The first of two reboots in a four-year span, Sony’s The Amazing Spider-Man feels trapped in limbo. On one hand, it remains beholden to existing iconography, so it spends much of its runtime retreading familiar ground. On the other hand, it attempts to craft an origin story that specifically stands apart from Sam Raimi’s trilogy, so it exerts undue effort trying to swerve in the opposite direction. Despite its fluid action, fun dialogue and effective casting, it exists largely in relation to its predecessors, and rarely leaves a mark of its own.
In our continuing look back at Peter Parker on the big screen, we examine why Marc Webb’s 2012 relaunch feels like a mere echo of what came before it, despite being sold as an “untold story.”
Andrew Garfield picks up the baton admirably from Tobey Maguire, but despite his acting chops and his passion for the character — he even showed up to Comic-Con in costume — Garfield finds himself lodged between two warring films. His performance as Peter Parker, alongside Emma Stone as love interest Gwen Stacy, leans towards naturalism and away from the operatic cadence of the previous series, which Maguire and Mary Jane actress Kirsten Dunst embodied with sincerity. However, The Amazing Spider’s Man’s most impactful moments are goofy enough to feel completely in line with Raimi’s films.
For every rambling conversation that feels improvised, there’s a moving, moralistic speech by Aunt May (Sally Field) or Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) right out of an afterschool special. For every realistic depiction of Peter’s super strength and the way it takes him by surprise, there’s a saccharine sequence like blue-collar New Yorkers lining up construction cranes to help Spider-Man swing uptown as he’s illuminated by a spotlight.
The film’s lack of interest in reconciling these approaches isn’t inherently a pitfall, but it ends up painting Peter’s story (and thus, Peter himself) in contradictory colors. Raimi’s formalism and broad emotional scope meant that Maguire’s timid Peter Parker could conform to a distinct type — a stereotypical “nerd,” the way the character had been portrayed for decades in the comics — while the realism of the reboot’s snappy dialogue scenes dislodges Garfield’s version from that recognizable shorthand.
The film’s exploration of how this Peter came to be is distinctly malformed.
Instead, this Peter is a brooding, lanky skateboarder whose appearance conforms to the film’s contemporary Young Adult feel. Like Twilight’s Edward Cullen, Garfield’s messy hair feels intentionally styled, and he deftly captures the character’s internalized angst, which simmers just beneath the surface and injects him with an air of romantic mystery. However, the story beats constantly force Peter back into the same outdated “nerdy” box the film seems determined to escape — to the point that it visually separates him from a pair of bespectacled, high-pitched geeks discussing the logistics of Spider-Man’s webbing. Despite this, he too has niche scientific interests, stammers around pretty girls, and is frequently victimized by a high-school bully.
This clash of types is intriguing, and it opens the door to an arguably more realistic and well-rounded character, but the film’s exploration of how this Peter came to be is distinctly malformed. Maguire, though he played an old-fashioned archetype, was able to craft a Peter Parker whose awkwardness and physical and emotional vulnerabilities stemmed from his unapologetic sincerity, since he belonged to a series with precise tonal objectives. In contrast, Garfield’s Peter is a moody loner, and while The Amazing Spider-Man initially connects this to his past by cutting to flashbacks of his dead parents, this theme is eventually dropped in favour of a more straightforward action saga.
Even before its first images, the film establishes a much darker tone thanks to James Horner’s ominous score, which introduces its opening flashback. As a young child, Peter is abandoned by his parents, Richard and Mary Parker (Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz), and is left with his aunt and uncle for reasons he doesn’t understand. These opening moments set the stage for a story where abandonment is, or rather ought to be, entirely central, but this theme merely hovers in Peter’s orbit, and is promptly discarded once the plot calls for a more familiar hero-versus-villain trajectory.
