The Amazing Spiderman is Pretty Good (Spoilers)

Cafe Society
#1

Just got back from a sneak preview for the new Spiderman movie. I hadn’t really been following this one. I wasn’t a big fan of the Tobey McGuire Spiderman movies, and wasn’t expecting much from this one. But it’s pretty good! Andrew Garfield is a lot less mopey than he looked in the trailers. He’s still pretty mopey (this is Peter Parker’s life we’re talking about, here), but he’s also got an endearing goofy streak. And he wisecracks while beating people up, which was sorely missing from the first series.

Martin Sheen was great as Uncle Ben. Partially because we first see her standing next to President Bartlett, I spent the entire movie thinking Aunt May was played by Stockard Channing.

Not sure how I feel about the Lizard keeping his intelligence while he was mutated. It gave them the opportunity for some good interactions between Spiderman and the Lizard during the fight scenes, but under cut a lot of the pathos inherent in the Lizard character. Still, his character worked in the story they were trying to tell in this movie.

Overall, a good super hero movie. I’d recommend it.

#2

I’ve been back and forth about wanting to see this but proably will since 6 year-old junior is into Spider-man everything these days.
The things making me not so excited are
1- I don’t know if I care to watch the whole origin story all over again checking off boxes as it goes along.
2- After Rami’s trilogy this really doesn’t look or feel much different from what I’ve already seen.
3- Andrew Garfield’s body is too tiny for his head and is made even worse from his bouffant hair-do.

#3

A reboot after only ten years? I refuse to see it on principle.

No, not just that, but the first one was almost perfectly casted. Especially aunt May and James Jamerson. Oh, and MJ too. I keep looking at the stills on Rotten Tomatoes and shouting “HEY, THOSE ARE THE WRONG PEOPLE!!”

#4

i loved the raimi spiderman movies and would have happily gone to see the fourth if it had come to fruition, but its over. i like the looks of this one and am looking forward to seeing it.

#5

I like the description of this as “The Perfectly Adequate Spider-Man.”

I think the one thing I appreciate about this one is that they went with Gwen Stacy first. I would have preferred Raimi’s version to have gone with Gwen and done the death, and introduced MJ in the sequel or as a peripheral character in the first.

#6

I’m looking forward to seeing it, though I know it’s going to be an OJ movie as opposed to a great one.

I understand why Sony decided to go with a reboot with the movie. They had the property and they needed to put a movie out or lose that, but I agree with everyone who thinks it’s too soon for a reboot. I also wished they could skip the origin or gloss over it quickly because it’s been done so many times. Every different medium has something different about his origin, so we’ve seen an origin for him a lot of times already.

That being said, I like Spidey and I have a 4 year old son who really likes him too. We may see this tomorrow because it’s so hot out there.

#7

I’m kinda meh on the idea as the Rami films were pretty good so simply due to Regression to the mean, this will probably be worse. But the SO wants to see it tonight, so off I go.

Does this have real 3D or is it that post-processing stuff?

#8

I know Spiderman eventually kills Gwen Stacy, but don’t you think you are being a little uncharitable?

#9

I’m tentatively looking forward to this. So glad to hear this Spidey is goofy and wisecracking!

I find the Rami trilogy just okay (well, the first 2 were okay, the third was dreadful). Didn’t love the casting in them (except for J.K. Simmons, who was great) and they failed to capture pretty much everything I love about Spider-Man. I really like Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone so I’m hoping they get it right this time.

#10

By most accounts, it’s better than 1 & (of course) 3, but not better than 2.

#11

I will probably see it. I was not satisfied with the Raimi take personally. 2 was good, but 1 sucked after the Green Goblin was introduced: the character looked terrible; and 3 was a hot mess.

#12

I have to say it’s incredibly different from the Raimi movies. I mean, everything. It’s a much more personal and emotional take on Peter Parker, who makes different, yet equally troubling, choices. The villain almost comes off as irrelevant to his ultimate story: not that Kurt Conners is uninteresting, but that he’s more the last element in the movie.

