The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (May 2014)

[Saitsu]

Yeah well, better this then anything else they’d have to concede to Fox.

[iShotto]

lol @ being upset about xmen plug. smh cmon dude…

[SNAAAAKE]

lol @ being upset

[T20thoughts]

lol @ being upset about xmen plug. smh cmon dude…

Not upset, just kinda confused at why anyone thought it was a good idea to do it that way.

[Dangerous_J]

I just saw it. I have mixed feelings. It was ok, but perhaps I was expecting a lot more.
I spent the last week watching the Spectacular Spder-man on blu ray, so maybe my expectations were higher.

Pros

Garfield,Stone,Sally Field and Dehaan’s acting.

Action /special fx

The chemistry between Peter/Gwen

For perhaps the first time in the live action films, Spider-mans humor was dead on. It felt straight out of the comics.

The webslinging/acrobatics/speed

Cons

Riddler, I mean electro. This “nerd turns on his hero” cliche needs a break.

The film was rushed , rushed, rushed. It felt like I was watching a collection of scenes edited togther rather than a continuous movie.

Peters Parents mystery- I really didnt give a crap about it to be honest. (lol at “Roosevelt”)

Dr Kafka being some NAzi b-movie scientist. She was a minor character from the comics, but change the name if the character is going to take me out of the movie acting-wise.

Electro’s theme sounded like something out of Jet Set Radio Future. Im surprised they didnt put Cibo Matto’s birthday cake song in there.

Nowhere as bad as Batman and Robin, but cant’ touch Cap2…

[Graphic]

Overall it was a good movie. Not nearly as good as Cap America 2 but good nonetheless. 7/10

[Shadowcuz]

Overall a fun movie, it kinda slowed down a bit after Electro’s first big appearance. The fight between Spidey and Electro was definitely eye candy. Also that scene between Peter and Aunt May where she was talkin about raising him hit me pretty good. This will be a blu-ray purchase.

[Foolinfection]

I really enjoyed this movie. Can’t believe that it’s almost universally getting shit on everywhere I go online. It’s probably the most “spider-man” spider-man film I’ve seen. I’d put it up there with Spider-man 2. I hated ASM1 and this one blew it out of the water

[KaboXx]

I think part of the reason it’s getting shit on was because of the pcaing the movie had. I enjoyed the movie alot, but i didn’t like how once we got to the 1st electro fight the movie picked up then the pacing of the slowed down again. After that it was about an hour of peter/gwen, peter trying to find what happened to his parents stuff. I shit you not my five year old nephew kept yawning thru out the movie and he loves spiderman. Then once we got to harry breaking electro out of ravencroft the movie picked up again. Had they trimmed the unnecessary love dilemma a bit down the movie wouldv’e been alot better.

[crotchpuncha]

Gwens such an important part of early Spiderman id hadly call the love scenes unnecessary

[makmak]

Dunno but I think all my hype exploded in cap 2 and died down while I was watching this. Good movie though. Still got a little to nitpick here and there as a comic book reader. Everyone knew gwen had it coming but I was surprised they did it in this sequel. I was expecting they will keep her till the 3rd one. Felicia hardy felt like she was just there for what? Also what happened to the supposed mary jane?

Yeah credit goes to sally field for the great acting. Yes we still like you.

[BigDewey]

Oh hey, this movie has a separate thread. Crosspost time!

Watched Amazing Spider-Man 2. It’s one of those movies where the more you discuss it, the more you realize just HOW MUCH wrong there is about it.

However, I enjoyed it overall. The good stuff is actually very good. Just… expect to roll your eyes a lot. A LOT.

I’d say it’s worth seeing, but too long and too overstuffed. Not because of the number of villains, as some feared, but ironically because of everything else. The villains do fine. There are just too many other plotlines. And so. Much. Time. Spent. Talking about them.

Spoiler

Peter talks about his parents to Mary. Mary talks about being stressed out over raising him and getting an extra job. Peter and Gwen talk SO VERY MUCH about their relationship and maybe they should be together and maybe not and she’s going to London and and and. Norman Osborn expositions to his son Harry. Harry Osborn talks to his lawyers in the board room. Peter and Harry talk about old times.

