Hero Go Home

Continuing our look back at The Amazing Spider-Man, the reboot of the Spider-Man series directed by Marc Webb and starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. Two-thirds of the way through, the movie is a mixed bag. The attempt to update Peter Parker as a skateboarding slacker feels odd, but I think there are a lot of things that work about it. Garfield has great chemistry with Stone as Gwen Stacy. Martin Sheen and Sally Field make a pretty decent Uncle Ben and Aunt May. The costume is not classic Spider-Man, but it works okay.

On the other hand, the attempts at visual flash don’t always work well. The dark lighting makes some of the action hard to follow. It’s interesting that they’ve dug deeper into Spider-Man’s rogues’ gallery for this film’s villain, but so far, the Lizard has only been barely glimpsed and we haven’t seen what his endgame is.

However, that’s about to change now that Dr. Connors knows that Peter Parker is Spider-Man.

The Lizard bursts up through the floor into the school bathroom. Peter changes into Spider-Man and fights the Lizard through the halls of the school. The fight is not bad, with Spider-Man having to try increasingly desperate gambits to try to stop a villain who is essentially a scaly Hulk with claws. Detachable tail optional.

We also get one of the funniest Stan Lee cameos ever, with Lee playing a man so lost in appreciation of fine music that he doesn’t notice the battle raging right behind him.

But even though there are several entertaining bits in the battle, like Peter telling Gwen he’s going to throw her out the window right before he throws her out the window, overall the fight is underwhelming. The Lizard is a bit one-note as a villain, and though Peter is clever and inventive, the emphasis on Peter’s fast reflexes makes the rhythm off-kilter.

The Lizard disappears as soon as he hears police sirens approaching, making the entire episode kind of pointless. It seemed like he was there to kill Spider-Man, but he takes off without a word, even though nothing Spider-Man did seemed to hurt him.

Peter follows him into the sewers and calls Gwen to ask her to make an antidote to the serum at Oscorp. Not long after, he finds the Lizard’s secret lab, where he has helpfully left an animated graphic looping on a computer monitor illustrating his plan to use the MacGuffin device introduced earlier in the movie to dose the entire city with Lizard serum. Kind of a double danger signal. Not only is this obviously a blatant ploy to get the plot moving, but it’s kind of a stupid plot. The Lizard can only stay a lizard for a few hours at a time. Dosing the city with the serum might cause pandemonium, but it will be a very a short-lived pandemonium.

So the Lizard sets out for Oscorp with Spider-Man on his tail (heh), but the cops attack Spidey and zap him with some kind of taser dart that puts him down for the count.

Captain Stacy rips off his mask, and though Peter tries to keep his face hidden as he fights his way free, the Captain discovers his secret. Peter tells him that Gwen is in danger, and Captain Stacy lets him go, but another cop shoots Peter in the leg.

Meanwhile, Gwen has ignored Peter’s phoned plea to escape, because the antidote only has a few minutes left before it’s ready. The Lizard bursts into the lab, seeking the dispersal device, which Gwen is hiding with. The Lizard sniffs her out with his tongue and takes the device, but doesn’t bother hurting her.

Peter’s leg wound is really hurting, and it looks like he might not make it in time. But it turns out that the guy whose son he saved on the Williamsburg Bridge is a crane operator, and he calls all the other crane operators on Sixth Avenue and has them line up their crane arms so Spider-Man will have a clear path.

This scene comes in for a lot of ridicule, and I can see why. I see what they were going for, wanting something like that heartwarming moment where the crowd takes Spider-Man’s side against Green Goblin in the first Raimi film, but there are a bunch of small sillinesses all adding up to a big ridiculousness.

First, there’s the idea that Spider-Man even needs the cranes at all, when we’ve clearly seen that he has no problem swinging from building to building. Then there’s the fact that this one guy can easily get all these guys to ignore an evacuation order. Then there’s the fact that there are like six or seven cranes more or less evenly spaced along this small stretch of street. Then there’s the fact that Spider-Man sprays a web bandage over his bullet wound and suddenly he’s fine again with barely a limp after two or three steps.

Captain Stacy reaches the Oscorp building and meets Gwen coming out with the antidote. He tells Gwen he knows Peter’s secret and she gives him the antidote for Peter to use on the Lizard.

Upstairs, Peter fights his final battle against the Lizard, but Connors is just too big and strong and invulnerable. Until Captain Stacy appears and uses a shotgun to shoot a canister of liquid nitrogen, which weakens the Lizard’s cold-blooded metabolism and also makes his body brittle and easily shattered. The Lizard is on the ropes.

