After Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire's exit from the 'Spiderman' series the bigwigs at Sony Pictures decided to reboot the franchise despite the first film coming out just 9 years ago. This appeared to a knee jerk decision, but the main players exits certainly came as no surprise after the alleged battles between director and studio over plot and characters in both 'Spiderman 3' and the planned fourth film. So Sony decided to tell the story of Peter Parker all over again, which was met with a less than favourable reception by fans of the franchise. Marc Webb ('500 Days of Summer') was brought in to direct and rising star Andrew Garfield would don the spidey suit. The film is now scheduled for a summer 2012 release and there seems to be a vast difference in tone from Raimi's trilogy, judging by the trailer at least.
At first glance I can say I am not overly thrilled by the new direction that the 'Spiderman' franchise seems to be taking. The studio execs have clearly seen the enormous success of the very mature and dark themed Batman films and thought they would transfer it to Peter Parker. It's not beyond the realm of possibilty that it works because Spiderman has certainly had his fair share of dark tales, but the previous films were hugely fun films despite their flaws. It appears that Peter Parker has got that emo Robert Pattinson look about him and the trailer is overall quite gloomy. Where is the humour and vibrancy?
Darker, grittier reboots are the new craze with Bond and the previously mentioned Batman benefiting greatly from a change up....but why does Spiderman have to go the same way? There was nothing wrong with the tone of the previous films and the darkest of the trilogy, 'Spiderman 3' was easily the worst one (although that film had more problems than its tone). Marvel showed that a superhero film doesn't have to be dark in order to be succesful with 'Thor', which was a fun and entertaining crowd pleaser that had a dramatic core and that is what 'Spiderman' should really be like, at least in my eyes. Leave the dark stuff to good old miserable Batman.
The trailer itself is pretty basic, we see the introduction of a few characters like Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy and her father played by Dennis Leary aswell as a brief glimpse of Dr.Curt Connors who becomes the antagonist Lizard. There isn't much that jumps out as being brilliant because we have essentially seen all this before - with the exception of Peter's mother and father. In Raimi's films the deaths of Parker's parents was never really mentioned but it seems to play some part in the plot here.
However as always this is just a trailer and those that saw 'The Phanton Menace' know that trailers lie. Full opinions will have to wait till its released or at least till footage is shown at Comic Con later this week.
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