August 20th, 2012 
Dane Sager 
What The Film?! is a weekly column exclusive to Under The Gun Review that brings to light the plot holes Hollywood hoped you’d never notice. Written by comedy writer Dane Sager, this column shows no mercy to films that try and pull the proverbial wool over our eyes.
If you know a film with major plot holes that you feel needs to be exposed, tell us! Email utgjames@gmail.com with the subject “What The Film” and we’ll try to get your suggestion featured on the site.
This Week’s Movie: 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man
My girlfriend told me a story about her high school boyfriend once. She would always complain and wish that he’d take her to Hampton Beach, but he never did. Over the course of three or four years, he never gave in and took her to this specific beach or any beach at all. He was kind of a douche. After they broke up, he took his next girlfriend to Hampton Beach. He was kind of a douche. Sony, the company that has been making the Spider-Man movies, took the franchise from Sam Raimi (the director of 2002’s Spider-Man, 2004’s Spider-Man 2, and 2007’s Spider-Man 3) and took it to Hampton Beach without him.
Pfft, Lake Michigan is better.
Sam Raimi did a great job with Spider-Man 1 and Spider-Man 2, but Spider-Man 3 was a bit of a mess. He had gone on record saying he would make Spider-Man 4 to make up for the mess that was Spider-Man 3. Now, since Spider-Man 1, Sam Raimi put the character Curt Connors into all of his movies. Curt Connors was mentioned in dialogue in the part one and was portrayed by Dylan Baker in Spider-Man 2 & 3, his role getting larger in each movie. The reason why is because Sam Raimi really wanted to make The Lizard in his next movie, but Sony kept shooting him down. “Maybe next time!” they probably said, dangling a lizard shaped carrot in front of him.
Raimi was set on doing The Lizard in Spider-Man 4, but Sony again shot him down because The Lizard would be difficult to merchandise (since it wouldn’t be a humanoid action-figure). Spider-Man 4’s villains were then changed into The Vulture (played by John Malkovich) and Black Cat (played by Anne Hathaway). They were about a week into shooting when Sony told Sam Raimi that it had to be made in 3D. Raimi, who has spent months and months of pre-production on this movie, none of it with 3D in mind, quit the project saying that he couldn’t produce the movie up to his own standards. With Raimi gone, the entire cast left as well.
I think this is Anne Hathaway as Black Cat. What else could this photo be of?
Sony quickly called a press conference, announcing that Spider-Man 4 was canceled and that they were rebooting the franchise with a darker, more serious version (probably due to the success of 2006’s Casino Royale and 2008’s The Dark Knight which both pulled in around fourteen brazillian dollars (brazillian is a number, right? It’s after a kajillion). During the conference, they insisted that Spider-Man needed to be rebooted, that they were going to completely re-imagine the Spider-Man origin for a new generation, and that it was going to be a completely different movie. Well, 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man came out a few months ago and did it do those things? Was the reboot needed? Was five years enough time for audiences to forget the last movie and accept the new one? Did they re-imagine the origin? No. Not at all.
Did they rework the origin? Nope. They gave us the same origin in 2002’s Spider-Man, almost verbatim, emphasizing how not needed this reboot was. All the trailers insisted that this was “The Untold Story” and it gave us “The Same Exact Story”. The trailers, the studios, even the actors in interviews insisted that Peter Parker’s parents played a big role in the movie. Not only was this hyped up there, but it became a major plot line in the movie, what happened to Peter’s parents? Spoiler alert: they died in a plane crash and apparently had nothing to do with the movie. In one trailer, The Lizard taunts Spider-Man with the line (paraphrasing) “Do you want to know the truth about your parents? Come and get it!”. There were rumors that the version we received in theaters was different from the one originally written and originally shot, that the studios called for re-shoots after poor test screenings. There is evidence of this in the trailers, with the aforementioned taunting and a completely different scene where Peter and Curt Connors meet for the first time. But, hey, let’s ignore that the entire first third of the movie where it’s emphasized how incredibly important that he finds the truth about his parents didn’t get any closure at all and that the origin was exactly the same. Lets say the other Spider-Man movies never existed and talk about how this movie stands on its own.
It’s not bad but it’s not all that good.
So after Peter Parker gets bit by a spider and gains super powers (in a facility where there is a room full of spiders and no one had ever been bitten before or after apparently), he decides to spend all his free time and energy finding the guy who killed his Uncle Ben. This takes up the rest of the first act and is the reason why he designs and builds the Spider-Man costume, so no one knows who he is as he hunts down every guy who looks like the singer of Seether in New York City. This plot line is resolved when he finally… well, it’s never resolved. Spider-Man finds something else to do.
Dr. Connors throughout the enter movie is trying to work on a serum that will cause humans to regrow limbs and while he believes he’s successful (and calls for trials at a Veteran’s Hospital), he ends up becoming an angry Lizard man. That’s okay, that’s awesome. The Lizard has always been my favorite Spider-Man villian and I’ve been wanting to see that on screen for ten years now. Working with Connors is another doctor who is sent to the Veteran’s Hospital for the human trials, but he gets attacked by The Lizard en route. He doesn’t die, he survives. It’s never really explained if he ever made it to the Veteran’s Hospital eventually to turn a bunch of people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder into angry Lizard men (and women). In fact, we never see that character ever again.
Here he is in another cut scene that’s found in the trailer.
If you wanted to see a group of people become a bunch of pissed off Lizard men, that’s still in the movie! In the climax, Connors turns his Lizard making serum into a gas which he uses on an entire SWAT team. The movie spends a lot of time and money showing the SWAT team transforming in vivid detail. So what kind of chaos do we see this lizard army create? None. It cuts away the entire time until they get changed back with the air dispersed antidote. Think of the potential of having an entire crazy lizard man army, there’s so many ways that could play off, and you get none of them. This was probably another cut scene, but the movie jumps around so much from idea to idea that almost none of them are ever resolved or brought to any form of closure as it jumps to another idea. It’s as if the writer saw someone with ADHD play Skyrim and couldn’t stick to one quest and wandered off whenever something else caught their eye and thought “Yeah, I can make a movie like that.”
Yes, there was a post-credits scene that mentions his father. No, it didn’t clear anything up.
Dane also never brought his girlfriend to Hampton Beach! He’s kind of douche! You can follow him on Twitter and Tumblr!
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