Captain Stacy gives Peter the antidote, but instead of injecting Connors with it, Peter decides to put it in the dispersal device. Meanwhile, the suspiciously large number of liquid nitrogen canisters on the roof (exactly why do they need so much liquid nitrogen up there, anyway? To supercool their cellular phone tower or something?) runs out and the Lizard is able to regenerate his shattered limbs and kill Captain Stacy.

He leaps up to stop Peter from disabling his device, but Peter is able to switch out the antidote at the last moment, and we can see the horror in Dr. Connor’s eyes as he begins to change back to human.

There’s a little bit of random destruction, and Dr. Connors saves Peter from falling to his death. Captain Stacy dies from his wounds, but not before making Peter promise to stay away from Gwen for her safety, which makes for a dour last few minutes, until in the last moments, Peter implies that he has no intention of keeping that promise. Happy ending, I guess!

So I come out of the movie feeling definitely ambivalent. There are a lot of things the film does well, and I do really like the different interpretation that Andrew Garfield brings to the role. But as they say, a movie is only as good as its villain, and the Lizard ends up being one-note and kind of boring. Also, the movie’s strongest dramatic moments are in the early parts and the middle, where we see Peter working out his anger and see the chemistry develop between Peter and Gwen. Once the action starts, it seems to get progressively duller.

But it does get the iconic Spider-Man poses right. So a mixed success, I’d say. Very flawed but watchable. I’m almost afraid to revisit the sequel now, considering how much vilification it gets now. I guess we’ll see, although it might not be next week. I have a vacation coming up.

Continuing our in-depth recap of Marc Webb’s 2012 reboot of Spider-Man, starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. When we left off, Peter Parker had learned two things: that his spider-enhanced abilities gave him a unique ability to get justice (or revenge) on the man who killed his Uncle Ben, and that it might be a good idea to cover his face during his nightly escapades.

At first, he goes out in normal street clothes with a mask he has designed with lenses that cover his eyes.

Over time, Spider-Man begins to develop a reputation as a vigilante, getting onto the radar of Police Captain Stacy (Gwen’s father, played by Denis Leary) once he starts delivering webbed-up criminals directly to police headquarters. At school, Gwen Stacy also notices Peter’s knuckles are scraped like hes been fighting.

Then he starts getting more creative, ordering a racing suit worn by lugers (this film’s apparent explanation for the whole costume bit is barely hinted at sideways in a scene where a couple of nerds talk about the speed at which a pendulum swings being determined in part by wind resistance, hence the luge suit), and silk-screening a spider emblem onto it. The other, more controversial thing he does is mail-order a bunch of Oscorp Biocable (the stuff being produced by the spiders in the lab, including the one that bit him), hundreds of miles of spider-silk in tiny canisters. Peter designs a special wrist-worn web-shooter that enables him to deploy it quickly and precisely, after a couple of false starts.

While I appreciate the full-circle-ness of Peter perfecting a product originally developed by his father (who bred the spiders), it opens up so many questions in terms of both the police and Oscorp potentially being able to track down Spider-Man once they realize he’s using Oscorp Biocable. The questions are never really addressed, except in one throwaway line where Dr. Connors later recognizes the webbing as an Oscorp product.

Finally, once the costume is completely finished, Peter catches a car thief in a scene which contains so many things which I like and dislike almost in equal measure. The good: I like Peter’s cockiness and sense of humor. One thing the Raimi films never quite nailed was Spider-Man’s tendency to wisecrack in costume. Tobey Maguire tries, but even when he’s cracking wise, he just sounds so Magiure-ly earnest and soft-spoken. Garfield nails the attitude, even when the lines he’s saying are kind of stupid (yelling “CROTCH!” before leaping up and wrapping his legs around the crook’s head, for instance).

I kind of like Spidey’s weirdly angular body language in this, but also kind of hate it. It gives him a strangeness factor that really works in moments like the one when he has the crook trapped and then moves in to check for the tattoo. But other times, you just want to smack him and say “stand up straight!”

The bad: in their efforts to make Spider-Man come off as cool and super, they have him appear and disappear in ways that are physically impossible unless he can literally dematerialize and walk through walls. Also, the editing of theaction is too fast and off-rhythm. I get that they’re trying to emphasize his freaky-fast speed and reflexes, but the dark lighting and the spotty editing frustrate me more than excite me.