The question of who Peter is comes up several times in words — an Oscorp secretary asks him if he’s “having trouble finding [himself]” when he searches for a name tag, and Webb’s camera remains fixed on him when a teacher poses the narrative question “Who am I?”— but this ends up being mere lip-service, since little in the film’s drama hints at a Peter Parker who’s in search of himself, despite some of the plot dealing with him pulling on the threads of his parents’ disappearance. The story seems poised to build a character arc around Peter’s paternal woes, between his memories of his father, his new surrogate parent Dr. Connors (Rhys Ifans), and the deaths of both his uncle and Gwen’s father, Captain George Stacy (Denis Leary), but despite introducing these ideas, the film is quick to pivot away from each of them without meaningful resolution.
After Uncle Ben is killed, the newly powered Peter goes on a vigilante spree, which centers Ben’s awkwardly phrased version of the famous “With great power” speech from prior films and comics (“If you could do good things for other people, you had a moral obligation to do those things” doesn’t have the same ring to it, but it does the job). Peter’s actions are further complicated when Captain Stacy — a character introduced nearly an hour into the film — sheds new light on one of the criminals Peter thwarted, around whom the police were secretly building a case. However, rather than Peter wrestling with his vengeful impulses to find Ben’s killer, the way Aunt May forces Maguire’s version to in Spider-Man 3, the film simply throws other plot elements in his path as a distraction, like Connors using his medicine dispersion device to disseminate Lizard gas (ironically, this is the only time the film follows through on any quandary between power and responsibility). This prevents Peter from ever making the active decision to either sideline or continue his revenge mission, and the question of Ben’s killer never comes up again.
Surrogate fathers have always had a large presence in Peter’s stories (in the Raimi films especially). The Amazing Spider-Man gives him a grand total of three, in addition to the actual father by whom he feels abandoned. However, these feelings of abandonment seldom amount to much, since the film introduces several consecutive paternal dilemmas that never meaningfully overlap or inform each other thematically. Once Peter begins tracking down Ben’s killer, he stops searching for answers about his father. Soon enough, both these mysteries are forgotten once his mentor Dr. Connors transforms into the Lizard — an event framed not as another betrayal or abandonment, but as the emergence of a monstrous antagonist with whom Peter must do physical battle.
Each of these stories is engaging in isolation, but it makes the overall film feel episodic and disconnected. George Stacy’s heroic death is arguably a reflection of Uncle Ben’s, and yet another abandonment with which Peter must reckon, but the two characters interact only once before they’re thrust together in the climax. The theme of abandonment almost manifests dramatically when Gwen mentions how she fears for her father’s safety, but her subsequent grief over his demise is reduced to a segment in a montage, and serves only to center Peter’s dilemma over whether or not to pursue her romantically.
Peter promises the dying Captain Stacy that he’ll stay away from Gwen — that is until he zig-zags in the opposite direction and decides to go back on his word.
Peter promises the dying Captain Stacy that he’ll stay away from Gwen to keep her safe, a romantic resolution that appears similar to the first Spider-Man film — that is, until he zig-zags in the opposite direction and decides to go back on his word. The story ends on an awkward beat of Peter and Gwen smiling as they betray the final wish of a mutual paternal figure; for a film where yearning for lost fathers and dealing with their deaths has been the closest thing to a consistent theme, this leaves an especially bitter taste.
In theory, a beat such as this could be employed to harken oncoming tragedy; Spider-Man 2, for instance, ends on Mary Jane’s uncertainty as Peter swings through Manhattan. However, the emotional conclusion to The Amazing Spider-Man lacks any sense of dramatic irony in its visual framing. The film — apart from a few sweeping moments of first-person video game-like action — largely uses shots that are functional and literal, capturing information instead of enhancing underlying themes or emotions through movement the way the Raimi films often did. And so Peter and Gwen’s concluding exchange unfolds at face value. It’s even followed by a triumphant sequence of Peter swinging between buildings, as if to emphasize his broken promise as a heroic victory.
It feels confused in its straightforward sincerity, an outcome of a film that can’t decide what it wants to say, thematically or aesthetically.
