The Amazing Spider-man
Let me make a blanket request for all scientists current and future: if you have developed a brilliant, one-of-a-kind algorithm that you are 100% sure will be used for evil because all your friends are evil, do me a favor and don’t keep it stashed in an oh-so-secret pocket in your briefcase. Just go ahead and destroy that sucker.
In short, my review is: I…do not know why this movie was made. The Amazing Spider-man is okay, but you know, it’s really only been a decade since the first movie in the Tobey Macguire Spider-Man series (and only five years since the third movie in that series), and from what I can tell, the story of Peter Parker does not justify a reboot if nothing drastic is being changed. A nerd gets bitten by a magical spider and then fights crime.
The writing on this film leaves a lot to be desired. Now, I am no scientist, but I have not seen pseudo-science this bad since Avatar’s hysterical “Unobtainium” or even The Fantastic Four’s mysterious radiation cloud that instead of giving everybody cancer just gives them separate useful mutations. But in The Amazing Spider-man, literally every bad science cliché that could be used was milked to death. I’m willing to overlook a few elements that require me to suspend my disbelief, but when those elements are coming about once every four minutes, we move from the point at which I’m able to overlook things to the point at which I’m eagerly looking out for them so that I can giggle inappropriately, then lose control completely and start guffawing in the middle of the theater.
The acting is actually pretty good here, but take that with a grain of salt because I’m an Andrew Garfield and Rhys Ifans fan. Garfield plays Parker as a twitchy guy traumatized by the disappearance of his parents and then determined to act like a secretive teenage drug addict. Ifans plays Dr. Curt Connors, a scientist with a missing arm who is not good at saying, “Let’s wait for proper medical trials before injecting ourselves with crazy drugs.”
At least Ifans’ character wasn’t demonized completely. The first line he said was something like, “I’m not a cripple, I’m a scientist,” which seemed promising. As the only character in the cast with any kind of disability, I was curious to see how he would be portrayed-and then of course he ended up being the villain and turned into a part-time rage lizard. Why? Because lizards can regenerate their limbs, and guess what Connors is very interested in doing.
I recall X-Men: The Last Stand (the third X-Men film) as dealing with a similar subject much more clearly and poignantly in the character of Dr. Hank McCoy (Beast), played intelligently by Kelsey Grammer. McCoy is an openly mutant politician who has been fighting for mutant rights for years. When the child with “the cure” was found, McCoy goes to visit him and puts his hand near the child-and all that blue fur disappears, leaving McCoy’s hand looking as it would have if he were not a mutant. McCoy, staring at his hand for a few moments, is visibly moved. And then he withdraws his hand because he’s made his decision to live as a mutant: this is who he is now. And he doesn’t look back.
Ifans’ Connors, however, seems to have dedicated his life towards looking for cross-species cures for human impairments-for a way to cure his arm (and we never do find out how he lost his hand or if he was just born that way). All well and good; it’s good that scientists are looking for ways to help humans who have lost limbs, but I’m thinking maybe some counseling on how to deal with his lost arm and make the rest of his life a happy one would have been healthier for him. It’s disappointing that the only character portrayed with a disability was fixated on finding ways to get rid of it, fantasizing about his life with a new arm. And when he finally does get his wish, he’s immediately punished horribly for it by turning into a lizard thing.
The portrayal of persons of color and women isn’t very inspired, either. The only non-white person in the entire cast is an evil advocate of bad science who wants to shut down the only researcher in the company making progress because he isn’t making progress quickly enough. Sounds like a great business plan to me. There are three women. Two of them exist entirely to prepare food, it seems (as bookshop noted, Sally Field’s Aunt May’s entire performance took place either in the kitchen or within view of the kitchen, and most of her dialogue was about food…yeah), and Gwen’s mother is more like a fish-obsessed chef than a character.
I had high hopes for Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy, but alas. She is pretty brave doing some ridiculous science in one scene but has no arc and very little agency. In what is probably her longest chunk of dialogue, she tells her dad she doesn’t want hot chocolate because it’s fattening and, oh, she’s also on her period. *facepalm* And the most significant things other characters say about her are that she’s pretty (this is said twice for no reason) and that she needs to be protected. Also, her dad derails her dating life by telling her boyfriend they can’t date anymore because it’s too dangerous for her. This leaves her alone, confused, and bereft when she needs a friend most. Because, boyfriends, if your girlfriend’s dad asks you not to date her, you should immediately dump her with no explanation to her whatsoever. That’s the chivalrous thing to do.
There were lots of things I enjoyed about this movie. The acting was quite good, as I said; they worked with the material that they were given. Some of the imagery was absolutely gorgeous, like the scene where Peter sits in the middle of a spider-web playing the Bubble Shooter game on his cellphone. Also, seeing him unintentionally smash things with his newfound strength and sticky fingers was genuinely funny. But with writing this silly and frankly lazy, boring, and predictable, and characterizations that were this inconsistent, it’s very hard for me to connect to those crescendo-ing music hero moments and to understand why this franchise warranted a reboot.
