5. What's The Deal With Lizard's Split Personality?
So we all remember the original Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie. It had a lot of silly, cheese-ball moments littered throughout the experience, but one of the funniest, if not the most scolded, was the Norman Osborn's (played by Willem Dafoe) Jekyll and Hyde-like relationship with the Green Goblin persona. While it probably wasn't as scary as the director had been hoping it to be (or maybe it was, it's Sam Raimi we're talking about here), it did, considering the tone that the film conveyed, make sense for such a development to occur. In Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man, there is a similar character, Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), who is eventually transformed into the Lizard, a hybrid of human and, well, lizard DNA. Much like the Osborn character, this transformation creates a secondary personality...that is pretty much mentioned once. The idea is dropped just as soon as it was introduced, leaving some people scratching their heads at the inclusion of such an unbaked idea. It was already unclear as to whether or not Connors was, in fact, in total control of the Lizard (my guess is that he's just drunk with power once he's reacquired that arm of his), and when we're sorta-kinda given an answer, it's ignored for the rest of the movie. Just as was the case (i.e. problem) with Prometheus, and what Christopher Nolan's Batman series (the template for this film) managed to succeed in, was the combination of popcorn action and thoughtful drama. Unfortunately, it seemed that the studio had a little less confidence with the Spider-Man property, forcing a more action-oriented picture down our throats, resulting in, what feels like, several cuts made to the movie to place less focus on the dramatic elements, which, unfortunately (or perhaps even fortunately, considering it's hard to take a
GIANT TALKING LIZARD seriously, especially when it looks like a goomba from the Super Mario Bros Movie) meant the chopping of one or two scenes featuring Connors' mental collapse.