Despite its narrative oddities, the strangest thing about The Amazing Spider-Man is its visual fabric. While its heavy shadows and plentiful night-time scenes help separate it from Raimi’s brighter trilogy, the way this texture is applied to Spider-Man himself speaks to the film’s mish-mash tonal approach.
Sequences like the one in which Peter hands a child his mask are meant to center his heroism and kindness, but this Spider-Man is also cockier and more sarcastic than his predecessor, to the point that his banter while catching criminals plays like a predator toying with its victims. These ideas aren’t fundamentally at odds, but the way the character is presented leads to a strange bit of dissonance. His mask, for instance, features eyes made out of reflective material, resulting in an almost sinister appearance during his night-time vigilantism, with a deep black gaze that seems to hide his intentions.
Not only this, but during scenes in which Spider-Man crawls along walls or fights the Lizard in the sewers, cinematographer John Schwartzman’s harsh and directional lighting often leaves his face in shadow. He appears almost monstrous at times, even when he’s fighting other monsters. None of this seems to be intentional, given the quippy dialogue and adventurous music during these scenes, so the result is a conflicted comic book story where even the character’s funniest jabs feel mean, and where the hero subconsciously comes off as a villain or a bully. This would fit perfectly if Spider-Man were presented from the point-of-view of the police, who spend most of the movie hunting him, but it’s applied even when he’s alone and setting up traps to photograph the Lizard, as if this is how he sees himself, even though his actions and conversations all say otherwise.
The film’s approach to Spider-Man’s appearance is contradictory and indistinct, which speaks to the lack of thought put into its creation. In Raimi’s first film, the character decided on his iconic blue-and-red outfit as an echo of Mary Jane’s blue eyes and red hair, while in The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter arrives at this color scheme by accident, when he falls through a rickety ceiling and lands in a wrestling ring where he spots a red and blue Luchador mask on a poster. It’s an oblique reference to the character’s wrestling origins in the comics and in Raimi’s films, though one to which he’s given no actual connection, so his moment of visual inspiration feels meaningless — a problem plaguing several key aspects of the film.
In the original Spider-Man film, Peter’s choice of color scheme was tied directly to the central theme of his feelings for Mary Jane and the ensuing domino effect of his romantic pursuit. In contrast, the central relationship in The Amazing Spider-Man feels hastily tacked on to its fractured tale of fatherhood.
Stone and Garfield share an alluring on-screen chemistry, but Gwen often enters Peter’s story through sheer coincidence; she happens to be nearby when he’s bullied, happens to be an intern where his father worked, and happens to be the only person in the school hallways when the Lizard attacks. She also largely serves to facilitate plot functions (like evacuating Oscorp workers and mixing antidotes) far away from the action rather than being an intrinsic part of it. Unlike Dunst’s Mary Jane, she’s given little interiority, and so her relationship with Peter rarely goes deeper than their flirtatious dynamic.
Both Peter Parker and The Amazing Spider-Man simply go through the motions of a Spider-Man origin, either hitting or subverting familiar beats without ever paving their own path.
The disconnect between the characters is best exemplified by the lack of emotional weight when Gwen learns Peter’s secret on her rooftop, since the film affords her neither any interactions with Spider-Man prior to this, nor any actual point of view on him; Peter’s revelation may as well be the first time she’s heard of the wall-crawler. Similarly, Peter hiding his dual identity from her doesn’t come up in the narrative until the moment he spills the beans (that too with little by way of motivation), as if this revelation was expected of any story featuring Spider-Man instead of it being a meaningful development for these characters and this story in particular.
Rather than romance, the film’s plot initially stems from Peter’s curiosities surrounding his father’s disappearance — a worthwhile departure from previous entries — but it quickly moves on to the death of Uncle Ben, before eventually meandering elsewhere. It’s unable to spin more than one emotional plate at a time, so the character’s appearance and overall story never feel rooted in any lasting or discernible motivation.
In the process, both Peter Parker and The Amazing Spider-Man simply go through the motions of a Spider-Man origin, either hitting or subverting familiar beats without ever paving their own path, or creating their own cinematic identity.
