara from Avatar a run for her money!
• Irrfan Khan pops for a little bit in this movie, he doesn’t really do much, but it’s neat to see a well respected Indian actor wear a suit and act like he’s the evil emperor’s messenger. And no, I’m not gonna make a Life of Pi joke because everyone else has already. Yes, it’s funny that Irrfan was in both movies and that the tiger’s name is Richard Parker which also happens to be the same as Peter’s father. I get it.
• I don’t normally bring up Stan Lee’s cameo in these movies but this one was just freaking hilarious! It’s not even great because it’s Stan Lee, although that does add to it, it’s also just so funny because it’s some old guy jamming to his classical music while right behind him are two comic book characters dooking it out.
• Young actor Chris Zylka does a pretty good job in a bit role as Peter’s high school tormentor/good friend, Flash Thompson, he’s done pretty much nothing I want to address due to either insignificance or my genuine distaste for, this guy show’s some real good chops and actually serves to make the character human, where as he’d previously just been relegated to an asshole with bigger muscles than Peter in the original Raimi film.
• Stone and Garfield have such amazing chemistry on screen, it’s really unsurprising when you realize that these two are actually in love in real life. The scene that actually convinced me to see this movie was a clip of Peter sort of babbling to Gwen trying to ask her out of on a date and some Gwen seems to realize what he’s saying and says yes. As she walks away to go about her own business, Peter does a little fist pump and then walks off his own way and does a little skip. It was so adorable.
• I previously said that I think Spider-Man 3 has the best action of the series. I stand corrected, THIS is the best action of the series. The production outright made it a point to rely on the actual actors and stunt guys and much less CG which is some that I greatly appreciate. I haven’t commented on it before, but there were times during the Raimi films where the midair sequences looked something out of the fucking Polar Express! But even then, they do really inventive things with the webbing that previously hadn’t been done in the other movies. Like when Peter outright wraps Conners as the Lizard up into a web like an actual Spider would it’s pray. It’s pretty inventive stuff really.
• James Horner’s score is kind of a mixed bag, there’s parts of it that I think are pretty good, and parts that really aren’t, but I do encourage you to give the theme a listen. It’s not quite as good as Elfman’s theme, but it’s pretty fun to listen to.

CONS:

• How the fuck does no one at Peter’s school talk about the fact that he threw a football so hard that it hit the goal post and actually dented it or the fact that he grabbed the basket on the basketball hoop so hard he broke the actual board!
• Kick. The. Gun! If you see a dangerous looking man trip and drop his weapon, don’t try to take it from him, make it so that he just can’t get to it. Ben, I know you don’t claim to be a smart man, but you’d have to be mentally impaired to actually believe it was a good idea to wrestle for the gun with the guy!
• “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” “But those are the best kind.”
• I know the guy behind the clerk bruised your ego Peter, but are you really so petty as to let the actual store lose money because the guy wouldn’t give you your chocolate milk? You fucking douche.
• The vigilante story arc I don’t get. Peter’s motivator has never been vengeance, it’s always been guilt. When Peter sees this crook’s face and sees that son of a bitch who killed his uncle is the same guy he let get away, he’s supposed to feel like a piece of shit. He’s supposed to realize that him being selfish cost his uncle’s life. Instead, it comes off almost like Peter feels betrayed or something. I helped this guy and then he kills my uncle, what the fuck!?!?

All in all, I’d say this was the start to a great new series. I don’t have many dislikes, and another point that I like, that I hand’t mentioned earlier, is the fact that this is a new director! This is Marc Webb’s second movie ever, before this he’d done a romantic comedy called (500) Days of Summer with JGL and Zooey Deschanel and a bunch of music videos, which are actually some of my favorite videos.

My Chemical Romance’s I’m Not Okay, Helena, Ghost Of You, and Teenagers, Green Day’s 21 Guns, and All American Rejects’ Move Along and Gives You Hell. This guy is a promising talent, and so are Emma and Andrew, if these movies don’t work out ultimately, I really hope that these guys all manage to get work elsewhere.

I’m gonna give The Amazing Spider-Man an 8.1 out of 10.