All that said, the close-up when Spidey goes quiet and we move in on that eyeless face is genuinely a little disturbing. This is the effect that Batman is always trying to achieve on-screen, and never quite hitting, mainly because you can see his eyes.

The cops show up and try to arrest Spider-Man, so he has to flee. But the cops are nothing next to Aunt May, who is waiting up when he gets home and is horrified to see his banged-up face. I’m not a huge fan of Sally Field, but she plays Aunt May’s horror and frustration at what Peter is doing to himself really well here.

Back at Oscorp, Dr. Connors’s boss is impressed by the rat’s regrown leg and wants to try the serum out on humans.  He proposes giving “vitamin supplement” shots to veterans. Connors refuses, and the boss tells him he’s fired, since the corporation owns the serum anyway. Connors panics, injects himself with his own serum and passes out, Dr. Jekyll style.  At school,Gwen asks Peter to dinner at her house.

Later, Dr. Connors awakes with a new, not-quite-fully-finished arm.

At Gwen’s place, Peter has dinner with her, her parents and her brothers. Captain Stacy starts talking about how this spider-vigilante is an amateur and a menace who needs to be taken off the streets. Peter disagrees and an argument starts that Gwen defuses by taking Peter to the roof where he demonstrates his secret to her by webbing her butt and yanking her into his arms.

But they are interrupted, first by Gwen’s mom, and then by sirens. Turns out that Dr. Connors, in trying to catch his boss who is on his way to a veteran’s hospital, has turned into a giant lizard-man and is terrorizing the Williamsburg Bridge.

Peter uses his webs to stop several cars from plunging into the water and then saves a young boy who is trapped in one of the cars. It’s a good scene in which Peter takes off his mask to establish a rapport with the boy and also in which Peter realizes that there’s more he can do with his powers than just hunt down the guy who shot Uncle Ben (who is still not caught and will be forgotten from now on).

Peter goes to visit Dr. Connors (who is now human and one-armed again) to see if he can help figure out how to stop the Lizard (Connors apparently managed to kill his boss before he could turn in that ‘Dr. Connors is fired’ paperwork). Peter starts to suspect something is wrong because one, Connors is acting super-sketchy, two, he has a weird scaly patch of skin on his neck, and three, Freddie the rat has turned into a super-strong lizard Muto-Rat who has broken out of his cage, killed and eaten his fellow rats.

Connors heads down to build a secret lab in the sewer. Peter goes to Captain Stacy to report Dr. Connors, but he sounds like a crazy man because it’s a crazy story. As he’s leaving the station, Peter sees lizards heading into a sewer grate, so he goes down into the sewer in costume and spins a web. His plan is to catch photos of the Lizard with a camera he has rigged to shoot when the web is tripped. He is discovered by the Lizard, and the two fight. Spider-Man barely escapes with his life.

Peter goes to Gwen’s to get help with his wounds. The Lizard discovers the automatic camera with “Property of Peter Parker” on the back. He now knows Spider-Man’s secret identity. That’s not good.

Got to say, so far, I kind of like the reboot. There are things I miss about Sam Raimi’s version, but there are things I think this version actually does better.  If this movie can stick the landing, it will be a respectable contender.

Five years after Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 came out to critical and fan disdain, Sony decided to release a new Spider-Man film. It’s easy to understand why they would take such a step; despite its critical drubbing, Spider-Man 3 made a pile of money. But they broke away from the Raimi/Maguire films and rebooted, in part because Raimi said he couldn’t deliver a satisfying number four on their deadline. I’m thinking it’s also because they were looking at marketing research numbers and wanted to skew a little younger.

Which makes sense because time was taking its toll. At the time that The Amazing Spider-Man came out, Tobey Maguire was on the wrong side of 35, not great for a character whose major appeal is his youth. So no matter how much loyalists loved him in the role and some still cry for a Tobey comeback,  Tobey Maguire (now over 40) will not be playing Peter Parker again unless they do a Spider-Man Beyond, with Maguire as a grizzled old Parker coaching a kid to take over the mantle of Spider-Man.

So they brought in director Marc Webb, a music video director who had done just one feature previously, with a new script from a story written by James Vanderbilt (who had also been one of the screenwriters of the aborted Spider-Man 4 movie). Alvin Sargent, credited screenwriter for Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 and 3, also got a screenplay credit, as did Steve Kloves, who had just spent apparently half a lifetime writing scripts for ALL SEVEN Harry Potter films.