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In our continuing look back at Peter Parker on the big screen, we examine why Marc Webb’s 2012 relaunch feels like a mere echo of what came before it, despite being sold as an “untold story.”
A New Peter Parker
Andrew Garfield picks up the baton admirably from Tobey Maguire, but despite his acting chops and his passion for the character — he even showed up to Comic-Con in costume — Garfield finds himself lodged between two warring films. His performance as Peter Parker, alongside Emma Stone as love interest Gwen Stacy, leans towards naturalism and away from the operatic cadence of the previous series, which Maguire and Mary Jane actress Kirsten Dunst embodied with sincerity. However, The Amazing Spider’s Man’s most impactful moments are goofy enough to feel completely in line with Raimi’s films.
More From The Spidey Saga
- Day 1: Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Choosing Responsibility
- Day 2: Spider-Man 2 and Choosing a Suit
- Day 3: Spider-Man 3 Is Both Better and Messier Than You Remember
- Day 4: The Amazing Spider-Man Goes Through the Origin Story Motions
For every rambling conversation that feels improvised, there’s a moving, moralistic speech by Aunt May (Sally Field) or Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) right out of an afterschool special. For every realistic depiction of Peter’s super strength and the way it takes him by surprise, there’s a saccharine sequence like blue-collar New Yorkers lining up construction cranes to help Spider-Man swing uptown as he’s illuminated by a spotlight.
The film’s lack of interest in reconciling these approaches isn’t inherently a pitfall, but it ends up painting Peter’s story (and thus, Peter himself) in contradictory colors. Raimi’s formalism and broad emotional scope meant that Maguire’s timid Peter Parker could conform to a distinct type — a stereotypical “nerd,” the way the character had been portrayed for decades in the comics — while the realism of the reboot’s snappy dialogue scenes dislodges Garfield’s version from that recognizable shorthand.
The film’s exploration of how this Peter came to be is distinctly malformed.
Instead, this Peter is a brooding, lanky skateboarder whose appearance conforms to the film’s contemporary Young Adult feel. Like Twilight’s Edward Cullen, Garfield’s messy hair feels intentionally styled, and he deftly captures the character’s internalized angst, which simmers just beneath the surface and injects him with an air of romantic mystery. However, the story beats constantly force Peter back into the same outdated “nerdy” box the film seems determined to escape — to the point that it visually separates him from a pair of bespectacled, high-pitched geeks discussing the logistics of Spider-Man’s webbing. Despite this, he too has niche scientific interests, stammers around pretty girls, and is frequently victimized by a high-school bully.
This clash of types is intriguing, and it opens the door to an arguably more realistic and well-rounded character, but the film’s exploration of how this Peter came to be is distinctly malformed. Maguire, though he played an old-fashioned archetype, was able to craft a Peter Parker whose awkwardness and physical and emotional vulnerabilities stemmed from his unapologetic sincerity, since he belonged to a series with precise tonal objectives. In contrast, Garfield’s Peter is a moody loner, and while The Amazing Spider-Man initially connects this to his past by cutting to flashbacks of his dead parents, this theme is eventually dropped in favour of a more straightforward action saga.
A Forgotten Story of Fathers
Even before its first images, the film establishes a much darker tone thanks to James Horner’s ominous score, which introduces its opening flashback. As a young child, Peter is abandoned by his parents, Richard and Mary Parker (Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz), and is left with his aunt and uncle for reasons he doesn’t understand. These opening moments set the stage for a story where abandonment is, or rather ought to be, entirely central, but this theme merely hovers in Peter’s orbit, and is promptly discarded once the plot calls for a more familiar hero-versus-villain trajectory.