It got to the point that midway through the movie, a roughly ten-year-old kid behind me asked his dad what time it was. When your colorful designed-for-mass-appeal superhero movie has the kids downright BORED, you’re doing it wrong. And it’s not like these conversations have an adult appeal either. They’re just too much.

Which is a dang shame, because there’s a perfectly fun, entertaining movie buried in there. Electro looked dumb in the trailers, but he works both as a (comic-book-style) character and as a villain. I even don’t mind his super-cheesy soundtrack, because it feels… actually wonderfully comic-booky. Goblin works well too, and I get his motivations and his descent into crazy. The current Peter/Spidey incarnation I actually like a lot. He’s jokey and awkward, the suit looks awesome, he moves well. Gwen works as a character, even if their whole romance subplot gets too long and complicated for the number of subplots present in the movie.
The fights are pretty great, once you get used to the fact that they run on comic-book logic. Which they so very much do. But that’s okay, because this is an unabashed comic-book movie on the high points.

It’s just such a damn shame that Amazing Spider-Man 2 can be such a pretentious little shit at times. There is the length, yes, which smacks of the director not being allowed to cut away too many of the studio’s precious franchise-building babies.

The prime example being a bit of inheritance from the previous movie:

[details=Spoiler]The movie opens with a flashback of Peter’s parents recording a video, leaving Peter with his aunt and uncle, and then boarding a plane. While they’re in this plane, Peter’s dad sets about uploading this apparently vitally important file somewhere via satellite. They exchange this relieved glance. And of course there’s a killer on the plane, and they fight for their life, while also doing their damnedest to upload the file. Never mind the insane sturdiness of the laptop, which somehow manages to keep uploading while they’re having a zero-gravity fight in the middle of a plummeting plane, but there’s SO MUCH emphasis on this one file getting somewhere.
So this means Peter has to spend time trying to figure out what the hell his parents were up to. It’s a big part of the movie. He covers his room in a mind-map, has angsty talks with his aunt about it. And finally there’s this secret lab in a subway carriage that literally lifts out from beneath the train tracks. And the payoff?
They show no other stuff having been uploaded there, so literally the thing Peter’s dad fought tooth and nail for in that airplane was a video of him saying, without presenting any evidence for it, that Oscorp is up to no good (and by the way he loves his son). The ONLY - literally the ONLY piece of useful information in the video is that the spider-gene-healing-stuff they were working on at Oscorp won’t work on anyone without Parker DNA.
Congratulations, you big damn scientist genius. You fought so hard to upload a VIDEO just for that? No additional files? Like, documents to PROVE all this? Just a video of your halfassed testimony?[/details]
Extra stuff might turn up later, but so far this whole legacy plotline they’ve inserted into the “Amazing” franchise has been an utter fuckup.

And again, all this stuff takes up so much time and focus that should’ve been spent on the actual in-movie plot. Which leads us to the romance, and the “payoff” for all that:

[details=Spoiler]So this is the movie where they kill Gwen. This means they have to spend time making us invested in her, in case we didn’t see the previous movie and/or didn’t get invested in her then.
However, rather than presenting Gwen as Peter’s anchor, with some guilt on the side for not obeying her dad’s final request, they go back and forth and back and forth through the entire movie. It’s a will they/won’t they stretched out over the course of an entire movie, further distracting from the plot.
He’s all into her, but then he sees her dad all over the place, and then he angsts about it to her, and then she breaks up with him, and then they try to get back together as friends (and by the way he’s been stalking her the entire time as Spider-Man, to which her reaction is just “aww, that’s so cute”), but then she’s going to London, and then he can’t deal with that, and then he decides he can deal with that, and then they get back together properly just in time for Goblin to recognize that she’s his girlfriend and kill her.
And here’s where the movie’s extra-super-pretentiousness goes into high gear. They have so many faux-artsy moments together. Him walking slowly and ignoring traffic as he thinks they’re getting back together with a navel-gazing pop song playing in the background, for instance.
And worst of all, when they finally DO have a really greatly done, touching variation on him catching her with a web line but her dying anyway, they ruin it with one. Fucking. Stupid. Thing.[/details]

Now let me play that scene out for you.

