Stop it Marc Webb! Stop trying to trick me into being excited for The Amazing Spider-Man 2
For those of you just tuning in, I thought The Amazing Spider-Man was an awful movie and the worst kind of garbage that exists only to further studio politics (in this case Sony keeping the film rights to Spider-Man away from Marvel). It completely misunderstood the character of Peter Parker, had an absolutely nonsensical new take on the origin story, and backwardly aped all the beats from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man in a way that was patently inferior across the board. Spider-Man has always been my favorite superhero and The Amazing Spider-Man spit in the face of everything that Spider-Man is. On top of that it was just a bad movie.
But, of course, Sony doesn’t want to let the film rights to Spider-Man expire so they’re going to crank out a sequel to this awful movie, and I had every intention of completely writing it off. After all, it’s going to have most of the same cast and crew so why should I think things would be any different? Well, over the past few months news has been releasing for ASM2, and it’s becoming increasingly positive. First, news broke that the movie was going to be shot on film which is something I can always get behind, then it was announced that the film would feature the absolutely pitch-perfect casting of Paul Giamatti as The Rhino, and now, it’s all culminating with this, the redesigned Spider-Man suit.
From my estimation, that’s just about perfect; at the very least it’s a massive improvement over the ugly costume that Andrew Garfield wore in the first movie. Overall, it’s very similar to the costume from the Sam Raimi films with nearly identical webbing and texture. By all accounts this is a good thing; Toby Maguire’s Spidey costume was an almost perfect translation of Spider-Man’s iconic costume from page to screen, and so it’s a great place to start. There are a few subtle improvements, with the shape of the webbing being refined a bit and the Spider emblem altered slightly, but the biggest change are the larger, more rounded eyes, reminiscent of Mark Bagley’s design of the character for Ultimate Spider-Man. Say what you will about the Ultimate continuity, but I’ve always liked the look of Mark Bagley’s Spider-Man at the very least. The eyes are also the proper white/silver color this time around rather than the dumb gold-tinted sunglasses look of the previous film.
Compare this new version to the previous version.
See? Much better. Gone is the ugly rubbery basketball-like texture, gone are the stupid sunglasses eyes, and although we can’t see the bottom half I’m hoping that they’ve gotten rid of the silly ballet slippers he was wearing last time around. I love this new design, and I might even be inclined to say it’s the best incarnation of Spider-Man’s costume in film so far, but I’ll wait until I see the actual suit in action before I say for sure.
And that’s just it. I want to see it in action. I’m actually looking forward to it. However in the grand scheme of things, the ugly costume was a non-issue when compared to the deep-seeded story and character problems that plagued The Amazing Spider-Man. The decision to shoot on film won’t fix the main issues with this series, and even the fantastic casting choice for The Rhino won’t mean anything if they still can’t get Spider-Man himself right.
I love Spider-Man and I would really love to see a truly great Spidey film again, but after the absolute train wreck that was the last film, it’s going to take a lot more than a pretty costume to assuage my concerns over this newly rebooted series. Keep at it Webb, you’re starting to chip away at my cynicism here, but you haven’t quite broken me yet.
Source: ComingSoon.net
David Daut 