by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Amazing Spider-Man is an odd movie because for some reason the
“suits” at Columbia Pictures (including the late Laura Ziskin, who was the
principal producer and whose last film this was) decided midway through the
planning process to junk the plans for a Spider-Man 4 with the original director (Sam Raimi) and star
(Tobey Maguire) and instead “reboot” the franchise with a different director
(Marc Webb) and star (Andrew Garfield, whose most important previous credit was
probably as Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network), working from a story by James Vanderbilt (though
the script is credited to Vanderbilt and Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves, indicating that they platooned at least two more writers
and had them do rewrites of Vanderbilt’s material) which went back and told yet
another version of the Spider-Man origin story. In this one, Norman Osbourne,
the founder and CEO of OsCorp (which is headquartered in a huge New York
skyscraper whose design by J. Michael Riva and his team of art directors is a
dead ripoff of the still-unbuilt design for the huge tower that’s supposed to
replace the World Trade Center on the original site of Ground Zero, adjacent to
the reflecting pools marking where the original Twin Towers stood until
September 11, 2001), is near death; for 15 years he’s been funding research
scientist Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) in search of a regeneration formula
that will restore him to his original state of health and youth. Dr. Connors
originally worked with another scientist, Dr. Richard Parker (Campbell Scott),
who mysteriously disappeared from his home in the middle of the experiments,
along with his wife Mary (Embeth Davidtz — that’s what the cast list on
imdb.com says her name is!), leaving their son Peter Parker (Max Charles) — and
no true Spider-Man maven needs two guesses as to who he’s going to grow up to
be! — in the custody of his Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally
Field). Then Richard and Mary Parker were killed in a plane crash and Peter
grew up to be a high-school science student at New York’s Midtown Science High
School (and to be played by Andrew Garfield) without any clear idea of who his
parents were or what they had done before they died.
He doesn’t even know his
dad and Dr. Connors were research partners until he finds a briefcase that
belonged to his father and sees a picture of him and Dr. Connors together in
it, and he decides to crash an internship program Dr. Connors is giving — only
he’s caught, he ends up in Dr. Connors’ most secret lab, and he gets bitten by
not one radioactive spider (as in
the original comics and the first Spider-Man film with Tobey Maguire) but a whole pride of
them, though only one actually penetrates — and in this version he even brings
the spider home with him. It’s not radioactive this time, either; it’s been
genetically engineered in Dr. Connors’ lab because his whole research approach
is to isolate genetic traits that enable other species to regenerate themselves
and insert them into human genomes. Dr. Connors is in the middle of animal tests
on this formula, and he’s bred a race of three-legged mice as his research
subjects. Most of the mice died, but when one lives and successfully grows an
additional limb to match the complement of them mice have naturally, the
formula is snatched away from him by Rajit Ratha (Irrfan Khan), who announces
that large-scale human trials must begin at once so the formula is ready before
Norman Osbourne croaks. Dr. Connors balks at this, and Ratha tells him that at
one point his associate Dr. Richard Parker had similar ethical concerns, only
they removed him — and Ratha tells Connors that the human trials will begin at
once at a local veterans’ hospital to which OsCorp’s charitable arm
contributes. When Connors refuses to go along, Ratha simply orders his entire
department closed and everyone in it fired. (In the earlier Spider-Man movies I noted the presence of a sort of
nervous-tic anti-corporatism, and here it is again: a movie whose production
budget is probably bigger than the gross domestic product of at least five
sub-Saharan African nations is railing against the immense, unanswerable and
irrevocable power of the 1 percent.)
Meanwhile, Peter Parker is developing
super-powers from his close encounter with Dr. Connors’ super-spider, and at
first he can’t control them — he turns his bathroom into a wreck the first time
he tries to use it post-transformation — and as in the earlier versions of the
story he doesn’t understand that with great power comes great responsibility.
