Saturday, July 07, 2012

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) in Theater Review

A desperate bid to escape the 100 F weather involved sitting through two showings of the reboot of everyone’s favorite wall crawler. Having been turned off by a clip from the film, I decided to give it a chance after all in 2D and 3D. The audiences at both showings loved the film, from kids to senior citizens.

I did not.

Perhaps my reaction would have been more positive if Sam Raimi’s excellent Spider-Man had never been made ten years before.

On second thought, no.

This simply is not a good film by my standards. It is not even technically proficient in regards to cinematography and direction. The script is melodramatic, overwrought, and full of plot holes while the acting… oh boy.

I have to single out Andrew Garfield for absolutely terrible acting. His Peter Parker comes off as a stoner emo skater boi with creepy sexual aggressiveness toward Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone). It seems Twilight has made the creepy lead male popular with the girls. This Spider-Man is an insincere  jerk, while being not at all charming or likeable. I enjoyed every bit of damage done to him, unfortunately.

Stone is a little better, but so much of her character is focused on the “romance” scenes that it didn’t matter. Sally Field is boring and badly miscast as Aunt May, while Martin Sheen gets all the good lines in the movie as Uncle Ben. But this Uncle Ben bares little relation to the one of the comic books and disappointed me greatly. His death scene was poorly executed and lacked any dramatic punch.

Rhys Ifans and Dennis Leary turn in the best performances despite appearing to phone them in. Yeah, that’s not good, is it?

I cannot count the ways the Lizard disappointed me, so I will not. Suffice it to say that they botched my favorite Spidey foe of all time, but the door is open for them to correct this in the next two films. Modeling him after Lord Voldemort was highly irritating and even more disturbing when it seemed like Garfield was channeling Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter.

The whole movie is a paint by numbers Hollywood movie that only succeeds during some of the comedy parts and falls flat on its face any time it tries to be serious. Special effects are okay to bad depending on the scene. Very heavy use of CGI is apparent and to me was distracting at times.

If you go to this, skip the 2D version. I watched that first and got the impression that most of the action sequences were made exclusively for 3D. Watching the film right away again in 3D confirmed that suspicion. Rather than being restrained and well done like The Avengers, this is the old paddle ball in the face 3D treatment. There are also some surprising errors in the conversion process during some of the every day scenes, with things being in the wrong depth of view. This is something I had never noticed before in a 3D film.

The Amazing Spider-Man lacks the joyous and tragic moments of its predecessor, but will be a very large hit if the audiences I spoke to are any indication. They loved the action, the characters, and the romance as much as I disliked them. It is an utterly superficial film and I cannot recommend it to anyone in good conscience.

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