With Great Power by Sean O'Connell

Author:Sean O'Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Applause
Published: 2022-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

The Thread Is Broken

What’s frustrating about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is that the film manages to do almost as many things correctly as it does insufficiently, giving both supporters and detractors enough material to make a compelling case.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever understand exactly what happened,” Tolmach reflects. “I won’t. That movie . . . I think there was a lot about it that was quite brilliant.”9

Garfield similarly expresses dismay when remembering the pushback from audiences on The Amazing Spider-Man 2 because he “genuinely loved” the Kurtzman and Orci screenplay but recognized that outside influencers tampered with it. “There was this thread running through it,” he said. “I think what happened was, through the pre-production, production, and post-production, when you have something that works as a whole, and then you start removing portions of it—because there was even more of it than was in the final cut, and everything was related. Once you start removing things and saying, ‘No, that doesn’t work,’ then the thread is broken, and it’s hard to go with the flow of the story.”10

Few people understand better what went wrong on The Amazing Spider-Man 2 than the film’s director, Marc Webb. And despite numerous attempts to get the filmmaker to open up on behalf of this book, his representatives politely but repeatedly declined, which is unfortunate because it’s probable that Webb thinks his Amazing Spider-Man films were mistakes or failures that led to the dismantling of the Garfield series and Sony’s need to appeal to Marvel for assistance. However, in a similar fashion to how Garfield received validation once he returned to Spider-Man for No Way Home, I believe Webb would hear affirmative messages from passionate Spidey fans who cherish his two films and prefer aspects of them to the other franchises in the series.

One fan-favorite element of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 that worked extremely well was the Spider-Man suit upgrade conducted by Oscar-winning costume designer Deborah Lynn Scott. One of Scott’s earliest gigs in the industry found her designing the puffy-vest look for an out-of-time Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) in Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future. In 1998, Scott collected her first and, to date, only Oscar for the exquisite designs she brought to James Cameron’s Best Picture winner, Titanic.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is Scott’s only superhero property, and I can’t see her topping the comic-accurate design she brought to Garfield’s second suit. Garfield used words like “friendly” and “warmer” when describing the suit, adding that it’s “closer to the Spider-Man we all know and love.”11 Webb’s contribution was the larger design of the eyes on the Amazing Spider-Man 2 mask.

“The eyes in this particular suit were a huge focus, and we really went back to the source material for that. The shape of them is very, very iconic,” Scott said, pointing out that a slight change to an angle on the eyepieces can make Spider-Man look angry, mean, or sad, none of which were the desired effect.12

Scott also encountered production issues that Raimi’s

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