Why The Amazing Spider-Man Film Sucked
Amazing Spider-Man. Image courtesy of Sony.
In between the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films starring Tobey Maguire, and the Marvel Spider-Man films starring Tom Holland, there existed a momentary rift in the Matrix that led to the brief and unmemorable existence of the Amazing Spider-Man films starring Andrew Garfield. I was somewhat shocked in researching this post to find that both Amazing Spider-Man films grossed in excess of $700 million and the first film was praised by Rotten Tomatoes for having a “well-chosen cast and sure-handed direction.”
I don’t really go in for corporate conspiracy theories, but given that initial pre-release reviews for the atrocious Wonder Woman 1984 were pretty positive, and that other human beings could have watched The Amazing Spider-Man and come away with the words “sure-handed direction”, well there begins to be no other explanation other than that reviewers absolutely lose their minds and all sense of objectivity when they review super hero movies. In particular, the direction of The Amazing Spider-Man cannot be described in positive terms. And I can point to a single point in the movie that embodies everything wrong with it: the moment in the subway when Peter has his first fight.
Usually these first fight scenes are some of the best of any super hero or action film, because they are revelatory. The hero is discovering their powers as the scene goes on. But this fight scene is spliced together so choppily with quick cuts meant to simulate the spidey sense and other truly terrible choreography that I actually wondered whether the version of the film I was watching in Indonesia had been heavily edited.
With good action, you want everything to flow and make sense in physical as well as cinematic space. You want there to be a logic and a beauty to the movement. With the Golden Age of fight choreography we are currently living through we are constantly being presented with immaculate examples of first-rate action, in John Wick or Extraction. So when you see really terrible fight choreography, it sticks out like a sore thumb. And that subway fight scene is truly terrible. The editing whipsaws the viewer around so you can’t make heads nor tails of what you are seeing. Lots of cuts, and they have no sense of rationality to them.
The entire scene is a jumbled mess, and perhaps that was a reflection of the soul of this film. It was trying to revive a storied franchise that more less kicked off the current super hero era we are now living in, a franchise that Sony held the legal rights to but had abdicated the spiritual understanding of the thing. Especially more recently Sony, like Warner Bros, has shown almost no aptitude for turning its immensely valuable super hero IP into films that people want to watch.
It mangled Venom (saved only through a strange confluence of Tom Hardy engaging in a tangled romance with… Tom Hardy?). And curiously, Venom also features some horrendous action sequences, so maybe this studio just doesn’t know how to shoot action or what good action is. I don’t pretend to know. What I do know is that there was no effort put into what is usually one of the fundamental building blocks of a super hero origin story - the moment when the hero begins to discover his or her power, and uses it.
And in general, I think that reveals the underlying weakness of this movie. It was made so Sony could retain the rights to the character, and make more money on what was then not yet a completely saturated market for super hero films. And the end product is an uniteresting, uninspired film that couldn’t even be bothered to do basic things well, like hire good fight choreographers and stunt men.
