It’s weird, realizing that watching The Amazing Spider-Man takes almost three hours because a lot of things take three hours — a week’s worth of cardio; a soufflé; Titanic — and most of those things have very little in common with Marc Webb’s tremulous, woobie-wonder reboot. (A woobie, for the uninitiated, is also known as an Andrew Garfield.)
Boy has parents who leave, then die. Boy grows up, gets bitten. Gets powerful. Boy angsts.
The film, much like its hero Peter Parker (that’d be Garfield, beneath a storm of hair), is capable of both outsized dramatic gawk and small epiphanies, and Webb enjoys himself while rolling through the origin story (it’s a reboot after Sam Raimi’s five-year-old trilogy, but also one that actually goes back to the beginning, Batman Begins-style). But his determination to bend the Marvel material to his own inclinations — less superheroic than super-adolescent — has its own casualties. The structure is a patchwork that keeps slamming audiences into small climaxes that never, themselves, quite climax. Perspective is flipped inside-out: Webb projects every moment through the prism of Garfield’s adolescence.
It’s smart filmmaking, because Garfield is a fleet, emotive charmer and because fleet, emotive charms can sustain pretty much any movie, for any length. But his front-and-self-centeredness hasn’t been built into a strong storytelling strategy: every emotional obstacle is actually just one emotional obstacle (Peter feels fatherless and abandoned, didn’t you hear?) that The Amazing Spider-Man keeps ramming back into, without new nuance or fresh developments.
Or put another way: count the number of on-screen adult males at the beginning of the movie. Count them again at the end. The difference is the film: one note distended to fill a symphony.
Are there villians? Sure. And Garfield battles them, in-between a romance with Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy. Is there spandex? Sure. And Garfield wears it, when he isn’t agonizing over his place in the city as, y’know, a teenager and citizen and, yes also, a superhero.
But is Peter agonizing, really? Garfield strikes a posture of agro-angst but his journey is done in comic-book bright letters. And Webb, as he proves on the heels of (500) Days of Summer, is more clever than he is incisive; quick with empathy — everything is feelings all the time — but little else. He presses forward heart-first.
All around this is an actual, panel-to-screen story, with blocks of acrobatic city destruction and speeches about the moral obligation of citizenry — not to mention Stone, curt and pop-eyed vulnerable, who plays an effervescent romantic duet with Garfield.
The Amazing Spider-Man is a slim, attendant film about adolescence.
Too bad that it’s also about superheroes.
The Flickering Image 