An All Too Familiar Path - The Amazing Spider-Man 2 First Trailer Review

The trailer for the Amazing Spider-Man 2 came out today much to my excitement. After all, the first move was pretty darn good. I figure that it would be a shame if I didn't write about what I thought about it. To be honest, while the trailer does show us some really cool stuff, I can't help but think that this film might be on an all too familiar path...

The Sam Raimi Spider-Man films were the gold standard for superhero movies until a guy named Christopher Nolan decided to come around and make a little movie called Batman Begins. Spider-Man 2 remains a classic film to me and still retains a special place on my favorites list. After the success of the second movie, Raimi got really ambitious in the third film, Spider-Man 3, with mixed success. The movie ended up being a jumbled mess of plotlines, villains, and campy acting. There was too much going on that when the end came, nothing felt resolved and if resolved was done in the complete wrong way. The Amazing Spider-Man series seems to be jumping to that level one movie too early in comparison to Raimi's films and it really does concern me. Too many villains and too many plotlines in a movie doesn't work. As of right now the film has teased three villains: Electro, Rhino, and the trailer doesn't shy away from teasing our new Harry Osbourne as becoming the Green Goblin at some point. Then there's the plotlines of Peter Parker uncovering more family secrets, the Osbourne's conspiring against him, Electro's vendetta again humanity, and oh yea...Peter's relationship with Glen Stacy who may or may not be alive at the end of the movie (for anyone who knows comics). At this rate, the film might need about 4 hours to cover everything that it has brought to the table so far. Also, I be more disappointed that Electro, who was teased as the main villain in all the build-up material, appears like he's going to be a minor villain in comparison to whatever the Osbournes have planned. The Dark Knight Trilogy showed that having two villains per film worked well. Once you expand past that, things start getting complicated.

The relationship between Peter Parker and this Harry Osbourne with an unfortunate hairstyle appears to be the driving force of the plot.

So that's the bad...what's the good? Well we're going to get more information on that backstory which was heavily teased at the beginning of the first film. This is good because these films seem much more interested in exploring the lives of Peter's parents more than Sam Raimi's films did. This will give Peter some good character depth for the movie. It's also exciting to see the Osbourne's finally involved even if I can't stand the actor choice for the role of Harry. As far as I'm concerned, James Franco will always be Harry Osbourne. The Osbourne family and their connection to Peter's father appears to be the driving force in this film. In all likelihood this film is just going to be the lead up to a third film with Green Goblin. Perhaps, the Goblin even shows up in this one, at this point it's hard to tell. Just saying though, they've already revealed an actress for Mary Jane which could spell misery for Gwen Stacy if the Goblin is in fact involved. There's plenty of good plotlines to speak of from the trailer, it's just a wonder about how this film plans to do them all justice.

The Amazing Spider-Man films are really just there so that Sony retains the character's image rights. However, they might as well do a good job with the films while they're at it. Better that than having the character fall into the mediocre mire that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the most overrated set of films in history). I'm excited for this and will see it no matter what the reviews say. I just worry about the potential for this to go the way of Spider-Man 3. Hopefully, we've learned from our mistakes this time.