On Monday, March 17, Sony Pictures previewed 33 minutes of The Amazing Spider-Man 2. It’s safe to say that whether you loved The Amazing Spider-Man or hated it, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is one of the most anticipated movies of the year. Either you want more of the same or you’re hoping the ship will right itself, since it has a lot of sailing left to do. Sony Pictures is already hard at work on The Amazing Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 4 and two spin-offs called The Sinister Six and Venom, so there is a lot of vested interest on all sides to prove that this franchise has legs. (Insert joke about “eight legs” here.)
So they have been particularly open about previewing clips of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to the public to build buzz and accumulate good will, and now they’ve screened the aforementioned 33 minutes of footage to the press in the hopes that we will either continue to heap enthusiasm onto the newly rebooted franchise or, if they are like me, begin to begrudgingly admit that we were wrong about the first movie all along.
I didn’t like The Amazing Spider-Man. Let’s get that out of the way right now. I’m not going to engage in hyperbole about it, the film just doesn’t work for me. Marc Webb’s reboot of the Spider-Man franchise wasn’t a complete wash – the cast was spot-on, if nothing else – but after watching it five times now (yes, five; and no, not because I secretly like it) I am still disappointed at the way it transforms Spider-Man into a generic revenge-driven do-gooder and the exact kind of confident, socially savvy teenager that gave the original Peter Parker an inferiority complex in the first place.
Factor in a story that completely downplays Uncle Ben’s demise and a “grim ‘n’ gritty” aesthetic that probably would feel passé for Batman nowadays and you have a film that may have entertained many, but sure didn’t feel like Spider-Man to me. And since the whole point was to make a movie about Spider-Man, that struck me as a pretty glaring flaw.
But I want a good Spider-Man movie. Heck, I want a great one, so I sat in the theater with my hopes held high that perhaps director Marc Webb had listened to my criticisms or perhaps even stuck to his own guns, committed to his own cinematic interpretation and finally started winning me over with his new take on my favorite hero, on and off the screen.
The following synopsis will contain SPOILERS, but if Sony were particularly worried about these spoilers they probably wouldn’t have shown this footage to members of the press and then asked them to write about it. If you would care to read my specific reactions to this preview footage, you may skip ahead to the analysis afterwards, but be aware that in order to explain my feelings there will be some spoilers there as well.
After the analysis are some highlights from the post-screening Q&A with director Marc Webb, who explains some of the creative decisions behind The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Electro, Norman Osborn, The Daily Bugle and whether we will ever see a Spider-Woman movie at some point.
If you plan to cut and run now, suffice it to say the following: there will apparently be much to enjoy about The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The action has been kicked up several notches, the aesthetic feels bright and heroic and overall I hope the film lives up to its promises. But if you, like me, had problems with the Marc Webb’s reinterpretation of Spider-Man the first time around, then be warned: those problems are still apparently here, and in full force.
Synopsis (Spoilers):
The preview footage of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 begins with Richard Parker (Campbell Scott) deleting his research from OsCorp’s computers and killing a batch of genetically engineered super-spiders. OsCorp is onto him, so he flees the building and returns home to make a farewell video that vaguely – very vaguely – explains his actions. The video is interrupted when young Peter calls his father into his office, which fans of The Amazing Spider-Man will remember was vandalized at the start of the movie. Fans will also remember that Peter discovered the vandalized office while playing hide and seek with his father, who we now discover in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 apparently took the opportunity to sneak into the basement and get some work done.
Richard and his wife Mary (Embeth Davitz) leave Peter with his Aunt and Uncle and board a private plane where they speak vaguely – always vaguely – about why they left Peter behind to become fugitives, as they upload a computer program to someone (or something) called “Roosevelt.” A flight attendant exits the cockpit and makes nice for a moment before Richard sees him washing blood off of his hands. Richard and Mary begin to fight for their lives against a gun-toting assailant as the airplane plummets through the sky, always prioritizing the upload of those important files over their own personal safety. The feels like it was lifted right out of a Mission: Impossible screenplay, at least until the tragic, inevitable conclusion.
Cut to Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) free falling into New York with a happy “wahoo” en route to a car chase. Aleksei Sytsevich (Paul Giamatti) and a gang of thugs have stolen an armored car filled with sensitive explosive MacGuffins and are pummeling through the streets. Spider-Man intercepts them and engages in playful banter with Sytsevich but is forced to take a phone call mid-car chase from Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), who is wondering why Peter is running late to their graduation.
The rest of the car chase plays under Gwen Stacy’s valedictorian speech: she’s chosen a surprisingly somber topic about living as if she will never die. Meanwhile, Spider-Man juggles explosive isotopes, saves the Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx) and pantses the bad guy before finally making it to graduation right as his name is called. Stan Lee, in his obligatory cameo, sees Peter take off his Spider-Man mask as says, “I know that guy!”
