The second installment of this prematurely remade franchise.
Most fans will know that while there are Marvel movies made by Marvel themselves (Avengers, Iron Man, Cap America, Thor etc etc), there are also those Marvel movies made by other companies like Sony and Fox featuring Marvel characters. The rights for these characters were sold to Sony & Fox way before there ever was a Marvel movie production house and Sony and Fox are not looking to give up these lucrative characters back to marvel.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is no exception to this. Fox and Sony just seem to make up stories as they go along, doing pretty much whatever they want. The big Marvel logo they paste on their posters and movie intros will lure in a lot of unsuspecting moviegoers expecting the next Avengers tie in.
All that aside, how does the movie fare?
Great visual effects, average storyline.
Peter Parker is still with Gwen, albeit haunted by images of her dead father and the promise he made her father that he would stop seeing Gwen just as he passed away.
Then there Jamie Foxx as Max Dillon, a nerd scientist stereotype. With no friends or social skills, he’s almost invisible to the world until he is saved by non other than Spider-Man himself! He quickly becomes Spider-Mans biggest fan! Until, that is, a freak accident at his work place, Oscorp, turns him into Electro ( totally different from the comic on how he become electro). There also Dane DeHaan as Harry Osborn, son of Norman Osborn, the boss of Oscorp. Harry, as we all know, is the Green Goblin.
And there Peter Parker’s quest to figure out what happened to his parents. There’s way too much going on in this movie
The whole back-story featuring Parker’s parents feels really unnecessary. To be honest, even when the 'parents' story arc is completed there is no real revelation and it left me wondering what the point of even including it in the story was. I really couldn’t care less about what happened to Parker’s parents.
Next we have Electro. Now this is one amazingly stupid character. He goes almost instantly from being Spider-Mans biggest fan to wanting Spider-Man dead. The change in mentality is just too fast to be believable. The Time Square action sequence, which has been paraded around so much in all the trailers, ends very easily and without any real consequence. There never seems to be any real danger or threat to Spidey and there also appears to be no fallout from having some super villain destroy half the city. Life in New York continues as if nothing happened as soon as the scene is over.
The story could easily have ended there; instead Green Goblin is thrown into the mix.
And then there Rhino, not worth mentioning as he’s not even really in the film and serves only to lead into the end credits. My fave character and this what they do to him.
The climax involving Spidey and best friend Harry, left me feeling surprisingly apathetic. It just does not have that feeling of a sad scenw
Some of you will argue that the new Amazing Spider-Man series is more faithful to the original comics. I dont think so. Where’s Mary Jane? Gwen and Mary Jane are supposed to be best friends, though having heard who has been cast as Mary Jane (Shailene Woodley), I glad her scenes were cut out. Rhino is not supposed to be a mechanical beast. Electro was not formed by an accident at Oscorp. Harry’s father was the Green Goblin first – but not in this version. Fine, they got the electronic web-shooter thing right (though it was an omission I was happy with in the Toby Maguire movies) and they nailed Spidey’s more cocky and sarcastic tone, but like everything Sony and Fox do, pretty much everything else has been adjusted & fabricated. Why must all bad things originate from Oscorp? Just seems like strange and lazy writing. And where’s Jonah Jameson??
Director Marc Webb clearly seems more at home when handling the more intimate human elements with the relationship of Gwen and Peter.
The special effects are amazing and Electro definitely looks awesome. Thankfully this movie has some amazing point of view / first person scenes of Spidey swinging through New York City at break neck speeds. These are the scenes that make the viewer wish they could be Spidey which were so lacking in the last movie.
At the end of the day the Spider-Man Toby series is still a better movie than The Amazing Spider-Man 2!
By the way Gwen Stacy die!
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