The Amazing Spider-Man
Before embarking upon a full weighing of director Marc Webb’s reboot, it’s worth taking a moment and looking back oh, those ten long years ago to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, a blockbuster that signaled the full arrival of the Heroic Age in Hollywood. Sure, the X-Men had made a splash two years earlier, but Raimi’s film showed just how powerful a superhero film that paid attention to its source material could be. Until then, studios had been like a con artist eyeing a boy with his head buried in a comic book and asking himself, “How do I get the rest of that kid’s money?” With Spider-Man, it was as if that same grifter took a moment to read the comic himself and finally understood why the kid was so absorbed in the first place. Raimi’s films—especially the first two—not only adhered tightly to the emotional, character and story arcs inherent in the source material, they also paid attention to iconic panels and action sequences of the original comics. In a turn of events that surprised absolutely no comic book fan, the story that had enthralled readers for 40 years proved good enough to stand on its own—no non-canon villains, mucked-up origin stories or capes that suddenly change into super-saran wrap needed. Even better, it totally got the rest of that kid’s money.
The success of Raimi’s trilogy left Sony/Columbia, the studio that made them, in a bit of a bind when it parted ways with the talented director. Instead of Spider-Man 4 and Spider-Man 5—there are plenty of villains and storylines left to explore in the Spidey-verse—the studio needed a new director and new stars and a way to market that change as something exciting. If you’re a Hollywood exec, that leaves four options: sequel (Raimi-less, so no), prequel (with what, a non-super-powered ten-year old?) or a reboot. (Yes, I said “four options,” but the fourth, the remake, has fallen out of favor—and will just be called a “reboot” by marketing anyway.)
The Amazing Spider-Man proves that the reboot approach isn’t so simple. First, a reboot works best with properties that have become stale, over-burdened by conflicting bits of canon or weakened by over-exposure. Only ten years removed from the first film (and five from the third), it’s not like Raimi’s trilogy is a distant memory for viewers. Considering the films occupy spots #1 through #3 in all-time box office for Sony/Columbia, it’s tough to argue flagging interest, either. Finally, unlike that most famous of recently rebooted properties, Star Trek, where its heroes’ early days have been untouched on film—and thus make for intriguing fan-bait—Spider-Man’s origin story is a central part of his Big Screen tale.
As a result, Webb was faced with a daunting proposition: Retell a story that was just told (and told well) a few years earlier—and, oh yeah, no major changes to the origin allowed. Boy meets spider. Spider bites boy. Boy gains some freaky powers, which he uses frivolously at first. Bye-bye Unca Ben. Spider-Man is born—bring on the first villain!
Perhaps this stricture explains why The Amazing Spider-Man feels less like a reboot than an extended paraphrasing of the plot points and emotional beats from the first two films in the Raimi/Maguire trilogy.
Why is paraphrasing such a bad thing? Try the following experiment: Start with a well-written paragraph. It can be fiction, nonfiction, the instructions to your Blu-ray player—whatever. Now, take each individual sentence in that paragraph and paraphrase it. (You must convey the same ideas, but you can’t use the same words.) Now look at the results. It’s possible that a few of the sentences are as good or better than the original. It’s more likely that most of them are not. And the paragraph as a whole? It’s practically guaranteed that it won’t fit together as smoothly as the original. (To complete the analogy, then put the new, inferior paragraph up on an IMAX screen and watch it in 3D.)