User blog comment:UltimateBub/What Spidey film was better?/@comment-1895174-20130630232707

Raimi's films are based in the first, Silver Age Spider-Man comics and it shows. Like the Silver Age comics, Raimi's films were able to find a good balance between humor (a goofy kind of humor that's also part of Raimi's style) and dealing with serious themes. Even Spider-Man 3, the weakest of the series, found a good balance between them. Sure, the jokes may have bombed (well, not all of them), but the film still had a strong emotional core. The dancing scene may have been a disaster, but it didn't make the audience's audible gasp when the scene ended with Peter hitting Mary Jane any less real.

If there's one thing to knock the Raimi films for, it's that they're not the best cast. Tobey Maguire was never right for Peter Parker, Kirsten Dunst is horrible as Mary Jane, and James Franco is...well... Then again, the original Spider-Man wasn't made at a time when superhero movies were guaranteed blockbusters, so, like with X-Men, an all-star cast couldn't be assembled for the film. Actually, Spider-Man is the reason why they're guaranteed blockbusters. As for Spider-Man 3, a huge part of why that film failed is because the studio execs forced Raimi to include Venom and the Black Suit. Those don't come out of the Silver Age, so they don't really belong in his movies.

The Amazing Spider-Man, on the other hand, is based on more modern series, particularly Ultimate Spider-Man, to its own detriment. It is both the most serious Spider-Man film to date (with Spidey's quips being the only real source of humor), and also the film with the most cartoonish villain and villainous plot. This works in comics like the Ultimate Spider-Man series because it came after almost 40 years of knowing the character and his mythos, and half the enjoyment of that series was just seeing how all these old characters were adapted for a modern setting. This is also why it doesn't translate well to film.

If there is anything The Amazing Spider-Man got right, it was the casting. Andrew Garfield has really come into the role, even down to the point where he walks off set in-costume and plays basketball with some young kids.

But if there's one thing The Amazing Spider-Man does that's unforgivable, it's that it's completely unnecessary. The film already suffered from the cynicism over rebooting the franchise so quickly, and that the film confused details in telling the story with actual, thematic differences in the story didn't help. Instead, it just comes off as cash-grab using a popular character.

Sure, the 2002 original (and movies in general) was made to make money, but it became more than that. It had enough of an authorial stamp to come off as a love-letter to the character, and even managed to tap into post-9/11 anxiety. And that translated into a film that sparked the creation of an entire genre. The Amazing Spider-Man would be lucky if it could have half the legacy Raimi's films have.


 * 1) Spider-Man 2
 * 2) Spider-Man
 * 3) The Amazing Spider-Man
 * 4) Spider-Man 3