First thing's first, despite beign over 2 hours long this film feels rushed like hell. We really don't get to dwell on anything for more than 5 minutes or so, it's like they just wanted to get all the origin stuff out of the way, so I have to ask why they even bothered to do this movie then. Just jump to him being Spiderman, it can still be a reboot without going back to the very start. Everything is jam packed in there and relationships between characters only happen for a few scenes but we're supposed to believe there's a great connection between them after that. The example that frustrated me the most of this was Captain Stacy. Peter has literally three scenes with him, none of which were positive encounters, he dies and Peter is acting as if he just lost a good friend. Let's add that onto it too; they kill Captain Stacy in the first film. Nevermind that Peter barely knows him, we barely know him. Oh, and that promise he gets Peter to make, that was just incredibley pointless. I get the idea of he makes a promise not to get Gwen involved so acts a bit distant to her, okay makes sense even if it is incredibly dickish. Such a situation is typically used ot create a bit of drama between the two romantic leads so it can build up to them getting back together in the future and if they're not involved then it stops the typical damsel in distress from happening again and again. But then Gwen turns around and tells him she knows that's what her dad would've said to him, okay so now we've lost the tension on Gwen's end because she knows exactly why he's doing it, but you can still use it. That is until 5 minutes later when Peter tells her he's not going ot keep the promise anyway. Good job, you just did a subplot of an entire other movie in the space of about 10 minutes.
This gets me onto another big bug bear: the reveals. So, Spidey reveals his identity to not only Gwen, who he has seriously shared very little screen time with at that point, but it's also clear that Aunt May catches on quick and then to Captain Stacy too. Again, I understand the basic principle of this, they want to avoid the repition of scenes of Peter coming up with convoluted excuses of why he has to suddenly leave in certain situations with the characters, we're doing away with all that foreplay. In principle that's fine, but why not just start at a point they already know his identity at, why the hell did we go back to the beginning if you clearly didn't want to deal with all the **** that goes on in the beginning?! It's just so rushed.
This next one is something the Raimi films did too that I absolutely detested and that is the vomit inducing cheesiness of involving the citizens of New York. In Raimi's Spiderman I think the scene I hate the most is when a group of New Yorkers start throwing bricks and things at Green Goblin and yell at him not to "mess with New Yorkers". He's trying to make it that their love for Spidey has brought them together to his aid but it comes off incredibly lame and cheesy. I didn't want to watch Green Goblin get heckled by ordinairy folk, I wanted ot watch him have a battle with Spiderman. This film does the exact same but with the father of some kid that Spiderman saved getting the crane operators to all help him get across the city. I know you're wanting to show us that Spidey is a great guy who helps everyone and can bring out the best in them by doing so, but it's kinda implicit we don't need to see it. It's just the cringe inducing American style "patriotism" that these scenes always end up smacking of, it completely turns me off.
I was pleased when they first said they were going back to web shooters rather than the whole naturally ocurring ones. What I always liked about the web shooters is that 1. it was part of that sci-fi edge that made comics cool and 2. the fact that the web shooters could be used to inject some immediate drama/sense of danger into proceedings because they could run out of webbing or get jammed at some moment. Yet, they never bother to use this option at any time. Sure, Lizard crushes his shooters at the end but it didn't really make a difference. I think I've run out of things to complain about, either that or I've just forgotten some more so I'll make another point before one final complaint. Despite how bad this film was I still hold out hope for the sequels, because this was clearly just made as a quick setup for the sequels. I'm not sure who we're going to have as villain in the second, but we've at least got a number of major characters "established". Think we'll see Norman Osborne actually show up in the 2nd, I did like all the mentions of him in this one (also what the hell is with him "dying"?), but they'll be setting him up as Green Goblin for the 3rd I think and go with him killing Gwen in the 3rd, in which they'll probably introduce MJ as the ready made replacement. I think they made these reboots purely so they could do Green Goblin again, which is actually a point I have to give this over Raimi's films. It didn't kill off the villain. Raimi's films all killed the villains with no hope of return, here Connors gets cured and arrested, leaving it wide open for a future return. That's the right thing to do, that's more like a comic book.