At first, it’s hard to tell just what’s supposed to be different, as the opening credits feature the same sort of 3-D animated flybys of spider webs that opened all three Raimi films. But then things take a decidedly different turn.

We see young Peter playing hide-and-seek with his dad (and in a nice bit of foreshadowing of this film’s villain, we see a toy dinosaur on the coffee table in the background of one shot). Peter discovers that his dad’s office has been broken into, which freaks Dad out so much that he grabs Mom and Peter (and an official-looking file that he stuffs into his briefcase) and flees the house, leaving Peter with Uncle Ben and Aunt May before disappearing into the night.

Fast-forward to now, with Peter Parker now a teenager (played by a decidedly non-teenage Andrew Garfield, almost 30 when the movie came out).

Peter is a skateboarding slacker, shy with girls, but not afraid to be brave when the situation demands it. When he sees mean jock Flash Thompson picking on a smaller kid, Peter draws Thompson’s ire onto himself by committing the unspeakable sin of using Flash’s given name, Eugene.

Flash beats Peter prettily mercilessly, until he is saved by the arrival of Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), who is tutoring Flash after school.

She saves him, get it? It’s like backwards and feminist and shit. Gwen talks Flash down. He’s obviously intimidated by her, not just because she’s smart and pretty, but because (although it’s never mentioned in the film) she holds his sports eligibility in the palm of her hand. Later in class, Gwen flirts with Peter a little, which Peter thinks is cool, because he has been staring at her from afar (and taking pictures, which is jest a little stalkery).

After school, Peter returns home to Uncle Ben and Aunt May, and they have gone a little star-crazy on the casting with Martin Sheen and Sally Field, although I don’t mind that they’ve made Aunt May look a little younger. It may not be comics accurate, but I always thought the comic book Aunt May (and Rosemary Harris in the Raimi movies, as much as I love her) looked more like Peter’s grandmother than his aunt (then again, this is apparently based more on the comic book Ultimate Spider-Man, which I never read, so…).

Peter manages to deflect their concern about his facial bruises with some help from a timely basement flood. In the process of rescuing stuff from the water, Peter finds his father’s briefcase, which includes this ominous security badge.

So Peter’s dad wasn’t just some random office schlub, but a genetics researcher at Oscorp. And we know what species he was working on, because we saw a spider mounted under glass on his desk in the first scene. Also, Peter finds that secret file we saw his father shove into the briefcase earlier, hidden behind the lining of one section of the case.

Urgh, so many mixed feelings. On the one hand, I like the fact that we’re actually talking about Peter’s parents, who have been mostly treated as if they never existed over the course of the Spider-Man series (comics and movies). But on the other hand, I always side-eye attempts in the movies to tie everything together.

Uncle Ben comes in later to tell Peter that his father’s former co-worker, Dr. Curt Connors, might have some information on why Peter’s father left so suddenly. To the Internet! Peter learns that Connors is researching cross-species genetics, trying to eliminate all human weakness to create a master race, because that never goes wrong.

Peter goes to visit the Oscorp offices, featuring a giant holographic portrait of “Our Founder” Norman Osborn with the face almost completely in shadow which is not just the most sinister thing ever.

Who would ever want to work here if they have to walk past that every day? They must have a great health plan, is all I’m saying.

Anyway, Peter is mistaken for an intern and is able to infiltrate a tour group led by… Gwen Stacy, which seems awfully convenient. Gwen is smart and all, but a high school student as the “head intern” on a cutting-edge science project? Wouldn’t that go to a college student, and even more, like a college senior rather than a high schooler? But it does let us meet Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), whose interest in Gwen may not be entirely about her brain, if you know what I mean. I mean, the script never goes there, but there’s a vibe in this first scene. Oh, and he only has one arm.

Peter sneaks away from the tour group almost immediately after seeing a sketchy corporate dude with a file that bears the same special characters–Ø Ø–as the file in Peter’s father’s briefcase.

Which leads him to the “Biocable Development Unit” and this creepy room full of hundreds of spiders.

While Peter is in the spider room, Sketchy Dude meets with Curt Connors and we learn that the secret purpose of the entire project is to save Norman Osborn from some unspecified medical condition. And time is apparently running out, because old Norman is in his last stages. Awfully convenient timing, given that the project was apparently started back before Peter’s dad left, and Dr. Connors has apparently never figured out the formula that Peter’s dad stole away in the ten-plus intervening years. How has this incompetent hack managed to keep his job all this time? Was he just a quota hire to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act?