The preview footage then jumps ahead. Marc Webb says at this point in the movie Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy have not seen each other for a year. They meet in public, make jokes about staying friends despite their mutual attraction, and Peter reveals that he’s been following her around every day as Spider-Man, which Gwen Stacy clearly thinks is romantic. She has bad news to break to Peter: she may be moving away. But before Peter can properly respond, his spider-sense tingles, and he springs to action in Times Square, where Max Dillon – now a blue, glowing Electro – has begun to make a scene by sucking up the electricity from under the sidewalk.
The police are trigger-happy but Spider-Man swings in to act as a negotiator. Max remembers their first encounter well, but Spider-Man’s memory is hazy (although to his credit, he remembers everything except Max’s name). Max knows he has been transformed into a monster, but has begun to enjoy finally being noticed by the world around him. When the cameras in Times Square begin to focus on Spider-Man instead, Electro’s inner monologue – tied directly into the pulsing score – turns on him with paranoid fantasies. Electro lashes out against Spider-Man and the police, who took an ill-advised potshot, breaking Spider-Man’s web shooter and forcing him to save civilians without his usual arsenal.
The final piece of footage comes from what would appear to be the third act. Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan), looking a little scaly, breaks into Max Dillon’s holding cell to strike a bargain. Harry needs Electro to help him break into OsCorp, which he no longer has access to (for reasons unknown but clearly a part of an earlier plot point). Security guards convene on their location while Harry desperately tries to convince Max to help him, finally playing to Max’s psychological scars by saying that for the first time, someone needs him. As the guards subdue Harry, Max reveals a heretofore-unknown electrical power that rescues his new friend, setting the stage for the big climax.
Analysis:
If nothing else, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 looks right. The colors have been pumped up to pleasingly eye-popping levels, Spider-Man’s costume once again looks like its classic self, and the editing – though a little rapid for my taste – does a fine job of keeping the action clear while making every action sequence feel like it takes place in a larger environment. Intercutting between various gags and reactions from the crowds leaves this footage from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 feeling bigger and more capital-f “Fun” than its predecessor.
In his cocky persona as Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield is having a grand old time whipping out mostly amusing one-liners and playing to the unusual physicality of the acrobatic hero. Whereas his jokes to the car thief in The Amazing Spider-Man bordered on mean-spirited, in this footage he hovers engagingly around playful condescension.
We see much less of Peter Parker in this footage, however, than we do his alter ego. His chemistry with Gwen Stacy is as effortlessly charismatic as usual (which may or may not be a problem, depending on your interpretation), although the film’s decision to let him off the hook for stalking her is off-putting, even a little creepy.
Peter has one brief hallucination of Captain Stacy (Denis Leary) during the opening car chase, proving that his guilt is alive and thriving, although no mention is made of Uncle Ben, which was part of the problem with the previous film. The death of Uncle Ben was diminished in the previous film; it was used not as Spider-Man’s singular motivation but as an excuse to reappropriate Ben’s philosophy – “With great power comes great responsibility” – to Peter’s birth father, and then send him on a vigilante mission until he forgets all about it and becomes motivated instead by Capt. Stacy’s death. Although it’s possible that Uncle Ben gets more credit in the rest of the film, in this footage he once again draws the short straw in The Amazing Spider-Man’s mythology.
As for Peter’s parents, that one bizarre continuity gaffe (or flat out plot hole) from the previous film aside, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 perhaps deserves credit for resolving their whereabouts but loses points – at least until we see the entire film in context – for transforming them into badass super spies in an action sequence straight out of the opening of Cliffhanger (or the end of The Transporter 2). The whole overblown fight seems to be a multi-million dollar distraction from the fact that the scene only offers one new piece of information: that there is one new piece of information out there for Spider-Man to find.
We don’t see nearly enough of Harry Osborn in this footage to make much of an impression, but Electro seems to have been constructed in the classic mold: a Universal Horror monster, aware of his freakishness, undermined by neurosis and only turning to evil out of fear and a newly inflated ego. Jamie Foxx does a fine job of conveying Max Dillon’s vulnerability even as he achieves godhood, and his cruel inner monologue – tied directly into an almost horror-movie soundtrack – injects motivation where it might not otherwise have been clear.
The Q&A with Marc Webb:
“We’re developing the Daily Bugle. Obviously you’re going to get a little hint of Norman Osborn in this film, [and] The Daily Bugle is part of it,” Marc Webb says, when asked which classic Spider-Man elements would begin to appear in the sequel. “The Daily Bugle is an emerging force to be reckoned with. That’s one of the fun things about delving into a universe like this. You can take more time with these things, and we really did think about this in a longer format. So things like The Daily Bugle and the Norman Osborn story, we’ve been very selective about how to tease that out.”
“One of the iconic parts of the character that we chose to embrace even in the first movie, in that scene in the parking lot, but something fundamental about Spider-Man as you guys know is his wit and his quips,” Marc Webb adds about the comedy. “But it’s also part of his character. It’s how he provokes villains in particular, it’s how he puts them on their heels. I think with Rhino it’s particularly convenient because he’s such a dumb villain that he can provoke him that way. We always try to think about it that way in the nature of the scene and the nature of the character, that’s where the comedy emerges.”
