Review of Spider-Man (1977) by Sam J — 09 Jan 2018

There were parts I liked and parts I hated. Generally, I just found myself confused why this film exists. It's a very competent film with mostly good characters. Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy was great and Andrew Garfield did enough to be interesting even with the expected comparisons to Tobey Maguire's take on the hero. There are some less-than-stellar characters; Ifans' Dr. Connors was unbelievable (due to writing) and Leary's Captain Stacy wasn't given nearly enough time or story.

There are many problems I have with this film. I don't care how nitpicky they sound, when a studio unnecessarily reboots a franchise, they'd better have an extraordinary reason for doing so. As expected, they didn't. I liken this to a more lame fan film version of the original Spider-Man film. It's just... okay in every way. The film really is acceptable, there really are a few good parts. But WHY? There is nothing in the movie that necessitated a re-boot. All the good parts could have been part of Spider-Man 4.

Garfield has some good moments as a more sarcastic Spiderman, and the fights were really great. But, once again, the retread over the same story was boring, pointless, [slightly offensive to fans,] and really hampered the whole story. The whole film really just made me wonder how great Spider-Man 4 could have been had they taken the new elements to the action, fights, and characters in The Amazing Spider-Man and applied them to Spider-Man 4. As I said, the new additions are mostly acceptable (or at least are good ideas), but could have easily worked to better effect without the pointless retread. Why not make Maguire's Peter Parker more sarcastic? Why not make Spider-Man 4's fight scenes more brutal and ad first-person shots of flying? Why not add in a Captain Stacy character? Why not make the Lizard tied directly to Parker in Spider-Man 4? They already had the character set up for his reveal in the original trilogy. This movie is pointless.