In short, my review is: I…do not know why this movie was made. The Amazing Spider-man is okay, but you know, it’s really only been a decade since the first movie in the Tobey Macguire Spider-Man series (and only five years since the third movie in that series), and from what I can tell, the story of Peter Parker does not justify a reboot if nothing drastic is being changed. A nerd gets bitten by a magical spider and then fights crime.
The writing on this film leaves a lot to be desired. Now, I am no scientist, but I have not seen pseudo-science this bad since Avatar’s hysterical “Unobtainium” or even The Fantastic Four’s mysterious radiation cloud that instead of giving everybody cancer just gives them separate useful mutations. But in The Amazing Spider-man, literally every bad science cliché that could be used was milked to death. I’m willing to overlook a few elements that require me to suspend my disbelief, but when those elements are coming about once every four minutes, we move from the point at which I’m able to overlook things to the point at which I’m eagerly looking out for them so that I can giggle inappropriately, then lose control completely and start guffawing in the middle of the theater.
The acting is actually pretty good here, but take that with a grain of salt because I’m an Andrew Garfield and Rhys Ifans fan. Garfield plays Parker as a twitchy guy traumatized by the disappearance of his parents and then determined to act like a secretive teenage drug addict. Ifans plays Dr. Curt Connors, a scientist with a missing arm who is not good at saying, “Let’s wait for proper medical trials before injecting ourselves with crazy drugs.”
At least Ifans’ character wasn’t demonized completely. The first line he said was something like, “I’m not a cripple, I’m a scientist,” which seemed promising. As the only character in the cast with any kind of disability, I was curious to see how he would be portrayed-and then of course he ended up being the villain and turned into a part-time rage lizard. Why? Because lizards can regenerate their limbs, and guess what Connors is very interested in doing.
I recall X-Men: The Last Stand (the third X-Men film) as dealing with a similar subject much more clearly and poignantly in the character of Dr. Hank McCoy (Beast), played intelligently by Kelsey Grammer. McCoy is an openly mutant politician who has been fighting for mutant rights for years. When the child with “the cure” was found, McCoy goes to visit him and puts his hand near the child-and all that blue fur disappears, leaving McCoy’s hand looking as it would have if he were not a mutant. McCoy, staring at his hand for a few moments, is visibly moved. And then he withdraws his hand because he’s made his decision to live as a mutant: this is who he is now. And he doesn’t look back.
Ifans’ Connors, however, seems to have dedicated his life towards looking for cross-species cures for human impairments-for a way to cure his arm (and we never do find out how he lost his hand or if he was just born that way). All well and good; it’s good that scientists are looking for ways to help humans who have lost limbs, but I’m thinking maybe some counseling on how to deal with his lost arm and make the rest of his life a happy one would have been healthier for him. It’s disappointing that the only character portrayed with a disability was fixated on finding ways to get rid of it, fantasizing about his life with a new arm. And when he finally does get his wish, he’s immediately punished horribly for it by turning into a lizard thing.
The portrayal of persons of color and women isn’t very inspired, either. The only non-white person in the entire cast is an evil advocate of bad science who wants to shut down the only researcher in the company making progress because he isn’t making progress quickly enough. Sounds like a great business plan to me. There are three women. Two of them exist entirely to prepare food, it seems (as bookshop noted, Sally Field’s Aunt May’s entire performance took place either in the kitchen or within view of the kitchen, and most of her dialogue was about food…yeah), and Gwen’s mother is more like a fish-obsessed chef than a character.
I had high hopes for Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy, but alas. She is pretty brave doing some ridiculous science in one scene but has no arc and very little agency. In what is probably her longest chunk of dialogue, she tells her dad she doesn’t want hot chocolate because it’s fattening and, oh, she’s also on her period. *facepalm* And the most significant things other characters say about her are that she’s pretty (this is said twice for no reason) and that she needs to be protected. Also, her dad derails her dating life by telling her boyfriend they can’t date anymore because it’s too dangerous for her. This leaves her alone, confused, and bereft when she needs a friend most. Because, boyfriends, if your girlfriend’s dad asks you not to date her, you should immediately dump her with no explanation to her whatsoever. That’s the chivalrous thing to do.
There were lots of things I enjoyed about this movie. The acting was quite good, as I said; they worked with the material that they were given. Some of the imagery was absolutely gorgeous, like the scene where Peter sits in the middle of a spider-web playing the Bubble Shooter game on his cellphone. Also, seeing him unintentionally smash things with his newfound strength and sticky fingers was genuinely funny. But with writing this silly and frankly lazy, boring, and predictable, and characterizations that were this inconsistent, it’s very hard for me to connect to those crescendo-ing music hero moments and to understand why this franchise warranted a reboot.