“We did something that sometimes big comedy movies do, which is you get a roundtable of comedians and you just have them spit jokes out. We would use that and try them out with Andrew [Garfield] and see what works. At the beginning of the process we got some of the best comedians – it’s sort of a private thing, we can’t really tell who’s in it, but it’s amazing, really brilliant comedians, many of them are comic book fans – come and help us with jokes and one-liners and quips that are part of Spider-Man’s universe.”
When asked (by me) about the decision to have graduate Peter and Gwen from high school, when the apparent raison d’être of the reboot was to keep the characters younger, Webb says, “Listen, our actors, they’re getting a little bit older, and to play around with that for too long would get to be absurd. We’re also trying to find stations in life, important moments for them to emerge from, and we did spend the whole first movie in high school. It’s not that much further in their future, but to be honest there’s a thematic resonance with people with graduation that felt very potent for us. The graduation speech was a way to introduce the universe and the themes of the movie in an interesting way, and that just felt right. They were getting to that age. Again, it’s about a gradual teasing of information but it felt appropriate to watch that important moment in so many people’s lives.”
Was it always the intention to explain at the beginning of this movie what actually happened to Peter’s parents? “Yes,” Webb says. “It’s a tricky thing because that was part of what we were trying to establish. Of course it was going to be teased out. We had a plan about how to let that unfold with a long shadow that was cast over Peter Parker’s life. We knew how this was going to emerge. We had ideas about the pathways of these characters, but we didn’t want to blow everything out in the first movie. Again, it’s about creating a more elaborate universe, which is developing into more and more interesting and nuanced things that I think the fans are really, really going to enjoy.”
Why is Electro the main villain? “What a great question,” Webb says. “Very thoughtful. Again, in the first film I had an idea of how these characters were going to evolve. I just wanted to use Electro. There is purely a cinematic opportunity there that I thought was awesome, that given where we are at with visual effects and technology, I thought we could do we could do an effective and interesting [Electro], which I didn’t think existed until recently. There was an opportunity there that I thought was fantastic.”
“So there’s part of that that went into it. Then when we were trying to crack Electro’s story, thematically there was a resonance between Max Dillon’s character and Spider-Man. What is that villain going to bring out in your protagonist? How is he going to make that character more heroic? That was important, but really it was about this movie. It was about finding an adversary that was interesting, powerful, strong but had a thematic resonance that related to Spider-Man. That idea of an outcast. You get a little tease of it in this [footage], but really it was about… villains and heroes are often foils to each other. There’s layers and layers of that, but thematically, and it had a lot to do with Max Dillon. Electro is an incredibly visual villain. He needs to be seen, which is the heart of his character, and that has a relationship to Peter Parker’s theme and Peter Parker’s journey.”
Is there room for a female spider person? “A female Spider-Person?” Webb asks, clearly unprepared for this question. “Anything is possible, but that hasn’t been on my mind. It’s an interesting idea.”
How does Norman Osborn fit into this movie, and will we finally learn the identity of the mysterious figure who spoke to The Lizard in his cell at the end of The Amazing Spider-Man? “Yes, to your second question,” Webb says. “Norman Osborn as played by Chris Cooper has a really interesting component, but we have to be very careful about what we reveal. We get a lot of flack sometimes for talking about too many things, but we’ve also got to enthuse people to see the movie. So in keeping with trying to make that cinematic experience for everybody at home really special, I’m going to withhold that answer.”
Conclusion:
Overall, I have mixed feelings. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 seems to have re-committed to several aspects of the first film that bothered me – Peter Parker’s smarminess, the over-emphasis on Richard and Mary Parker’s espionage shenanigans, the plot holes – but it appears at least to be compensating with an increased sense of scale, more creative action sequences and a lighter tone.
The villain feels a little tacked on – Max Dillon is introduced as digression from a car chase, and only commits his own acts villainy (at least, the ones I have seen) as the result of manipulation – but presumably the “real” big bad, the one whose actions drive the story forward, is Harry Osborn or his father, even if Norman Osborn is largely off-screen.
For those who, like me, are still unconvinced that the Amazing Spider-Man movies are the cinematic version of Spider-Man that we would like to commit to in the years ahead, I wish I could say something more encouraging than, “It looks like it’s getting better,” but that’s better than being forced to admit that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 just looks like more of the same. It looks like an evolution of the franchise and of Marc Webb as a large-scale filmmaker. It looks a lot more fun than the previous film, but I remain discouraged by the series’ emphasis on the Parker family mysteries. If, on the other hand, that’s what works for you, then The Amazing Spider-Man 2 clearly exists to make you happy.
I will be back with a full review after the movie screens for critics in its entirety in the next month. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 web slings into theaters on May 2, 2014.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
