The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Review

Note: this blog has been migrated to Medium, with the articles here available to preserve permalinks. Please see this post at https://medium.com/@ianrbuck/the-amazing-spider-man-2-review-6b68fcb681bc#.49wweyh5r

I am really glad with how The Amazing Spider-Man movies have turned out. They have been much better than the Spider-Man trilogy from ten years ago. Part of the appeal for me has been Peter Parker's relatability. He's always struggling to make those he loves happy, but he often fails horribly. Granted, that's usually because he is living a secret life, but if he were perfectly relatable it wouldn't be an interesting movie.

The thing that stood out to me about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was how much the movie focused on the relationship between Peter and Gwen Stacy. Most superhero movies place much more emphasis on the villains the hero must face, with the love interest seeming more like a distraction from the real action. They did a very good job getting me invested in their relationship. It wasn't until after I watched the movie that I found out that Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield are a couple in real life, which explains why their performances together felt so real. Honestly, I would have enjoyed the movie even if it didn't have any big villains in it.

Let's talk about those villains then. I was totally expecting the Green Goblin to be the main antagonist, especially when Harry Osborn was introduced towards the beginning of the movie. However, I was much more interested in Electro (or as I like to call him, "Dubstep Man"). I was really digging his powers, and the way that they made one of his fight sequences look like an equalizer for the music that was playing was really cool. I wasn't really sold on the character's motivation though. He seemed pretty two-dimensional, focusing too much on the one phrase about being invisible. I suppose you can make an excuse about his transformation making him unstable, but that seems to be the cause behind a lot of Spider-Man's villains.

The best indicator for how much you will like this movie is how much you liked its predecessor. I enjoyed this one more, and I recommend it.