The Amazing Spider-Man: Some chosen one...

Sony: "You were the chosen one! It was said you would make us money forever, not fail so hard we had to give you up!". Look, I've been wanting to make a parody of that for years, was waiting for the right movie to do it.

With the breakout success if Iron Man, the moderate success of The Incredible Hulk, and promises of movies like The Avengers in the works, it should come as no surprise that both Sony and Fox were intimidated by the sudden competition, and quickly tried to replicate the success themselves. While Fox’s attempts involved bringing the old director back and throwing in time travel, Sony’s was more… destructive. Spider-Man 4 was not turning out the way they wanted and was taking longer to make then they had hoped. As a result, a reboot was in order and once they could finally cancel Spider-Man 4, The Amazing Spider-Man was fast-tracked to better align with Sony’s goals for the IP. How well did it go? Well, Spider-Man is now under joint custody between them and Marvel Studios so you can imagine that it didn’t go well. Welcome to the prequel of MAYvel Phase 2, where we see what Sony has done with the IP post-Avengers, what Fox began doing post-Avengers, and also looking at the movie with some red asshole in it because he won’t shut up… No the Fox one!

To beat the first dead horse quickly, this story is a disaster, or to be specific, the script is a disaster. The basic points of the story? They’re not bad in execution. The main villain is The Lizard, who wants to turn New York into half human, half lizards like him. We get a retelling of Spider-Man’s origins which, while not bad, had some bad decisions made in them, mainly in how Peter tried to get revenge on Uncle Ben’s killer. We get some great chemistry between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, who takes the Girlfriend role for these two films instead of Mary Jane. The problem though is that the script is… certainly a rushed script from around the mid-2000s. It’s awful and has aged horribly. The only reason why anything works with it is the cast.

The cast itself is solid. Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone pull off Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy well, my biggest problem with Andrew though is that while he does a good Spider-Man, a bit too edgy for some though, it is case by case, he sucks as Peter Parker. I find it very hard to believe that anyone would bully this incarnation of Peter, mostly because he doesn’t really do anything that would warrant it. He’s just a normal teenager, which makes him blend in more with the rest of the High School. I don’t really care about him because everything interesting about him mostly revolves around Oscorp and the use of “The Chosen One”.

I’m not a huge believer in things like Destiny, that one was chosen before birth to become what they are, so when it’s forced down your throat because “It was good in Harry Potter”, it feels jarring, especially because there isn’t anything explicitly special about Peter normally. Here though? Things like his father helping to make the Spider that bit him, to the connections with Oscorp, to The Lizard and Peter’s dad being friends, it gets quite obnoxious, and it only gets worse from here. It further dates the film purely on the structure.

Which is a shame because visually? This movie has aged really well. The effects are still impressive, and though I’m not a fan of the suit, things like first person web swinging still look really cool. The fights between Spider-Man and The Lizard are decently choreographed, I personally prefer the movement of this Spider-Man over what happened in Spider-Man Homecoming. The soundtrack is decent, though not overly memorable, any praise I can give it is drowned out by the script, I cannot stress enough how bad it is.

This movie has the feel of “We’re doing this so that the rights don’t default back”. This movie has the feel of heavy corporate control. As bad as something like Jem and the Holograms? No, but there is certainly a feeling of things being done this way “Because the charts say so”. This feels soulless, which is frustrating because there’s no reason for it to feel that way other than “because the charts say so”. Objectively horrible in every sense of the word? No, but there’s not enough here to like, let alone recommend for any other reason than curiosity. It has its moments, but nothing can describe how much of a bomb this script is. And people think this is the better of the two movies. Well, without spoiling the entire review, it’s certainly better than Sunday’s review, because at least I could recognize who everyone was. I’ll see you on Sunday when we begin to look at the phasing in of Fox’s plan to fight the MCU.