How Close The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Was To Being Good And How To Fix It

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 catches a lot of flack. And some of it is definitely for good reason, but upon a rewatch, you can see that there’s a lot of good stuff in there!

The opening sequence—literally from the first moment of the opening logo fading into the back of Peter’s suit as he dives through the air—is so good. That’s Spider-Man. And then the car chase and the web shenanigans catching all the vials and the quips! Oh, man, the quips. This annoying, sarcastic New York goofball is Peter Parker. It’s Spider-Man. It’s so perfect.

You’re never going to convince me Andrew Garfield isn’t the best live-action Spider-Man. He has the best physicality, the best and funniest dialogue, an actual agency that drives the plot, and his connection with science is what moves the story forward. He’s such a compelling actor and really embodies what makes audiences love Peter Parker in the comics. That absolutely carries through into the second movie, despite all its other problems.

Peter establishing connections with his community is absolutely beautiful. From telling Max he’s his eyes and ears to paling around with the Fire Department to talking about the kid’s school project as he walked him home. This movie was your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

And the science! Getting to see Peter looking up tutorials and taking notes and, through trial and error, trying to make his suit electricity-proof was so good! He’s a problem solver! He’s a genius! I love the bit with his parents—them being weird little secret scientists is comic accurate—and his obsession with them makes for the best scene with May. And it makes his arc with science so much more real! He takes action where he needs to and asks for and accepts help from Gwen when she comes up with a solution. The characterization is just so good I want to forgive all of the plot issues and say the movie is good.

But I can’t. The plot is not good. But it so easily could be.

The biggest problem with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is how much they tried to do in it. There were too many villains, too much relationship drama, and just generally too much going on. Streamlining the entire thing and moving things around to make it less complicated would have saved this movie and maybe even the entire franchise.

How to fix The Amazing Spider-Man 2

For starters: keep Peter and Gwen broken up at the beginning of the movie. The end of The Amazing Spider-Man has Peter basically telling Gwen he plans on breaking his promise to her dad and staying close to her. Which is great! It can totally still work that way, but having them together at the beginning of the movie only to break them up in the first 15 minutes is just exhausting. And they do a scene similar to this like five different times in the movie. It’s just ponderous.

Part of the problem is that Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield have such amazing chemistry that when they’re in a scene together and they’re doing their little banter thing, it’s just magic. And it’s good! It should be! We absolutely need them to be complicatedly in love for her death to hit at the end—and she absolutely does still need to die. But there are better ways.

Keep them broken up, but Gwen still is the only person who knows Peter is Spider-Man, so she still reaches out to him when he’s late to graduation, she still has to talk to him when he’s at Oscorp, and she figures out there’s something fishy going down with Max. He can still follow her and watch her as she goes about her life because he is still in love with her, and he can even do that romantic ‘I Love You’ webbing on the bridge and confess and offer to go to England with her. All of that can absolutely still happen without being jerked around for the entire movie.

And, yeah, she dies at the end. But we don’t need the Green Goblin to accomplish that.

That’s right! My second fix is removing the Green Goblin. I still think we should bring in Harry: the Oscorp stuff and Norman’s death were well-telegraphed in the first movie. And bringing in Harry is fun! They would absolutely set him up to take the fall for the Lizard, and he would also be the perfect scapegoat for what happens to Max. His primary drama should be his place at Oscorp, not whatever medical crap has him turning into the Green Goblin. We can and should have absolutely set that up for the third movie!

Norman did still die with that warning to Harry like, “You’re next,” and he can start to see deterioration in this movie, but the primary conflict should be Oscorp. He’s like twenty years old, and suddenly he’s the CEO of this multi-billion dollar company? And he’s reconnecting with his old friend Peter, who’s acting super sketchy about the spiders his dad was into? That’s enough. That’s a good enough setup for Green Goblin stuff later. And this way, it doesn’t take away from the true star of the film: Electro.

Electro is a masterpiece of an antagonist. He’s a villain that Peter truly makes himself: just a victim of circumstance who latches onto Spider-Man’s whole deal and is made to feel important for the first time, first by being saved by Spider-Man and then by directly opposing Spider-Man. That is interesting! That’s a really good character, a good villain! And that scene in Times Square is iconic! 

Fixing the gap in his teeth with the electricity was weird, and I do not know why that choice was made. So we can leave that out. But everything else is good, and I wish we had more time for it.

We can also keep Harry breaking Max out of the facility. His motivations would just be a little different: he’d mostly be doing it to get back at the board for ousting him and use Max to establish himself back as CEO. This would be a beautiful jumping-off point for the third movie—how willing Harry is to resort to violence for his own security—and would be a great thing for Peter to start poking his nose around in before the Green Goblin rears his ugly head. The third movie writes itself if you just save half the stuff you put in the second movie! It’s crazy that they shoved it all into this one.

But, of course, their reason for doing so was to kill Gwen Stacy. And, I agree, Gwen absolutely needed to die. Thematically. After seeing Captain Stacy everywhere and the commitment to breaking the promise at the end of the first movie, there was no way Gwen was making it out of this one alive. And, in the comics, Green Goblin is the reason she’s dead. Except, actually, more critically, Peter is the reason she’s dead. She dies because Peter couldn’t save her. She falls. She falls because she was in the wrong place, and Peter’s desperation to catch her breaks her spine.

But all that can still happen without the Green Goblin!

Imagine, if you will, Gwen is still at the power plant at the end of the movie helping Peter stop Electro. Imagine that instead of the control room being in a squattish building, it’s in a tower. Imagine that the structural integrity of the tour is compromised in the fight, and when Peter joins Gwen at the top at the end—maybe they’re happy to be alive, maybe he’s yelling at her for getting involved, maybe she’s yelling at him for webbing her to the cop car and trying to keep her out of it—but in their conversation, they fail to realize that the floor is giving way. Gwen falls. Peter tries to catch her. She dies.

And we didn’t need a Green Goblin there for that to happen.

It allows us to keep the absolutely perfect final scene with the kid and the Rhino. There is so much good stuff in this movie, and it has the best characterization of Spider-Man we’ve seen in film so far; it absolutely kills me that they fumbled this sequel so hard. Andrew Garfield deserved better.

What’s done is done, and we can’t exactly remake the movie, but it’s important to look at what we got and how close it was to something that could have been amazing. If we understand what was good about The Amazing Spider-Man series, we can hopefully make more things like it in the future.