WARNING, SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!!!! I tried to write this without spoilers, but I just couldn't explain things without the spoilers. If you're reading this to see if you should see the movie. The spoiler free answer is yes, this movie is great. If you've already seen this movie and are reading reviews to reaffirm your opinion of the movie, please continue reading.
I love the spiderman movies, especially the new ones. The Ramey movies were good, but he took to many creative liberties for my tastes. Sure, I'm not super familiar with the spiderman mythos, but I watched the 90s "The Amazing Spiderman" cartoon so I know the mythos enough to say that Ramey took to many "rub me the wrong way" liberties. What I really liked about the first Mark Webb reboot is that it's a lot more faithful to the spiderman that I know. What I also liked is that it didn't start off with the most well known villain, instead saving him for later in series, similar to the Nolan Batman series. So how was Amazing 2? It delivered just like the last one.
I'm having trouble figuring out where to start. I mean I just really liked it. I guess I'll start with the story since that's where I typically start off. We start with Peter graduating from high school and doing normal spiderman things; saving people, catching bad guys, throwing out great jokes and one liners. The next major element is the Peter Parker internal conflict of "I promised your dad I won't see you anymore, but I just can't." This is in reference to Gwen Stacy and Commander Stacy. During his web slinging, he saves Max, a no body electrical engineer that works for Ozcorp. His character and how it relates to the movie I'll explain in the next paragraph. We also meet Harry Ozborn, Peter's childhood friend that helped peter through losing his parents. Peter comes to Harry because Harry just lost his dad and he finds out he is dying of the same genetic disease. How Harry copes with this I'll also explain in the characters paragraph, but just know that he becomes a villain. The next thing that we're introduced to is the mystery of what happened to Peter's parents. Now Peter has to not only fight Electrode, he also has to fight his best friend, chose between his feelings for Gwen or keeping his promise to her father, find uncover the mystery of his parents, all while maintaining the illusion of just another young adult.
Now when it comes to the story, I was a bit worried they were going to introduce to much and frantically tie up all the loose ends at the end of the movie, like in Juno. Yeah, this story introduced a lot of characters and a lot of character conflicts. Like there are maybe 4 different villains in this movie. However, Webb did a really good job of explaining their motives, providing sufficient backstory in a way that wasn't just exposisive monologues, tied up the stories that ended with this movie really well, and left open the stories that will be explored in future films. It's kind of like how Superman: Doomsday
had 4 different villains but it did a really good job of making sure everything was done well. It was excellent.Now to talk about the characters, and let me tell you, the characters are what steals the show. Garfield as Spiderman is great. He portrays the character well. I know people get all nostalgic about Toby as Spiderman, but Garfield is amazing as it. He's the same Spiderman as in the first movie, so yeah. Gwen is great in her quest to be with Peter but Peter not wanting to hurt her. But the villains are what stand out. Oh man, are they great. Electrode is great. He's so relatable. All he wants is for people to know he exists. He does amazing work. He revolutionized the way New York gets electricity, but no one acknowledges that fact. He just wants some friends. Then when he gets his powers, people fear him, and he goes super evil due to people not treating him right. He got his powers from Ozcorp and Ozcorp is trying to cover the whole thing up, "because that would be bad for our investors." You really feel bad for the guy. He ultimately chose to be a villain, so I'm not saying what ultimately happened to him wasn't deserved, but if he wasn't mistreated in the beginning, things would definitely be different for him. He may have even been a good guy. Then there's Harry. Oh man, Harry is great. What are his motives for being evil? He just wants to live. He's dying of an incurable genetic disease, but the people he loves and trusts may have the cure. But to his misfortune, they won't give him the cure. First he wants Spiderman's blood, of which he asks very nicely and offers to compensate him appropriately, but since Peter is his best friend, he won't do it because his blood could easily kill him, or worse. He finds out Ozcorp has something that might be able to cure him, but Ozcorp throws him under the bus in order to protect their investors after the Electrode issue. The traditional villains that Spiderman eventually fights are not evil. They're just beaten up by the system and are sick of it. The real evil in this movie is Ozcorp. Ozcorp is the reason that the villains in this movie exist. They're also the reason Peter's parents are dead. There's probably some commentary on capitalism in there, but whatever. The characters were great.
Now to talk about the creative liberties. As with the first movie, and is the case with any movie adaptation, creative liberties were taken at various points. However, like with the first movie in "Amazing's" series, these liberties are taken to tell the story of Peter Parker/Spiderman better while keeping true to the feeling of the source material. The most dramatic liberty I noticed was with Harry and Norman Ozborn. In the source material, Norman went crazy due to the green goblin gas, and Harry's reasoning for becoming the second goblin was for revenge against Spiderman for killing his dad. Or he just went crazy after accidentally inhaling goblin gas just like his dad. I can't quite remember. Either way, in this version, Norman was never the Green Goblin and Harry was driven to be the Green Goblin because he thought the Spider venom, the same stuff that gave Peter his powers, would cure his disease. I know this isn't what happened in the source material, but it works. It really works. This gives Harry more depth, more reason to do what he does. More, "I understand why you chose the path of evil." Same sort of thing with Electrode, maybe. I'm not familiar with the Electrode character, but I heard Webb takes liberties with him as well. But I don't care, he was great. He just wanted companionship. He was lonely. When he's saved by Spiderman in the beginning of the movie, he even says to him, "why did you save me, I'm a nobody." Then Spiderman says "no, you're important, you're my eyes and ears, got that Max?" No one ever calls him by his first name, even though it's right on his name tag. That was just great character development. Also, Ozcorp wasn't really evil from what I remember, but someone or something had to be evil in this movie, and it's easy to make a corporation the evil ones.
So how was this movie, well needless to say it was great. I loved it. I feel like rewatching the first movie just to remember what all happened. It's great, go out and see it while you can. Well, this has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.
What's this, an extra paragraph after the review? Well it's only right since this is a review of a Marvel movie and they always do extras during or after the credits. So now it's time for miscellaneous things. This movie really left it open for new movies. Harry is going to make an army with the Rhino, Doc Oc, and Vulture from what I saw in the secret section of Ozcorp. Really looking forward to that. Then there's the Stan Lee cameo. This time he was an audience member of the graduation. Pretty interesting, but still no where near the cameo in Fantastic 4 Rise of the Silver Surfer. Say what you will about that movie, best Stand Lee cameo yet. It was interesting to see Felicia Harding as a character, be that a minor one. Lets see if she becomes more of a love interest in the next movie because she did come before MJ as a love interest after Gwen's death. Oh yeah, Webb keeps true to the source where Gwen dies. I wasn't expecting the X-Men Days of Future past trailer for the secret ending during the credits thing. I was expecting something regarding the next movie. What really confused me about it was that Spiderman and X-Men are licensed by 2 completely different studios; Spiderman by Sony's Columbia and X-Men by 20th Century FOX. Weird, but whatever, there was enough teasers in the actual movie. When CinemaSinns does a sin count of this movie, I can almost guarantee that there's going to be a "Sony product placement" bonus round, because just about everything here is a Sony product; Sony laptops, Sony cameras, I'm pretty sure Spiderman was using a Sony Xperia cell phone, I'm surprised no one was using a Sony Walkman. However, I think of these more as Easter Eggs for those who are really paying attention. OK, now I'm done.
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