Friday, July 06, 2012

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)



I'll go straight to the point... I didn't like The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)!
 It add absolutely nothing new to the old installment, regardless of the minor changes they made.

Sam Raimi's version of "Spidey", which cast Tobey Maguire in the leading role was not a perfect Spider-Man, but was at least in a very good level... until the third one came along and all his good work was in a word: flushed! It made Peter Parker look like an idiot and it gave people only ludicrous scenes to remember. 

Nonetheless, despite the wrong turn that Raimi and his team gave to this franchise, it didn't justify to refresh the series by making a reboot. The studios and others involved, made it seem like there was no salvage to the previous one, but everyone knows they were just looking to make more money. Let's not forget that Spider-Man was one of the most profitable movies of all time... Do you see what I'm aiming at?

But although doing it for the wrong reasons, I couldn't deny I was looking forward to see it. And even if I had any mixed feelings, those quickly disappeared after the first reviews came out, while the iMDB score just kept improving. The feedback was so good, it gave me no choice but to watch it.

And why shouldn't I?

Marc Webb, the director, did a really good job on his debut with (500) Days of Summer (2009), the cast lead by Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone was top notch and the storyline seemed to add a few corrections to the original feature plus having a twists and turns that would spice things up a little bit.

Unfortunately, I knew minutes after the movie started that I wasn't going to enjoy it... Dialogues were boring, most of the humor either was dry and just really forced... Most of it seemed cheesy. Now and then something would come up to try and balance my level of satisfaction. How Peter Parker came to use his webs was an adjustment more faithful to the comic books and really enjoyed having Gwen Stacey - Peter's first crush - involved in the storyline, however, Uncle Ben's death, how he came to be bitten by the radioactive spider and the scenes leading up to that, how he came up with his costume idea among many other things, just felt wrong. Like this was a frustrated attempt of making this one so much different than the original. But guess what... even with those changes, it still felt the same, except with a worse villain - one for whom I felt no sympathy for what he could bring - and over the top acting. I really do like Andrew Garfield, but sometimes he would try to make things so overly dramatic, it just made me want to laugh.
Oh... and does Emma Stone playing a 17 year old girl, seem wrong to you? We have all seen before older actors portray younger characters, but even with her good performance, it feel like she didn't suit the role.

The only thing I would say was very (very) positive about this film were the action sequences, but keep in mind, this movie came out 10 years after Raimi's take on "your friendly neighborhood".

This movie may be called The Amazing Spider-Man, but in my modest opinion... it's far from being amazing!

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