He uses his powers mostly to get back at the tall, blond, hunky star athlete
Flash Thompson (Chris Zylka) who’s been bullying him at school — I suspect the
writers called him “Flash” as an homage to Flashman, the bully character in the novel Tom Brown’s School
Days, which set the clichés for
virtually every depiction of high school since — and to win over Flash’s girl,
Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), who’s not only a hot-shot science student but also the
daughter of police captain Thomas Stacy (Dennis Leary). One imdb.com
contributor noted that Gwen Stacy was Peter Parker’s first girlfriend in the
comic books, but she wasn’t; Peter’s original girlfriend was Betty Brant, a
trick of Spider-Man creators
Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to have the three principals in the stories (including
J. Jonah Jameson, Peter’s boss at the Daily Bugle — a plot element completely eliminated from this
version, probably because newspapers are so 20th century) have alliterative names;
later Betty was dumped from the comics and Gwen replaced her, and Gwen was
actually killed (giving the comic writers a powerful story arc showing Peter’s
grief) before Peter got to graduate from high school, go on to college and
start dating Mary Jane Watson, the name of his light o’love in the
Maguire/Raimi films. Anyway, Peter Parker’s disinclination to get involved when
a robber sticks up a bodega leads to the death of his uncle Ben, and the shock and grief smacks him
to attention and he gets serious about the superhero business.
Meanwhile,
rather than allow Ratha to use the poor old veterans in the nursing home as
human guinea pigs, Dr. Connors decides to inject himself with the rejuvenation
serum — and in the great tradition of self-experimentation gone wrong stories,
including the great-granddaddy of them all, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the injection turns him into the Lizard, a
400-pound living dinosaur but with Connors’ brain intact. (Charles said he had
no trouble suspending disbelief long enough to accept Peter Parker’s
transformation but he had a great deal of trouble with the Lizard because he’s
three times the size of Connors — Marvel had already pulled this gimmick with
the Incredible Hulk but at least in his case he was a creation of radioactivity, which presumably
could have expanded his atoms so he would be physically larger than he was as
Dr. Bruce Banner while still having the same mass — but the Lizard is not the result of atomic energy.) The rest of the
movie is typical superhero stuff, as the Lizard causes a wreck on the Brooklyn
Bridge (he’s trying to stop Ratha from getting the serum to the veterans’
hospital) and Spider-Man has to spin his webs (in this movie they’re a
mechanical/chemical device, not an intrinsic property of Spider-Man’s body; the comics started out with
Parker inventing a device that spun his webs, later shifted to an organic one,
and the Maguire/Raimi films made the webs organic from the get-go) and
Spider-Man has to rescue a kid from a burning car. The Lizard hides out in the
sewers under New York and Parker figures the only way to vanquish him is to
invent a device that will freeze him, since like real lizards he’s cold-blooded
and will suffer immobilizing paralysis from extreme cold.
The film times out at
two hours and 16 minutes, but it’s half over before Peter Parker finally gets
around to becoming Spider-Man and it’s at the two-thirds point before he has to
deal with the Lizard — who quite frankly isn’t a particularly interesting
super-villain (but then that’s been a weakness of all the current run of Spider-Man movies; aside from
Dr. Octopus in Spider-Man 2, they haven’t used most of the really imaginative villains from the
comics) — but overall it’s a good but not great entry in the current comic-book
superhero genre, with some marvelously
campy moments (notably a fight scene inside the Midtown Science High library,
in which one of the librarians is lost in a classical music piece he’s
listening to over headphones and is totally oblivious to the fight between
super-hero and super-villain going on just behind him) and a refreshing let-up
on the miseries and angst that the Maguire/Raimi films emphasized (Spider-Man 2 made the title character so doggedly unhappy and
unlucky I joked at the time it could have been called It’s a Wonderful Life,
Spider-Man) — though I had an odd
problem with Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man: he’s too good-looking, too sexy, to
be believable as the nerd. Still, no one goes to a movie like this for the
acting, and the ending (Thomas Stacy is killed in the final confrontation
between Spider-Man — whom he’s been trying to arrest and prosecute as a
vigilante all movie — and he extracts a promise from Spider-Man never to tell
what really happened) is not only well directed and well acted but genuinely
moving, ending the film on a sigh and a heartache rather than a baroque action
climax.
Like most movies today, it draws as much or more on older, better
movies than it does from life (even the weird, twisted version of it we get
from comic books); like just about everyone who makes a superhero movie today,
Marc Webb owes a lot to Tim
Burton and the urban-Gothic look he got out of his London-built sets of “Gotham
City” in the 1989 Batman, and as
Charles pointed out the experiments in Dr. Connors’ lab hearken back even
earlier, to H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau and the three films made from it. Still, The
Amazing Spider-Man is good entertainment,
blessedly lacking the forced “seriousness” of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies and Watchmen — Webb and his writers remain aware that their
story isn’t a great vehicle for making insightful comments on the human
condition; it’s just a super-powered cop chasing a super-powered crook across a
recognizable but stylized cityscape, and though it probably could have been cut
to about two hours without suffering anything, it’s fine (and fun) the way it
is.