Back in the spider room, Peter stupidly twangs a web, which sets off an alarm and causes a dozen or more spiders to fall on him. He brushes them off and flees the lab before he’s caught, but he runs into Gwen on his way out, just in time to get bitten by one last spider he missed. His fake intern badge is confiscated and he is ejected from the building. He takes the subway home, and the spider bite is already affecting him. His senses and reflexes are heightened, and his hands randomly stick to things, like the shirt he rips off a pretty woman, leading to a fight with five or six dudes (the editing in the action scenes is often confusing) who all end up on the floor.

The fight is actually pretty funny, with Peter constantly apologizing as his reflexes and strength act almost without his conscious control. This continues the next morning as he accidentally destroys the bathroom in the process of brushing his teeth (echoing a similar scene in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which is not a movie you should be reminding people of, just saying). He ends up holed up in his room, flinching at every random noise, realizing this all came about because of that spider bite.

To the Internet! He researches spiders and spider bites, until he has to stop because his keyboard keys are all stuck to his fingers. Instead, he visits Dr. Connors at his home, where he finds out that Richard Parker (his father) is the one who bred the super-spiders.

Back at school, Flash Thompson is picking on another innocent victim when Peter decides to intervene. Only this time, Peter isn’t helpless, so he hits Flash where it hurts, by out-basketballing him in front of all his teammates and then knocking him down as he’s driving to the hole. This white man CAN jump.

He shatters the backboard, and once again, the movie loses all credibility. Because instead of immediately being recruited for the basketball team, Peter is instead sent to the principal’s office, where he has to deal with a furious Uncle Ben. Uncle Ben tells him he has to pick up Aunt May that night.

Peter and Gwen have a cute moment where he kinda-sorta asks her out in a someday-maybe sort of way. Then he goes skateboarding and has a quick training montage where he learns to use his powers more fully. Then he is with Dr. Connors, where he gives him the formula that Peter’s dad apparently died to keep away from him. Way to go, Peter.

They test the formula on a computer-simulated rat, and it works perfectly in helping the three-legged virtual rat regrow its virtual missing limb, because no matter all the lip service about curing Norman Osborn’s Macguffinitis, we know it’s really about Dr. Connors’s missing arm. So they mix up the formula and give it to a real rat to see what happens.

Peter returns home to an even more furious Uncle Ben, because Peter forgot to pick up Aunt May. Wait, all that stuff happened on the same day? Uncle Ben chews out Peter and Peter blows right back up at him, where we learn the extent of the anger Peter usually keeps bottled up at his parents for abandoning him.

And this scene I love, because it’s raw and honest and gives Peter a reason to eventually go out and beat up on people. One place where the first Raimi Spider-Man stumbled was depicting the transition from shy, bookish Peter to masked-man-who-beats-up-on-criminals. We saw why he could do it with the guy who shot Uncle Ben, but why keep doing it? We get that here, and Garfield plays the hell out of it.

Oh, and speaking of Uncle Ben getting shot…

Peter runs out of the house after the argument. Instead of the classic comics tale of Peter entering a contest to stay in the ring with a professional wrestler, Peter goes to a convenience store, where he gets in an argument with the cashier over the Take-a-Penny-Leave-a-Penny bin. It’s ridiculously petty, so you can understand Peter not caring much when the store gets robbed.

But then the crook runs into Uncle Ben, searching for Peter, and Uncle Ben is shot. While I kind of like the new version of Peter’s letting the thief get away, the way the shooting is staged isn’t as effective.

Peter is grief-stricken, so full of guilt and rage that even Flash Thompson feels sorry for him, which is a nice moment for his otherwise really one-note character. Peter has a copy of the police sketch of the crook, plus a description of the star tattoo on his wrist. One night as he’s walking down the street, he sees a girl in an alley arguing with a guy who might be the guy. So Peter goes up and starts punching him, which is when the dude’s friends come out to play.

There’s a quick frantic battle between Peter, who at this point is just trying to get away in one piece, and all of these guys who seem to be almost as fast as he is, because no matter what wall he scales or how far he jumps, there always seems to be a guy or two right on his tail. The action choreography and editing are not top-notch in this movie, is my point.

Finally Peter manages to isolate the first guy on a rooftop and realize he doesn’t have the star tattoo. Then he falls through a roof and we finally get the pro-wrestling callback we didn’t have earlier in his origin story. As the gang members are yelling that they know his face, Peter looks up and sees this.

So now Peter Parker must become El Hombre Araña!

Be here next week to see him in an Amazing Grudge Match in Part 2 of our recap.