I certainly enjoyed it. I did, however, come within an inch of outright murdering the three girls and one grown woman who kept talking during the show.

#13

It was pretty good. I could’ve done with about ten minutes less of teen drama, and sitting through poor Uncle Ben getting murdered yet once again was pretty boring.

But the villain was well done, the kid playing Spiderman was alright, the heroine was far better then the girl from the first set of movies (both the character and the actress).

I also liked that Spiderman wasn’t totally overpowered. When he gets knocked through a wall, he at least appeared sort of hurt (granted, not in any way that actually slowed him down), he was strong but not crazy super strong, he was obviously outmatched by the villain and while he could take on three or four bad guys at once, once he was outnumbered by more then that he either had to run or surrender.

Other thoughts:
-Best Stan Lee cameo since Chasing Amy
-Trying to awkwardly step around the “with great power…” line without actually saying it was…well, awkward.
-I kind of liked the ridiculousness of how they shoehorned the exposition setting up the doomsday device. I’ve been in a lot of science labs in my day, and none have had a decade old, unused WMD just sort of chilling in the corner so that I can explain to the interns how it could be used to spread biological agents.
-Ditto Lizard-guy leaving his computer open to Youtube videos in which he explains his nefarious plot, next to a computer animation giving further details in case the previous explicit explanation wasn’t enough to tip the hero off.
-Was the guy talking to Lizard-guy in the end his subconscious or are we supposed to recognize that as some other villain from the Spiderman franchise.

#14

It was alright. I really liked Andrew Garfield (anyone’s better than Toby Maguire, but Garfield did a great job). I enjoyed the fighting quips, the Raimi movies seemed to forget how huge a part of Spiderman the quips are.

However, it suffered from severe pacing issues. In the beginning, you could practically feel the filmmakers groaning with the effort of avoiding a retread of the first Spiderman movie. In the end, I feel like they rushed through the origin (which I’m fine with), but then screwed around for most of the second act so they had to rush through the resolution.

It was nice to see Dennis Leary as Captain Stacy.

#15

I liked it, the casting was just about perfect imho. I had some major issues with a couple of plot points but since I do not know how to use spoiler boxes I will leave them be.

One problem I had was for the first 20 minutes the actor who player Spiderman reminded me of someone. And it bugged me until I figured out who, the actor who played Kumar in the White Castle movie. Those two share way to much mannerism and expressions, both vocal and facial not to be related. :slight_smile:

But overall I would say this Spiderman franchise has far more potential to be a more adult/darker Spiderman ala The Dark Knight. And that isn’t a bad thing.

#16

It was released in Japan a couple of weeks ago. JpnGal and I watched it in IMAX 3D. While I never closely followed the comic or story, I have seen the original TV series and all the movies made since then.

We both enjoyed this version and took at as a “fun Saturday night at the movies” and nothing else. I have a question about one scene:

In one of the police station scenes, Leary’s character mentions something about “Godzilla” and “Japan”, at least that’s what we heard him say and the Japanese subtitles supported that. However, the audio for that quick phrase seemed to be spliced in and the words didn’t seem to match Leary’s lip movements. Does anyone remember that scene? And if so, I was wondering if the same lines were used in other countries. Thanks.

#17

It was ‘Godzilla’ in the US version, and either ‘Japan’ or ‘Tokyo’ (I think he used both).

My WAG is that you were used to his words not matching the subtitles, so when he used two Japanese words, your brain interpreted it as being off.

#18

Do you mean Mall Rats or did he appear in Chasing Amy as well? I only saw Chasing Amy once, in the theater at a sneak preview.

#19

Your right, I meant Mall Rats.

#20

We saw it last night and really enjoyed it! My teen sons enjoyed it more then The Avengers and are still talking about the Spider Man movie this morning.