It's The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
Superhero movies are really unique things. For a long time now various movies and television shows have tried to encapsulate comic book characters, with varying success. The sub-genre comes and goes like the tide with various amounts of interest from the public.
But in this day and age we're able to do something that our forefathers were unable to accomplish with latex masks, analogue editing and animatronics (not to discount their efforts). Almost anybody could tell you that I'm talking about computer generated images when it comes to what advantage modern filmmakers have. Due to the nature of CGI now is the time for another renaissance of film. Both the Harry Potter and X-Men series opened the floodgates of the reality of how possible it was to have a large continuous cast spread out over many years on a series of stories.
Playing second fiddle to X-Men and Harry Potter was the Spider-Man series, starring Toby MacGuire. This trilogy was doomed to repeat the mistakes of falling into the old shackles of the industry... I've come to assume that anybody who was passionate about making movies in the early 2000s would shake in their boots when they heard buzzwords like, "blockbuster" and "trilogy" due to the nature of how coffin-like those terms are to a project. X-Men and Harry Potter were punching above their weight, but the Spider-Man series died after the third movie for reasons I don't want to remind myself of... But if you aren't familiar to the series then watch the following video at your own risk (and yes, that really is not a parody):
Some people were really skeptical when it was announced that the Spider-Man movies were getting a reboot in 2012. I myself didn't bother seeing it in cinemas due to having crippling flashbacks to certain scenes in Spider-Man 3. Eventually I saw that movie and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, given the reviews. It was far from my favourite movie however due to a few details across the board.
And then recently I saw The Amazing Spider-Man 2. And I have to say that it ticked the boxes for a good sequel. Namely the story was heading on the same direction; the consequences of the first movie carried over well but didn't distract from the multiple new elements to the series. Dialogue took a major step up - if the dialogue was taking baby steps in the first movie it was jumping hurdles like Liu Xiang in the second. It felt like it was the first movie but it was bigger and better - the villains weren't the deepest but three new villains emerged. Each of them had enough focus to display their own strengths and traits... When compared with the first film's singular villain, who was only sometimes a good character the sequel is impressive. Finally all the fight sequences with Electro, the main villain were visually stunning.
Electro, surprise surprise is an electric themed villain. As such it's really hard to convey how fast he moves when he's fighting Spider-Man. Nonetheless the CGI enviroments where we see Spidey and Electro face off allow for photo-realistic pockets of time that dazzle and impress, and while The Amazing Spider-Man had a few moments that were inventive, this really took the cake.
It's incredibly hard to make any sequel without stuffing it up. And for many movies that get a sequel there was never supposed to be a sequel when the script was initially written. There's only a few sequels that actually work well, and even less that work greatly. In my opinion Aliens was the best sequel prior to Amazing Spider-Man 2. Aliens added a lot of depth to the series and was twice the film Alien was. Alien was a hard act to follow up on and I really respect the work the team did for Aliens. At the same time though, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was three times the film The Amazing Spider-Man was, and that's a true marvel of an accomplishment for a sequel.
If all things go very well for me, I'd love to make a movie that was four times its predecessor. Then I might just hang up the towel and call it a day.
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