Why the Amazing Spider-Man Movies Still Have Devoted Fans Despite Their Messy Storytelling

The Amazing Spider-Man films wrapped up roughly 12 years ago, and they left an interesting legacy on the Spider-Man fandom. Andrew Garfield's two movies were never the most praised films in the world, and many would argue both range from mediocre to straight up bad, but it is undeniable that these films have their fans, and more specifically, that Garfield's Peter Parker has fans. So much so that the actor got a wave of love and support after the release of No Way Home. What I wanted to do is dive deep into what makes these movies falter, and what it is about them that has earned so much love despite their quality.

A Reboot Was Born When Sam Raimi Rejected the Spider-Man 4 Scripts

On January 11th, 2010, Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios announced that instead of continuing with Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 4, the film would be canceled and Spider-Man would be rebooted. Several screenplays had been written for Spider-Man 4, but Raimi rejected all of them, which led him to leave the project. Instead of continuing without him, a reboot was ordered. Allegedly, there wasn't as wide a director search for this movie as there was for the original Spider-Man, and shortly after, Marc Webb, who had only one directorial feature under his belt with 500 Days of Summer, was chosen.

Webb was a fan of the Raimi films but made it a point that he wanted to present a new version of Spider-Man rather than retread what Raimi had done with Tobey Maguire. Many actors were considered for Peter Parker, including Michael Angarano, Drake Bell, Jamie Bell, Frank Dillane, Alden Ehrenreich, Josh Hutcherson, Aaron Johnson, Joe Jonas, Logan Lerman, and Anton Yelchin, before Andrew Garfield was announced on July 1st, 2010. Rather than recasting MJ, the film brought in Gwen Stacy, a minor character in Spider-Man 3, as Peter's love interest. Dianna Agron, Lily Collins, Georgina Haig, Ophelia Lovibond, Dominique McElligott, and Mia Wasikowska were considered before Emma Stone was cast in October 2010, reportedly because she and Garfield had instant chemistry during screen tests.

Webb wanted these movies to focus much more on Peter's intelligence, something that wasn't a major factor in the Raimi trilogy, so Garfield's Spider-Man built artificial web shooters rather than having natural ones. Principal photography ran from December 2010 to May 2011, and The Amazing Spider-Man was released on July 3rd, 2012.

Marc Webb Clearly Understood Spider-Man Even When the Story Didn't

Before diving into the specifics, I want to give my overall take on both films. It's rare for me to see movies that most people agree aren't that good but still have a pretty big audience. It's not uncommon for someone to say Andrew Garfield is their favorite Spider-Man, and the only other films I can think of with a similar dynamic are the Star Wars prequels, which are pretty bad yet have plenty of fans. After rewatching both movies, I found the mandate Webb had to make them different from the Raimi films is definitely present, and after watching all five movies nearly back to back, I think that's a great thing, because superheroes have had so many interpretations and I love that this take is so different.

I also have to acknowledge my own bias. I grew up on the Raimi films, and I vividly remember wearing the Spider-Man suit around my apartment at six or seven years old in 2004. So watching these movies, I had to remind myself that things like Peter riding his skateboard aren't negatives of the film, just my personal preference not matching the version of Peter in my head.

My big conclusion is that Marc Webb clearly understands Spider-Man. Both movies have moments that just scream Spider-Man to me. The scene in the first movie where Peter saves a kid from a falling car is probably my favorite scene in either film, and I'd argue these scenes are the best Spider-Man specific moments we've ever gotten. I'd also argue the character dynamics are stronger here than in the Raimi films. I never fully bought Peter and Harry as best friends or Peter and MJ's chemistry in those movies, but Peter and Gwen are running circles around them. The reason I don't think these movies are very good is that the writers could not string these beautiful moments into a coherent narrative. The seeds are planted for something great, but they're never watered enough to bloom.

Grief and Three Father Figures Drive the First Film's Coming of Age Story

The Amazing Spider-Man is pretty much all about grief and fatherhood. A huge pillar for this version of Peter is the death of his father, something completely missing from the previous films, and I really liked that addition. Throughout the movie Peter picks up three father figures: Uncle Ben, Curt Connors, and eventually Officer Stacy. This is a coming of age story that uses those three figures to help Peter grow up, and on paper the elements could make a great story, but the writers didn't tie them together well.

Ben in this film feels a lot more like a real person, having multiple conversations with Peter to try to help him through his grief. This Peter is more prone to abusing his power than the earlier version, taking joy in embarrassing Flash and later in attacking criminals. A heated argument between Ben and Peter about the absence of his father leads Peter to storm off, and Ben follows him to his death. Because the film has repeatedly emphasized how losing his father impacted Peter, Ben's death hits harder for that reason alone.

The impact of Ben's death plays out differently than in the Raimi films. There, it was Ben's words about great power and great responsibility that motivated Peter to do good. Here, I don't know if this was intentional, but Ben's death doesn't lead Peter toward doing good. It leads to him getting closer to Connors and taking his anger out on criminals, spending his time searching for Ben's killer without ever finding him, instead beating up and humiliating criminals and handing them to police. I don't hate this change. I personally still prefer the Raimi direction, where Uncle Ben is a key pillar of Peter's identity, but I can't say I hate what this movie tried to do.

