10 Things You Just Have To Accept About The Amazing Spider-Man Reboot

1. It's Building Its Own Mythology

Taking all these previous quibbles into consideration, let€™s take a look at what makes this incarnation of Spider-Man so unique and worthwhile: it€™s building a singular and inherent mythology that both adheres to and takes liberties with the source material in a way that hasn€™t been used before. Whereas previous versions of the Spider-Man tale (which has almost become folklore as so many superhero origins tend to do) focused eminently on the death of Uncle Ben triggering the epiphany that €œwith great power comes great responsibility,€ this time around there is a grander and possibly even more personal scheme at work: the relation of the Parkers with the Osborns, and how that relationship may have preconditioned who Peter is and who he has become. The reboot has so far made the OsCorp enterprise a formidable and quasi-faceless opponent to be scaled rather than fought outright, first through Doc Connors as the Lizard, then Harry Osborn as the Green Goblin. Each adversary has been more personal than the last; could his last foe perhaps be the one most painfully close to him, his supposedly-dead father? As a candidate for the guise of Mr. Shade the puppet master in the background, this would bring the mythos the reboot has built full-circle. And this is indeed a mythos, based around not only the foibles of young Parker but his attempt to unravel the mystery revolving his parents€™ death, which comes together piece by piece like any good detective story. Whatever this reboot has truncated, it has done so for the sake of telling the story it wishes to tell, and that is more than a superheroic moral fable. It is epic in scope and Oedipal in its intimacy, and if all that sounds too pretentious and highfalutin for a Spider-Man story, remember that Stan the Man himself once described the Doc Ock-Spidey relationship as akin to something found in a Russian novel.