RP Goes to the Movies: The Amazing Spider Man

I want to explain to you guys where my head was at as I sat through this movie.

There was pretty much no food in our fridge on Monday. All day long, all I ate was a small peach and a cheese sandwich. You guys, I don't do hunger. I seriously become ill, which is bad because then I can't eat. Anyway, by 6pm when my dinner break at work rolled around, I was prepared to eat the fastest available thing, which happened to be a prepared deli sandwich. I bet you can imagine where this is going.

I was fine through the rest of work, at after when we got in line for the midnight showing of The Amazing Spider-man. I was happily drinking my soda (caffeine is non-optional at these things) and munching popcorn. I was tired (a whole day of moving followed by 8 hours of work), but functional. About halfway into the movie, I started to feel nauseous on and off.

Peter Parker was being an angsty orphan teen and I was holding my aching head and cursing God.

The lizard guy was being all lizardy and I was biting my tongue to keep from yawning.

Peter was flirting clumsily with Gwen Stacie and I  started to feel like my sandwich had betrayed me.

They shared a kiss and I was pretty sure that I was going to throw up.

The one thing that you shouldn't do, if you are planning on having a mild case of food poisoning, is try to sit through an action moving with stunts that involve swinging from roof tops. And you definitely shouldn't do so in a room full of unwashed folks of dubious character, because two seats down from me there was a guy who clearly had not bathed today, and maybe took a nice long jog outside in the 90 degree weather before coming to the movies. I think he was in league with the sandwich.

I want to say this very clearly: The movie was actually pretty good. What I was able to focus on, I found appealing. And I never lost track of the story, despite being ill, which tells me that the plot flowed fairly well.

Here's What I Liked About It:

• There's a shameful part of me that sort of enjoys teen angst (that's why I read YA), and this movie has that. The actor who plays Peter Parker pulled his character off very well. He's twitchy and awkward, but clearly smart. He has these amazing powers, but it takes time to learn to use them. He has cocky and humorous moments. He likes Gwen, but fluctuates between trying way too hard and stuttering. The contemporary YA fan in me eats that up like days old turkey on mildly stale wheat bread.
• It's a darker, more emotionally gripping telling of the Spider-man story than the previous movies. 
• I liked the effects (up until they made me all woozy). I like that they put the viewer in Spider-man's POV as he figures out how to swing and jump about. 
• I found the romance passably believable. Disposable, unnecessary, but believable.

Here's What I Did Not Like:

• The editing was a little choppy. This is one of those movies where the subplots had subplots, and in several instances it felt like the pieces were pasted together in the wrong order. Slightly.
• The villain was dis-interesting to me. His motivation is wanting to grow back a missing limb, so he injects himself with essence of lizard and...it makes him crazy. So predictable, and so unimaginative. But hey, it's a comic book movie.
• OMG the pseudo-science. I wish these movies would not try so hard to make the science believable. You can't. You have a giant lizard man in a lab coat. It's ridiculous. Just accept it, and don't stop to try to explain lizard biology to me.
• I did not like that on our way home, Josh had to slam on the breaks to avoid hitting a bunny, causing me to finally throw up the minute I got out of the car. I hope your happy, you stupid rabbit.
• I do not like turkey anymore.

So, in conclusion, it's a good movie that I would recommend to fans of comic book type movies. And fans of teen angst. I liked The Avengers slightly more, but that may be the turkey experience skewing my views. I definitely thought this was better than Spider-man 3. Overall, I'm glad they did a reboot.