Curt Connors and the Lizard Had a Perfect Mirror to Peter That the Movie Never Uses

Connors is arguably the second most important character in this film, and he's so interesting because the first half of the movie builds a great foundation for him and his relationship with Peter, only to fumble it completely in the second half. After Ben's death, Peter turns to Connors as his next father figure, and for the first half this really works. Marc Webb has said that both Peter and Connors use their powers to fill a hole in their lives, Peter to fill the hole his father's death left and Connors to fill the hole of his missing arm. Both are outcasts, and both initially use their new power for personal vengeance, Peter against criminals and Connors against those who wronged him. A conversation with Officer Stacy, who challenges Spider-Man for seeming more concerned with revenge than with helping people, changes Peter, who never again looks for Ben's killer after that. Connors never makes that same change.

Everything up to this point I really liked, but this is where the missed opportunities start. Connors' turn into the Lizard is mishandled badly. There's no real inclination of him becoming a villain in the first half beyond his insecurities about his missing arm, but after he injects himself with the serum he goes from zero to a hundred, feeling the need to fix the whole world of weakness with no problem killing people. There's clearly some mental element tied to the serum, but the movie doesn't explain it, and apparently a number of deleted scenes that would have developed this were cut from the final film.

The bigger failure is how Connors' turn should have affected Peter and didn't. Since both characters mirror each other in using their powers to fill a personal void, Peter stopping Connors and taking away his power should have given him real pause, a reflection on why he'd rob someone else of the thing that made them feel whole, but the film skips straight to Peter simply deciding to stop him. A deleted scene reportedly showed Peter struggling with exactly this, with Connors making that same point, but it isn't in the final cut. Another deleted scene, set shortly after Ben's death, has Connors tell Peter, "We must be greater than what we suffer," a perfect line for their conflict that the ending never pays off. Connors is also the last father figure Peter has left at this point, so the fight should carry the weight of Peter deciding whether he can kill the man who has been there for him, echoing the sacrifice theme that runs through the best Spider-Man material, but the film never asks that question. Peter reports Connors to Officer Stacy without hesitation, missing the point of the character entirely.

Peter's Broken Promise to Officer Stacy Undercuts the Ending

The last piece of the first film I want to raise is Officer Stacy's role and how it shapes the ending. In the third act, Peter reveals himself to Stacy to save Gwen, and Stacy lets him go. In the final fight, Stacy is killed, but not before asking Peter to promise to keep Gwen out of Spider-Man related business to protect her. Peter agrees, and this is echoed when he later tells Gwen he has to stay away from her to keep her safe. Right before the credits roll, though, Peter jokes that he's going to break that promise, Gwen smiles, and the movie ends. By the start of the second film, they're together.

I really hate this. Imagine if the first Raimi movie ended with Peter letting MJ go to protect her, only to walk right back and say, "Just kidding," before kissing her. That's essentially what happens here. Peter's number one character trait in this movie is his daddy issues, so having him ignore Gwen's father's dying words so quickly, after struggling all movie to find meaning in his relationship with his own father, feels wrong to me. I wouldn't mind Peter eventually deciding to be with Gwen, but the speed of the reversal is the problem. I think the sequel is stronger if Peter and Gwen don't get back together here at all, cutting the repeated breakup and reunion cycle across both films and instead having them reunite midway through the second movie only for Gwen to die shortly after, which would make her death hit even harder. The Amazing Spider-Man scored 71 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with a 77 percent audience score and a 6.9 on IMDb, and it grossed $757 million at the box office, the seventh highest grossing movie of 2012.

Studio Meddling Turned The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Into an Unfocused Mess

Sony was happy enough with the first film's performance that the sequel was greenlit, and after some contract disputes were resolved, Marc Webb and Garfield both returned. There isn't much of an interesting production story here beyond the fact that Shailene Woodley was reportedly cast as MJ and scenes with her were filmed but all cut from the final movie. Principal photography ran from February to June 2013. A major storyline behind the scenes was studio interference, with a lot of the finished film cut in post production so the studio could put a bigger focus on setting up a wider cinematic universe to compete with the MCU. Despite that, the film finished on time and was released May 2nd, 2014.

This is a much more extreme version of the first movie in almost every way. It has a bit more visual style, with the shot of Spider-Man saving people on the street and Gwen falling both standing out compared to a first film I always thought was a little visually dull. Peter and Gwen have the best romance of any Spider-Man movie here, and the ending where Peter returns to save a child is a beautiful moment. Despite that, this is one of the messiest movies I have ever seen, spreading itself across four distinct plotlines: the conspiracy around Peter's father, Electro becoming a villain, Harry becoming a villain, and Peter's relationship with Gwen. None of these storylines connect to each other in any meaningful way, and the movie is spread so thin that only the Gwen storyline feels like it lands. When I looked up what the movie's theme is supposed to be, it's reportedly about time, about not having enough of it and needing to appreciate what you have, largely delivered through Gwen's opening speech, but that theme is barely explored elsewhere and feels hollow when it does appear.