The question of who Peter is comes up several times in words — an Oscorp secretary asks him if he’s “having trouble finding [himself]” when he searches for a name tag, and Webb’s camera remains fixed on him when a teacher poses the narrative question “Who am I?”— but this ends up being mere lip-service, since little in the film’s drama hints at a Peter Parker who’s in search of himself, despite some of the plot dealing with him pulling on the threads of his parents’ disappearance. The story seems poised to build a character arc around Peter’s paternal woes, between his memories of his father, his new surrogate parent Dr. Connors (Rhys Ifans), and the deaths of both his uncle and Gwen’s father, Captain George Stacy (Denis Leary), but despite introducing these ideas, the film is quick to pivot away from each of them without meaningful resolution.
After Uncle Ben is killed, the newly powered Peter goes on a vigilante spree, which centers Ben’s awkwardly phrased version of the famous “With great power” speech from prior films and comics (“If you could do good things for other people, you had a moral obligation to do those things” doesn’t have the same ring to it, but it does the job). Peter’s actions are further complicated when Captain Stacy — a character introduced nearly an hour into the film — sheds new light on one of the criminals Peter thwarted, around whom the police were secretly building a case. However, rather than Peter wrestling with his vengeful impulses to find Ben’s killer, the way Aunt May forces Maguire’s version to in Spider-Man 3, the film simply throws other plot elements in his path as a distraction, like Connors using his medicine dispersion device to disseminate Lizard gas (ironically, this is the only time the film follows through on any quandary between power and responsibility). This prevents Peter from ever making the active decision to either sideline or continue his revenge mission, and the question of Ben’s killer never comes up again.
Surrogate fathers have always had a large presence in Peter’s stories (in the Raimi films especially). The Amazing Spider-Man gives him a grand total of three, in addition to the actual father by whom he feels abandoned. However, these feelings of abandonment seldom amount to much, since the film introduces several consecutive paternal dilemmas that never meaningfully overlap or inform each other thematically. Once Peter begins tracking down Ben’s killer, he stops searching for answers about his father. Soon enough, both these mysteries are forgotten once his mentor Dr. Connors transforms into the Lizard — an event framed not as another betrayal or abandonment, but as the emergence of a monstrous antagonist with whom Peter must do physical battle.
Each of these stories is engaging in isolation, but it makes the overall film feel episodic and disconnected. George Stacy’s heroic death is arguably a reflection of Uncle Ben’s, and yet another abandonment with which Peter must reckon, but the two characters interact only once before they’re thrust together in the climax. The theme of abandonment almost manifests dramatically when Gwen mentions how she fears for her father’s safety, but her subsequent grief over his demise is reduced to a segment in a montage, and serves only to center Peter’s dilemma over whether or not to pursue her romantically.
Peter promises the dying Captain Stacy that he’ll stay away from Gwen — that is until he zig-zags in the opposite direction and decides to go back on his word.
Peter promises the dying Captain Stacy that he’ll stay away from Gwen to keep her safe, a romantic resolution that appears similar to the first Spider-Man film — that is, until he zig-zags in the opposite direction and decides to go back on his word. The story ends on an awkward beat of Peter and Gwen smiling as they betray the final wish of a mutual paternal figure; for a film where yearning for lost fathers and dealing with their deaths has been the closest thing to a consistent theme, this leaves an especially bitter taste.
In theory, a beat such as this could be employed to harken oncoming tragedy; Spider-Man 2, for instance, ends on Mary Jane’s uncertainty as Peter swings through Manhattan. However, the emotional conclusion to The Amazing Spider-Man lacks any sense of dramatic irony in its visual framing. The film — apart from a few sweeping moments of first-person video game-like action — largely uses shots that are functional and literal, capturing information instead of enhancing underlying themes or emotions through movement the way the Raimi films often did. And so Peter and Gwen’s concluding exchange unfolds at face value. It’s even followed by a triumphant sequence of Peter swinging between buildings, as if to emphasize his broken promise as a heroic victory.
It feels confused in its straightforward sincerity, an outcome of a film that can’t decide what it wants to say, thematically or aesthetically.
A Strange New Look
Despite its narrative oddities, the strangest thing about The Amazing Spider-Man is its visual fabric. While its heavy shadows and plentiful night-time scenes help separate it from Raimi’s brighter trilogy, the way this texture is applied to Spider-Man himself speaks to the film’s mish-mash tonal approach.
