The Amazing Spider-Man 2

     So I've written a review of the first trilogy(and those are spectacular movies). And  then when The Amazing Spider-Man came out, we(as a youth group) had to go see it. And so, since we(as a family) missed the sequel the first time, we thought we'd go see it at the dollar theater. Which me, Mom, Courtney and Trevor did yesterday afternoon. But first we re-watched The Amazing Spider-Man before we left. It turned out to actually be a very well-made film. True, like I've said before, the acting was overdone and the storyline was shallow, but it was an action movie more than anything else, and being so, the other aspects could be forgiven, somewhat. My favorite scenes are still the ones where Peter asks Gwen out, and then Aunt May commenting that Gwen was pretty right after Captain Stacy's funeral.

     In an interview between the first and second films of the rebooted series, Emma Stone said that while Peter was the muscle of their team, Gwen was the brains. And that's a very good summary of their interaction and roles.

     TASM2 opens with the same scene as the first, but from a different perspective, focusing on Richard Parker, instead of four-year-old Peter playing hide-and-seek like the first movie. (I love that trick of storytelling.) As I said about two years ago, "It's a darker, more realistic world....The dialogue feels more true-to-life, which somehow loses points, even though technically it should be better."
     After dropping Peter off at Uncle Ben and Aunt May's, Richard and Mary hop onto a private jet and plan to stay as far away from Oscorp as possible. An assassin murders the pilot and an intense fight follows, including a pistol going off, someone hurtling through a window, and a massive file transfer, before the plane crashes.
     Fourteen years later, Peter has been bitten by one of Richard's leftover spiders, Uncle Ben's been shot, Captain Stacy has died and Curt Connors has been incarcerated for his actions as the Lizard. And Peter's gotten used to this do-gooding Spider-Man gig. It keeps him busy, though. So busy, in fact, that he nearly misses his own high school graduation, a fact which valedictorian Gwen isn't too happy about. But there was this Russian thug named Alexei Sysetevich hijacking an Oscorp armored truck. During this chase, Spidey both delivers, well, amazing snarky commentary(sorry, I couldn't help it) to the criminal and saves the life of a pathetic Oscorp engineer named Max Dillon.
     During the fight, Peter sees a vision of Captain Stacy and remembers his wishes for keeping his daughter safe. Peter is twisted between his striving to keep his promise and yearning to be with Gwen. Exasperated from this well-worn internal battle, she breaks up with him that night.
     Harry Osborn comes back to New York to see his dying father Norman, who in addition to bitterly expressing his disappointment in his son, also tells Harry that he too has the hereditary retroviral hyperdisplaisia disease. Norman gives Harry a cube which apparently contains his life's work. Norman dies the next day.
     A now-Spidey-obsessed Max is pitifully lacking anything close to a life, feels invisible, and is extremely, unbearably sensitive(he makes Danny Rebus from The Electric Company look normal). Especially annoyed at no one noticing (or caring) that it's his birthday, a slip while doing maintenance work becomes a massive catastrophe. It's a big headache for top people at Oscorp, given the already-shaky investor confidence following the Connors episode. Following an awkward board meeting where newly-installed CEO Harry meets the board members and an even worse reunion scene between Harry and Peter, some unnamed board member hushes up the Dillon accident, citing the already-shaky investor confidence levels after the Connors episode.
     Gwen tells Peter that she might move to England for school, as she's one of the finalists for a hugely prestigious Oxford scholarship. While they're talking about it, Max, now a human power station, wanders into Times Square and inadvertently causes a blackout. The police show up, and Max defends himself animal-like, scared and with no idea what's going on, lashing out at anyone seen as a threat. Spider-Man attempts to calm him down, but those efforts fail when he doesn't remember who Max is. Enraged, Max, now calling himself Electro, attacks everything in sight, and the police fire at him, which doesn't help matters, and Spider-Man has to rescue the numerous civilians watching the scene. Electro is taken to the Ravencroft Institute for the Criminally Insane, where he's experimented on by a German named Dr. Kafka.
     Harry decides that Spider-Man's blood could possibly save him, but is turned down both by Peter and Spider-Man, and the Oscorp board fires Harry after framing him of covering up Max's accident. Harry's assistant Felicia tells him about secret equipment that could save him, so he makes a deal with Electro to get inside the building. In the Special Projects hidden lab he finds a glider and flightsuit, as well as antivenom, tentacles, a rhino-like exoskeleton and mechanical wings. This all hurriedly creates the Green Goblin, and Harry races off to find Spider-Man.
     Throughout the movie Peter's been trying to uncover more about his parents' disappearance(Aunt May doesn't much like this) and he discovers a hidden subway station lab where Richard hid the information about his work, knowing that Oscorp would use it as a biogenetic weapon. Gwen finds out she got the scholarship and plans to head to England immediately to get a head start on her studies. She gets stuck in traffic, which gives him time to say "I love you" dramatically, They get back together and make plans for him to come with her when they see Electro heading to the main power grid to take the entire city's power and they rush away to stop him.
     With Gwen's smarts and Peter's skills, they defeat Electro by overloading his electricity charge, only to have Harry/Green Goblin come sailing in and kidnap Gwen as revenge for Spider-Man not cooperating with a blood transfusion. The following fight takes them to a clock tower, and in the melee Gwen hurtles towards the ground and Peter tries to save her, but she dies.
     Months pass, and Peter is still deeply grieving her loss, he's stopped crime-fighting he's been so depressed. Harry is in Ravencroft, his condition improving, and plans are made to take out Spider-Man for good. Inspired by Gwen's graduation speech and a little boy's courage, he gets back into the superhero game by again taking on that Russian thug Sysetevich, now dressed in a heavily-weaponized rhino-themed exoskeleton. The end.

     I enjoyed it(but it's hard to not like superhero movies, unless it's The Fantastic Four or X-Men), but this was a strange movie. Several times I had to stop and wonder, "Wait....what's happening?!" There were way too many undeveloped characters, and there were huge plot holes that were skipped over or extremely poorly-connected. (Like Norman's death, how Peter-Gwen-Harry knew each other, or why Peter was under surveillance.) And most of the dialogue from the previews was absolutely nowhere to be found, which is always extremely annoying. Norman dies immediately, and Harry rapidly becomes the Green Goblin and then just as quickly is in jail. It's the second movie of a planned quartet, so that obviously leaves lots of questions unanswered, but still....this story was not very well done. And it's really long....two hours and 21 minutes. I did like Max, though, his character was well-written.

     There were some good bits of dialogue, though; like Peter and Aunt May arguing over whose job it is to wash his clothes. Or when Spider-Man knocks on the door of the runaway semi. Or repeatedly calling Electro "Sparkles". Gwen's graduation speech is good, and when she says that yes, he is Spider-Man, and she loves that, but she loves Peter Parker more, and that makes all the Spidey stuff worth it. Or when she accidentally screams out "PETER!" to a retreating Spider-Man and then instantly clamps a hand over her mouth, looking horrified. And I really liked the way they filmed her falling and then him standing by the grave as the season change.

     Peter says at one point in this film,  about Spider-Man, "I like to think he gives people hope." And he does. Andrew Garfield's portrayal is different than Tobey Maguire's, but it's a completely different take on the same character. Garfield plays a better Spider-Man, but Maguire was a better Peter Parker. But they're two different takes on the same story. So that's all right. And Spider-Man, and all superheroes generally, gives people hope, inspires them to keep going, keep fighting, trying to improve their speck of the world.