What did "The Amazing Spider-Man" get right?

My grievances against Sony’s “The Amazing Spider-Man” series bear little need for repetition at this point.

With Sony’s announcement to scrap the series in favor of a future joint production with Marvel Studios following the financial disappointment of its second installment, it’s clear that the weaknesses of the films have finally caught up with their poor management. In all of the celebration however, loath as I am to admit it, the films were not necessarily without their own merit.

Maybe it’s just the happiness of knowing that no matter what’s said from this point forward, this botched vision of Marvel’s flagship hero mired in the commercialistic greed of executives will progress no further but I can’t deny that when the movies actually worked, they were firing on all cylinders.

I’m all about taking the good with the bad so why not lay this franchise’s corpse to bed with a brief look at the things that they didn’t screw up?

Vision

One of the things that make both of these films so difficult to sit through is all of the potential and resources sitting at its feet that the studio squanders.

The executive meddling behind every step of “The Amazing Spider-Man’s” filmmaking process has become infamous at this point and that is disgraceful because whenever a semblance of story from the intended direction of either film surfaces, a vision of something truly creative rears its head.

I maintain that the concept of a “grounded” or “gritty” “Spider-Man” is still a stupid and contradictory idea conceived of by mass marketers with no understanding of the character but the first movie’s dedication to its thesis, if nothing else, provided a fascinating and well constructed alternate universe.

By comparison, the second film actually manages to get closer to the tone of the source material than even the best moments of the Raimi films.

The color palette and character designs work for the most part but the direction is the real winner.

Despite coming into such a major project off of a small indie rom-com, Marc Webb was born make a “Spider-Man” movie. He manages to capture elements of the character and his pathos on screen that I never thought could actually be translated to live action (Spider-Man's acrobatics and trash talk, visualizations of certain enemies, etc.) and his actors, Garfield’s Peter Parker notwithstanding, manage to hold their roles down admirably despite the disorganized hodgepodge of lines that passes for a script in both films.

Whatever story the team wanted to tell before Sony hijacked the production in a failed effort to patch their own financial mismanagement, it had great promise.  

Humanity

While nothing in the original or its sequel even came close to the emotional warmth of its genre peers or predecessors, the cast performances of both films do provide a more organic character play that lends itself well to the more cinematic tone of the production.

My biggest problem with Andrew Garfield's casting as Peter Parker is how perfectly he could have been in that role had they not stripped the character of his most endearing qualities in favor of executing him like a rejected protagonist from a CW sci-fi show. His ability to communicate Parker's thought process through sheer body language almost made up for how terrible his actual dialogue was and his chemistry with his fellow cast mates was stupendous.

He even managed to bring out the best of characters that were drowning in the weaknesses of their own writing, like Harry Osborn's more human side and Curt Connors regret over ignoring Peter. Even "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" had Electro's Time Square sequence, what was almost a perfectly crafted tragic villain origin if it weren't immediately followed up with action and bad one liners.

All the tools were present to give this interpretation of "Spider-Man" more depth and complexity had they only been allowed to.

Mythology

What very may have been the best element of the reboot ultimately turned out to be the most abused of the franchise.

While some may take issue with all of Spidey’s villains originating from Oscorp, I wasn’t necessarily against it. In showing what Oscorp technology and research was capable of throughout the first film, substantial amounts of time could be cut back on how a character makes the leap from human being to super baddy, while instead focusing on fleshing out their characterizations. Think back to the Sandman in “Spider-Man 3” and how contrived the circumstances behind his abilities were. Not exactly something you want a repeat of.

Oscorp clearly had a lot of layers to it and the level of complexity required to set up so many diverse villains within one source required a level of forward thinking not shown since the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” came to fruition.

Where Sony ultimately went wrong is that they tried to use that mythology as the engine of a cash cow franchise, undercutting the wiggle room left for a sequel with an effort to tell stories that really have no legs to them.

For all that went wrong however, there was a lot of greatness that could have come about. Peter’s coming of age story brought about through an effort to contextualize his past while learning to grow up fast in order to face the big corporate entity putting people at risk could have and should have been so much better.