The first trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man is now out, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It opens with Peter as a young child as his parents tell him they have to go away for a while. It immediately make me think not of the mainstream comics, but of Ultimate Spider-Man, which gave some backstory of his father doing experiments that lead to the creation of the Venom suit.
Year pass, and…
Oh, God. Emo Peter Parker strikes again…
It seems Emo-Parker likes to sit in the classroom looking very conspicuous in a black hoody as a blonde looks on. Wikipedia tells me this is, indeed, Gwen Stacy and that Mary Jane Watson isn’t in this one. Maybe they’re going to build up the relationship between Peter and Gwen in this one and then bring Mary Jane in to create a love triangle in the inevitable second film.
The scene switches to a dinner table with Gwen and who I assume is her father, Captain George Stacy.
“OMG, you are totally Spider-Man.”
Gwen mentions to her father that Emo-Parker lives with his Aunt and Uncle, and we get our first look at them.
It’s only President Sheen! Also, Aunt May looks less like the frail old woman she is so often portrayed at and more like her Ultimate version of still being fit and healthy.
Most teenagers have an evening and weekend job in a shop or a garage or something. Gwen works part-time at a research laboratory.
I don’t want to stereotype, but it’s hard to take a blonde in a white coat seriously, isn’t it?
Peter ends up in said research laboratory and is told by Gwen not to touch anything. So naturally he wanders into the ominously lit room with the spinning circle thingy.
Never a good sign. We can see where this is going, can’t we?
Now, I’ll admit a bit a bit of nerd rage here. The trailer shows him being bitten on the back of the neck.
It’s a bit of a departure from being bitten in the back of the hand like, oh, I don’t know…
Every single version…
…of the origin story…
…ever made.
The scene quickly shifts to Emo-Parker running about at night, trying out his new found powers, including this shot, upside down in the train…
Hopefully, there’s no passengers in this carriage or this’ll be difficult to explain.
…which kind of looks familiar…
“Ready to play God?” a voice asks and wee see a man walk towards a weird contraption.
My first though was that this was the Green Goblin origins again, but that lack of a right arm says it’s actually Doctor Connors. The film makers seem to be going in the same direction as Batman Begins, in that they are choosing one of the lesser know enemies that won’t overshadow the main character’s origin story.
A voice is heard saying “Do you have any idea what you really are?” and we see Emo-Parker sowing, presumably putting the spidey-costume together.
It always amuses me to think that Peter Parker, science nerd extraordinaire, knows how to sow. It’s a very complicated costume to put together by himself, and if you look closely at the costume see in the trailer…
…as well as the few pictures so far released…
…you can see they’ve gone for a lot more detail in the gloves around the fingers and up the arms. I feel my nerd rage tingling at this as well. You could make the same arguments in the Sam Raimi films that the costume couldn’t have been made by one person, but at least it looked like the Spider-Man costume from the comic.
If they are following the Ultimate Spider-Man route, they may show the wrestling section in which the organiser has the suit made for him, but there’s no sign of that and they may even wish to avoid it since Sam Raimi did it in Spider-Man.
If I was making a Spider-Man film, I might try to go the Batman Begins route of building the costume up over the film, starting out bulky and impractical and moving towards the costume we see in the comic.
The scene shifts to a first person perspective of Spider-Man swinging through the streets of New York and I seriously hope it is in no way reflective of the visual effects of this film. They look like a game and by that I mean they look fake.
Now don’t misunderstand, computer game graphics look stunning these days, but when you play a game you are never under any illusions that what you are looking at is anything other than one hundred per cent artificial. You know people have been sitting at a computer constructing everything you see, hear and interact with. A film is meant to make you believe that what you are looking at is real. The best kind of special effect is one you hardly even notice.
Not that I would object if this really was a game trailer. In fact a first person perspective, Spider-Man-meets-Mirrors-Edge game would be pretty cool if it was done right.
Web slingers are back!
The trailer ends with a line from Peter: “We all have secrets. The ones we keep and the ones that are kept from us.”
Yeah, Peter, your father totally made the Venom suit.
If I’ve come away from this trailer feeling anything, it’s quietly optimistic. I’m torn on the subject of a reboot. On the one hand, wiping the slate clean and taking the movie version of Spider-Man in a new direction could be interesting. On the other hand, Spider-Man was a great origin story and do we really need another one this soon? Still, saying Spider-Man 3 is now void is always a good start and there is the potential to tell a more modern feeling Spider-Man story that draws upon the excellent Ultimate series.
Here’s the trailer in full, you can judge for yourself:
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