The Conspiracy About Peter's Parents Goes Nowhere

The film opens with a flashback showing Peter's parents trying to kill the spider project before Oscorp kills them for it, then that storyline is essentially ignored for an entire hour. Peter eventually starts investigating, throws a calculator at a wall to find hidden coins, follows them to a secret underground railroad, and finds his father's hidden lab, a chain of clues so convoluted that I called it out as too much, comparing it to a Da Vinci Code plot rather than a Spider-Man movie. Layering in a subplot of Aunt May training to become a nurse only adds to the lack of focus.

I didn't mind Peter's parents mattering in the first film, but here it's implied his father is one of the smartest people ever, and the reveal that only Peter could become Spider-Man because his father put his own DNA in the spider venom struck me as too much fake science even for a superhero movie. His father's recorded message does say, "I wish I had more time," which technically ties to the film's stated theme, but simply having him say the line doesn't make the whole plotline thematically relevant. Once Peter learns the truth, it's never brought up again and never affects anything else happening in the story. It seems to exist purely to set up a third film that never got made, making it a waste of time in the movie we actually got.

Electro Is "A Truly Awful Villain" With No Reason to Exist

Max Dillon's storyline has nothing to do with the film's stated theme as far as I can tell. He exists solely so there can be a bad guy by the end. Peter saves Max early on, and Max is established as a huge Spider-Man fan who works at Oscorp, conveniently having built the electrical grid where the final fight happens and also being the one who falls into electric eels to become Electro. His story centers on craving attention, having no family or friends and getting bullied at work. He doesn't love Spider-Man so much as he loves the idea of getting that same adoration, and when he finally gets a taste of it in Times Square, Spider-Man showing up and reportedly stealing the spotlight is enough to turn him into a villain who wants to kill people.

After Peter stops him, Max disappears for roughly an hour, resurfacing for an interrogation scene where he memorably declares, "I am Electro," before Harry frees him purely so he can fight Peter at the climax. There's nothing less interesting to me than a villain whose only motivation at the climax is that he hates the hero. The final fight at the electrical grid is cool visually but shallow thematically, and the writers seem to have known it, throwing in a random plane that will crash unless Electro is stopped, a plane with no connection to any character, purely there to manufacture stakes. It is one of the most shameless devices I can remember seeing in a movie like this.

Harry Osborn's Turn to the Green Goblin Is Shallow Compared to the Raimi Trilogy

The setup for Harry requires buying that he and Peter are close friends despite Harry never being mentioned in the first film. His storyline centers on his father dying of a genetic disease that Harry now has, so he spends the movie racing to cure himself before he suffers the same fate, which does loosely tie into the theme of valuing time. I don't love his story because he's a pretty two dimensional character, given one scene establishing daddy issues before everything else becomes a survival plot. In the Raimi trilogy, Harry's issues with his father and his legacy were developed across an entire trilogy; here, because the film is so cluttered, we never get a strong sense of why Harry is the way he is. It's also confusing that Harry is only twenty and treated as though he's weeks from death, when the story might have worked better thematically if he had thirty years left and was still wasting his time chasing a cure.

Harry's plot also falls into the pseudoscience I dislike in this movie, with the scene where he asks Peter to get him Spider-Man's blood because Peter is his photographer being unintentionally funny, along with the idea that Harry assumes Peter knows Spider-Man just from having photographed him once. When Spider-Man won't give him his blood, Harry turns hateful and spends the rest of the film trying to hurt him, eventually becoming the Green Goblin. Like so much of this movie, Harry's arc doesn't have real depth and barely connects to the larger themes.

Peter and Gwen Remain the Best Part, Even With a Death I Wanted Handled Differently

To close out the discussion of this film, Peter and Gwen are clearly its strongest element. Their chemistry is infectious, so when Gwen dies it does feel devastating. I don't love the back and forth of them being together, then not, more than once, and I think their kiss on the bridge would hit harder if that were the first time they were officially a couple in the story. I'd also propose that letting Peter's decision to give up being Spider-Man sit for longer than the five screen minutes it actually gets, ideally carried into a third film with its own arc about him putting the suit back on, would have been more powerful, though I recognize that film never happened, and I'm not sure how a version of Peter who never went back to being Spider-Man would even fit into his later appearance in No Way Home. Regardless, this dynamic remains the clear best part of a film that is otherwise unorganized and messy.

Poor Reviews and a Sony Marvel Deal Ended the Trilogy Before It Started

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 scored 50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with a 64 percent audience score and a 6.6 on IMDb, grossing $708 million, not a bomb but only the ninth highest grossing film of the year and the lowest grossing Spider-Man movie up to that point. At the time there were plans not just for a third film but for a wider Sony cinematic universe, but the so-so reviews and box office results left the studio lacking confidence in the series going forward. Sony eventually got a call from Kevin Feige asking whether they wanted to fold a new Spider-Man into the MCU, and Sony agreed almost instantly, canceling The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and moving Peter Parker into his own new trilogy within the MCU.

If it's not just the quality of these movies that keeps bringing people back to them, what do you think it is?