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

5. It May Be Trying Too Hard

It should be admitted by now that since the filmmakers did go out of their way to make a Spider-Man that wasn€™t quite for everyone, they broke the cardinal rule of Spider-Man adaptations in general: they should be for everyone. Spider-Man€™s global appeal comes from his Everyman status, the overgrown boy who has to worry about girls and paying the bills as much as saving a panicked populace from Hydra goons in Time Square. Alternately, his rank of outcast made him more relatable to the average viewer, whereas now people seem more alienated by his acceptability. Taking the spaz out of him also took away a good deal of his charm; we could feel for a guy who couldn€™t walk a straight line around a pretty girl. This Peter is just a little too€confident. He also has too many obstacles to overcome per hour. If it€™s not visions of Captain Stacey as he attempts to reconcile with Gwen, or realizing his friendship with Harry has decelerated into hostility, it€™s the unfortunate outcast Electro obliviously causing damage in Time Square (did anyone else notice his final fight in the film resembled that in the game Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro? Was that a stealth homage or just theft?). While the film did a decent job at juggling the flow of conflicts, it also distracted from the overarching plot set up in the first film. Sure, the Electro plot ties into the dangers inherent at OsCorp, but his accident and its consequences have no bearing on the primary Parker-Osborn tension, and he could have sold his blueprints to another sinister corporation down the block and come out with the same results, for a different film. Those narrative threads could have stayed severed.