The Amazing Spiderman-A Lot of Good Wrapped around a Lot of Dullness
The Amazing Spider-Man has always been a film that I've always found featured a lot of good wrapped around a lot of dullness. The film is well-acted, with each actor giving decent to pretty good performances. The romance between Peter and Gwen works as well as it does solely due to the performances, with Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone having this incredible, firey chemistry. The Spider-Man stuff is excellent, with cinematic, visually striking web-swinging sequences and pretty moving scenes, such as the one on the bridge, showing that the writers have a decent understanding of Spider-Man as a character.
All this is quite great, but they don't mean much to me if the bulk of the plot is as dull as it is. Much of the film is a bland retread of Spider-Man's origin story. Only it isn't very compelling, as the film's portrayal of Peter is that of a conventionally "cool" skater-boy character instead of the shy, overconfident nerd of the comics or the Sam Rami movies. There are moments, such as the scene in the gym with flash, that give glimpses of a more accurate Peter Parker, but in execution, they make Peter feel very unlikable and hard to root for, in my opinion. Some relationship dynamics, such as the father/son dynamic between Peter and Uncle Ben, Peter and Aunt May, and Peter and Captain Stacy, are somewhat compelling. But they don't feel fleshed out enough to make me care about the narrative.
The film also focuses much of its time on a mystery involving Peter's parents, which further dulls the story and forgets a fundamental part of Peter-Parker/Spider-Man as a character. The film eventually reveals that Peter's father actively developed the genetically modified Spiders that gave him his powers and also developed the formula for the web-shooters. The film attempts to do this to set up some mythology, where Peter was destined to be Spider-man, but that forgets the fundamental part of Peter that, in my opinion, makes him such a compelling character: that he was some kid who happened to get powers, who then used his extraordinary powers and intuition to make himself a superhero. There are bits of that, with the montage of him making the suit and web shooters. But, by having his father develop the formula for the web-shooters, it loses a lot of that "Peter making himself a hero from the ground-up" part of that character that I find so compelling about the origin story of Spider-man.
The film also features a pretty uninteresting villain in Curt Conners. His story starts interesting, with Curt Conners attempting to heal himself, and he has a reasonably compelling relationship with Peter. But once he becomes the Lizard, he feels too much like a by-the-numbers Jekyll and Hyde-type villain.
While The Amazing Spider-Man has a lot of good, and I understand why many love the film, I can't sing the same praises when I find so much of the story dull and uninteresting. It's a film with many compelling character dynamics that don't go far enough to make me care about the story. The film also shows an inconsistent understanding of Spider-Man as a character. While the film features singular scenes and sequences that seem in line with the character, it also makes strange choices with its portrayal of Peter and the parts with Peter's parents, which also seem backward and off for the character.
Watched in 35MM. Now Streaming on Disney Plus and Netflix in the U.S.