[details=Spoiler]So Goblin decides to drop Gwen into a clock tower. Spidey catches her, and she’s dangling down amongst the clockwork while the two guys are having a good, fast-paced fight further up. The web-line snaps, and she’s falling down amongst debris. Peter sends a desperate web-line after her. You feel the tension.

And then the end of the web-line turns into a goddamned tiny web-hand reaching out for her.

Let me repeat that. The end of the web-line turns into a goddamned tiny web-hand reaching out for her.

The web catches her by the waist, just in time to save her whole body from hitting the floor. But her head does, and it’s perfectly shot. You hear the nasty thump from it, and you know what’s happened before Peter, and his gradual realization is played out really, really well.

But it’s all ruined, because you’re still not done laughing incredulously at the tiny stupid-looking web-hand.[/details]

There’s other, relatively minor stupidity, but this is getting too long already. Suffice to say, I totally understand the haters of this movie. I know a lot of people whose movie experience would be utterly ruined by all this. Mine wasn’t. Because I enjoyed what was enjoyable, and there WAS a lot to enjoy. Roughly an hour and a half of well-played, well-shot goofy comic-book enjoyment, in fact. And then half an hour of “enh, okay”, and half an hour of “what why why why why moviemakers why”.

Oh, and finally, the mid-credits stinger. I’m not going to put it under a spoiler tag because it isn’t a spoiler. It’ has nothing at all to do with the movie. The mid-credits stinger is a scene from the coming X-Men movie. Even though the two universes aren’t connected, that I know of. I wonder if it hints at an eventual actual connection, but for now I’m gonna chalk it up to more dumb.

EDIT: Initial reports say something else appears in the end credits. However, in the movie I saw,

Spoiler

the Sinister Six tease is actually put in BEFORE the end credits, and before the Rhino encounter at the very end. And at that, by the way, hilarious that they gave Rhino so much space in the trailer when he gets that little screen time in the actual movie.

I saw it with my Family, my Mom at the end pretty much came to a similar conclusion saying “I came to see a Spider-Man movie, not some lovey-dovey shit where spoiler happens!”

I saw similar problems, but understood everything going on based off the previous movie and tried to explain it to her. She pointed out similar issues with the romantic angle being explored and how it was a huge buzzkill.

My view: I do feel like the movie could’ve cut-out certain parts of the franchise expanding stuff to make a much more cohesive and enjoyable movie. It’s tough to do considering how weaved-in this stuff is, but it would’ve done wonders for all the characters involved.

It’s still a solid movie though, just not a great one. 7/10

[Alexisdabomb]

Spoiler

What a piece of shit.

[T20thoughts]

Gwens such an important part of early Spiderman id hadly call the love scenes unnecessary

Some love scenes needed to be there, yes. But they didn’t have to be so godawfully complicated. Hell, the subplot they did might not have been out of place in a different movie (though even then they probably could’ve spent less time on it). But in THIS movie they had about five other subplots happening at the same time. It all adds up.

[Sensei_Rouzu]

Love stories bug the hell out of me in superhero movies. I almost hate in them in fact. The beginning of this film I thought was kind of boring. Max’s character before transformation felt extremely cheesy and was kind of hard to watch at points. Goblin was definitely rushed, but other than that it was good.

[Saitsu]

Well maybe if we got less Heroes with Love Interests in general, we’d get less movies bothering with Love Stories.

[Sensei_Rouzu]

lore

Spoiler

Hey, now that Gwen died like I was eagerly waiting for maybe we won’t have one in Spider-man for a while?

[Saitsu]

lore

Spoiler

Hey, now that Gwen died like I was eagerly waiting for maybe we won’t have one in Spider-man for a while?

Spoiler

You really think they aren’t going to bring in MJ the next movie? Hell, they’ve been trying to fit her into the last two.

[po_pimpus]

LOL you know damn well Mary Jane is coming in the next one. Get ready for some more romantic tension.

[Lantis]

And don’t we have Felicia Hardy there too? Spidey just can’t get enough bitch drama…