Trailer Reaction: The Amazing Spiderman 2

If you're of a film-watching persuasion (you must be, you're reading this!), then you'll no doubt have noticed that yesterday saw the premiere of the first trailer for The Amazing Spiderman 2.  If not, here it is:

This trailer has prompted no small amount of discussion amongst fans of Spiderman, comic book movies and blockbusters in general.  A lot of this has been devoted to 'Easter eggs', background details which have suggested future villains Spidey will face in the next films (Sony are looking at making this a four film series - AFTER WHICH THEY'LL ALLOW MARVEL STUDIOS THE RIGHTS TO INCLUDE HIM IN AN AVENGERS MOVIE - sorry, I don't know what came over me then!).  Immediately clear are Dr Octopus' arms, Vulture's wings, there's also tiny, tiny details referring Venom and Morbius.

These have been discussed in detail in other places (like here, here, and Empire‘s excellent breakdown here) so I just want to pick out some other things which struck me about the trailer.

Firstly, the visual look is much brighter.  The first Amazing Spiderman movie was mostly set at night - I think this was probably the studio executive's idea of making the film 'darker', because they apparently wanted to match the serious and dark tone of Nolan's Dark Knight Batman Trilogy.  Whilst that approach worked for that character, Spidey ain't Batman - not to say you can't get a serious portrayal of the character - outside of his villain show-downs, Peter Parker's life could be lifted out of a soap opera/drama!  Bright doesn't have to mean more 'comic', in a negative sense - but bringing Spidey out in to the light of day will benefit the character.

Secondly, it looks like the plot will be more coherent than its predecessor.  Watching 2012's reboot, you could tell that it was a film the director and writers were being 'interfered' with right until the final cut.  Story-lines were set up, and then abruptly left; entire characters went missing without explanation.  It is clear they wanted to set up an over-arching story involving the disappearance of Peter's parents, however by the final act of the film this had been forgotten (apart from a mid-credits stinger).  Not to mention the hunt for his Uncle Ben's killer, supposedly the trigger for his heroic, do-gooding vigilantism, which was also forgotten!  This sequel looks to be heavily based around the death of Peter's parents though, so while it probably won't resolve the entre plot until the fourth film, hopefully it'll handle the development of this narrative thread more effectively.

Thirdly, there'll be three villains - can this film balance them more effectively than others have?  The 'failure' of Sam Raimi's Spider-man 3 was largely blamed on the inclusion of three different villains (although I think the over-all lack of narrative and tonal coherence was more at fault), also it's seen as one of the biggest problems with the late 1990's Batman films (again, they had WAAAAAY more problems than that..!).  In this case, seeing as they're clearly wanting to build to a series-concluding showdown with the villain team Sinister Six, having more than one villain makes sense - it's how much is devoted to each which will be the issue.  Apparently Electro is the main villain (although you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise from this trailer) - which makes the inclusion of Rhino and Green Goblin an interesting prospect as to how they'll be handled.  Although sometimes it is important to give villains depth and breadth in their narrative development (especially as many of Spiderman's foes are 'dark reflections' of what could have happened to him, and in most cases are themselves victims of tragic accidents/circumstances), this isn't always the case.  A murderous thug with a grudge against Spidey, who gets his hands on some military grade armour, is pretty self explanatory!

Fourthly, this film feels more like a proper 'Spiderman' film than its predecessor did.  While Andrew Garfield's portrayal of the sarcastic, loved-up, teenage Peter Parker is widely accepted as a more realistic and better acted portrayal than Tobey Maguire's (although I think Maguire has done some solid acting work in Raimi's films and others he has been in), Raimi's films just seemed to capture the character and stories (in the first two films anyway) better than the prequel.  The only moment in the 2012 film where I really felt like I was truly watching a Spiderman movie was the (superbly executed) high school-set fight against The Lizard.  The way Spiderman crawled over objects and fought was in some-ways closer to the comics than many of the scenes in Raimi's films.  Aside from that, there just seemed something missing from the portrayal - more of that type of action.  It almost seemed that, in the attempts to make a 'darker' or more 'grounded' Spidey movie, they were actually embarrassed about making it a Spidey movie!  From the looks of this trailer though, the second film is a lot clearer about what it wants to be - that is, an unashamed Spiderman movie.  And that is very welcome!

Finally - and this is my biggest reservation - I still don't feel like they've done enough to justify the complete series reboot.  Despite embracing the character and trying to build an ongoing story with him, I'm still not convinced that there was any need to start from scratch with his origin story; the only problem from Raimi's films was his unfortunate tendency to kill off villains, so that seems the only justifiable reason for taking this approach.  Of course, the producers wanted to ape the tone of the Nolan Batman films (as stated above), but it's clear they've realised this doesn't suit Spidey - making it a bit redundant, really.

Because of this, and the concerns about rushing to include three villains in this film, I must admit I'm worried that Sony don't really know how to properly treat Spiderman.  There is part of me that wishes Disney/Marvel would simply buy the rights back from them - seeing how well the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been developing, they clearly know how to get their characters spot-on; so imagine what they'd do with Spidey!  Beyond this, there'd be so much more cross-over potential - and I'm not just talking about Spidey appearing in an Avengers movie!  You'd have Norman Osborn and Oscorp tussling with Tony Stark and his company, as well as him hiring a rogue's gallery of Marvel villains to take on the Avengers.  It's a real shame that no one though of this potential when different studios bought the rights to various characters, instead of the Marvel Universe as a whole...