Sequences like the one in which Peter hands a child his mask are meant to center his heroism and kindness, but this Spider-Man is also cockier and more sarcastic than his predecessor, to the point that his banter while catching criminals plays like a predator toying with its victims. These ideas aren’t fundamentally at odds, but the way the character is presented leads to a strange bit of dissonance. His mask, for instance, features eyes made out of reflective material, resulting in an almost sinister appearance during his night-time vigilantism, with a deep black gaze that seems to hide his intentions.
Not only this, but during scenes in which Spider-Man crawls along walls or fights the Lizard in the sewers, cinematographer John Schwartzman’s harsh and directional lighting often leaves his face in shadow. He appears almost monstrous at times, even when he’s fighting other monsters. None of this seems to be intentional, given the quippy dialogue and adventurous music during these scenes, so the result is a conflicted comic book story where even the character’s funniest jabs feel mean, and where the hero subconsciously comes off as a villain or a bully. This would fit perfectly if Spider-Man were presented from the point-of-view of the police, who spend most of the movie hunting him, but it’s applied even when he’s alone and setting up traps to photograph the Lizard, as if this is how he sees himself, even though his actions and conversations all say otherwise.
The film’s approach to Spider-Man’s appearance is contradictory and indistinct, which speaks to the lack of thought put into its creation. In Raimi’s first film, the character decided on his iconic blue-and-red outfit as an echo of Mary Jane’s blue eyes and red hair, while in The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter arrives at this color scheme by accident, when he falls through a rickety ceiling and lands in a wrestling ring where he spots a red and blue Luchador mask on a poster. It’s an oblique reference to the character’s wrestling origins in the comics and in Raimi’s films, though one to which he’s given no actual connection, so his moment of visual inspiration feels meaningless — a problem plaguing several key aspects of the film.
An Empty Romance
In the original Spider-Man film, Peter’s choice of color scheme was tied directly to the central theme of his feelings for Mary Jane and the ensuing domino effect of his romantic pursuit. In contrast, the central relationship in The Amazing Spider-Man feels hastily tacked on to its fractured tale of fatherhood.
Stone and Garfield share an alluring on-screen chemistry, but Gwen often enters Peter’s story through sheer coincidence; she happens to be nearby when he’s bullied, happens to be an intern where his father worked, and happens to be the only person in the school hallways when the Lizard attacks. She also largely serves to facilitate plot functions (like evacuating Oscorp workers and mixing antidotes) far away from the action rather than being an intrinsic part of it. Unlike Dunst’s Mary Jane, she’s given little interiority, and so her relationship with Peter rarely goes deeper than their flirtatious dynamic.
Both Peter Parker and The Amazing Spider-Man simply go through the motions of a Spider-Man origin, either hitting or subverting familiar beats without ever paving their own path.
The disconnect between the characters is best exemplified by the lack of emotional weight when Gwen learns Peter’s secret on her rooftop, since the film affords her neither any interactions with Spider-Man prior to this, nor any actual point of view on him; Peter’s revelation may as well be the first time she’s heard of the wall-crawler. Similarly, Peter hiding his dual identity from her doesn’t come up in the narrative until the moment he spills the beans (that too with little by way of motivation), as if this revelation was expected of any story featuring Spider-Man instead of it being a meaningful development for these characters and this story in particular.
Rather than romance, the film’s plot initially stems from Peter’s curiosities surrounding his father’s disappearance — a worthwhile departure from previous entries — but it quickly moves on to the death of Uncle Ben, before eventually meandering elsewhere. It’s unable to spin more than one emotional plate at a time, so the character’s appearance and overall story never feel rooted in any lasting or discernible motivation.
In the process, both Peter Parker and The Amazing Spider-Man simply go through the motions of a Spider-Man origin, either hitting or subverting familiar beats without ever paving their own path, or creating their own cinematic identity.
Continue reading...