5 best and 5 worst things about the Amazing Spider-Man movies
https://www.looper.com/161461/5-best-and-5-worst-things-about-the-amazing-spider-man-movies/
Best: The chemistry between Emma Stone and Andrew Garfieldshare
Gwen Stacy is famous for being dead. She doesn't loom quite as largely over Spider-Man's psyche as Uncle Ben does, but she comes mightily close. She's Peter's lost innocence, the hapless bystander caught up in the superheroic slaughter, the girlfriend too sweet and pure to belong to Peter's supervillain-riddled world. Before her reinvention as Spider-Gwen, that was the entire point of the character: to be good and then to be dead.
Audiences knew this heading into the Amazing Spider-Man reboot. And in the hands of a lesser team, Peter and Gwen's romance might have progressed along a rote path to destruction. The shock of Gwen's death is gone, so what was left? A lot, it turns out, when portrayed by Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. The actors (who were also an off-screen couple until 2015) brought a tenderness to the doomed pair, sweet and earnest enough to make an audience forget the parting they were headed towards … until it finally came and was rendered all the more tragic. For two movies, Peter and Emma got to be young lovers against a world of mutated lizard-men, electricity-manipulating revenge-seekers, and radioactive spiders. In so doing, they became the heart of the Amazing Spider-Man reboot.
Worst: Rehashing Spider-Man's origin story
Batman loses his parents in a darkened alleyway. Superman is sent to our world from the far reaches of outer space. Spider-Man watches his uncle die from violence he could have prevented. These origin stories are etched into our culture, to the point where even someone who's never picked up a comic book is likely to know them by now. They are, as some comics scholars have argued, our modern myths, retold to highlight values, lessons, and models of heroism.
But there isn't just one myth about Zeus, Ra, or Odin. So why, then, must we be subjected again and again to the origin stories of our most popular heroes? The Amazing Spider-Man brought in Peter's parents to add a little variety to their version, but still, audiences had to see Peter give in to selfishness, watch Uncle Ben die, and vow to remain responsible with his newfound abilities forevermore. Perhaps if the movie hadn't come a scant few years after the Sam Raimi trilogy ended, this would have grated less … but it didn't, and audiences yawned where they should have been on the edge of their seats. The MCU took this lesson to heart, introducing an already bereaved and spider-bitten Peter in the midst of Captain America: Civil War, then plunking him right into the superheroics in Spider-Man: Homecoming. A myth is beloved for its familiarity, but they do need to have a fresh spin put on them now and again.