The official reviews for The Amazing Spider-Man are in. While the film
itself isn't released here in the UK for another week, the general
consensus is the Marc Webb directed Amazing Spider-Man is a good film
that diminishes itself by rehashing an origin no one really wanted to
see. With Marvel's The Avengers managing to easily pass the $1 billion
mark already this year and The Dark Knight Rises expected to do better,
was 2012 really the best year for the return of the high school Peter
Parker?
Despite popular opinion, Spider-Man 3 (2007) was not the huge disaster
it's often made out to be. Emo-Spidey and underdeveloped villains aside,
the film still managed to be the highest-grossing film of Sam Raimi's
trilogy. It should have been easy to follow suit with a fourth movie. If
Internet rumour was correct, Sony would now be the one's having Anne
Hathaway as their anti-hero in their franchise, not Warner Bros. With
Hathaway's Hollywood stock at an all-time high, Sony would have been
guaranteed success with Hathaway and Jon Malkovich. Instead, studio
interference led to director Raimi dropping out, leaving the project
without a director and crew. Sony insisted they had no choice but to
reboot with Andrew Garfield replacing Tobey Maguire as the lead hero.
A new Spider-Man film should have been easy to sell to anyone. Peter
Parker is one of the most relatable and popular superheroes of all time,
and is Marvel's highest-grossing franchise to date. How could it go
wrong? Perhaps taking the focus away from the action, and focusing on
the relationship between Peter and Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone), Sony has
risked alienating their biggest audience. Children. Children that wear
the Spider-Man pyjamas, the face paint and buy the Spider-Man toys. The
Avengers catered for everyone and as a result it's managed to become the
third highest-grossing film of all time. Will Webb's reboot reach
similar heights? I doubt it.
I credit The Amazing Spider-Man for deliberately trying not to cater for
the superhero action extravaganza audiences. After all, they've already
been catered for this year with The Avengers, so why bother trying to
outdo a group of superheroes when you can tell a more personal and
intimate story? That's where I admire the reboot's ambition. It's trying
to be different from your usual superhero flick, or is it? There are
some very direct parallels between Webb's reboot and the Raimi movies.
The Lizard for one treads the same water Alfred Molina already crossed
with the tortured scientist trying to make the world a better place as
the brilliant Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2, while Denis Leary's Captain
Stacey fills the void left by J. Jonah Jameson played by J. K. Simmons.
If The Amazing Spider-Man was never going to be the cinematic revolution
many hoped it would be, you would think Sony would know better than to
put their reboot between two franchise juggernauts. Providing a film to
match the Web-Head's 50th anniversary in 2012 is a nice sentiment, but
it looks as if Sony has paid the price for re-visiting Peter Parker's
origin. Looking at next year's comic book movie schedule, there's Iron
Man 3 hitting cinemas May 3rd Man of Steel on 14th June and Thor 2 on
the 8th of November. That's a pretty crammed schedule, and adding a
fourth superhero film to 2013 risks over-saturating the comic book movie
industry, so The Amazing Spider-Man probably wouldn't have faired much
better there either. Will The Amazing Spider-Man find itself as the
first major casualty of an over-saturated market? That's something
that's long been on the horizon but until now with the exception of
Warner Bro's Green Lantern, we've never really noticed it. When was it
going to get to a point where people started tiring of comic book
movies?
I may be wrong, and the reboot may go on to hit the $1 billion mark,
however it was never going to meet my people's expectations. If I want
dark and gritty, I can wait to see The Dark Knight Rises. If I want a
romance film embedded in fantasy, the Twilight finale hits at the end of
the year. Raimi nailed with the character in my opinion. Spider-Man is
so compelling because he's a character surrounded by tragedy, by uses it
to drive him to achieve good in the world.
