The Amazing Spider-Man 2, A Decade Later

It’s been a decade since the premiere of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (released on May 2, 2014), the film that ended Andrew Garfield’s stint as the webslinger. On the one hand, you can kind of see why. In an effort to set itself apart from Tobey Maguire’s films, the Garfield-verse needlessly complicated its story, turning Peter’s origin into a spy thriller that took up way too big a chunk of the second movie. TAS2 also has the dubious honor of having the worst live-action Arachnoguy villain ever: Jamie Foxx’s Electro, whose entire arc is: “I love Spider-Man! Now I’m a Smurf as envisioned by Christopher Nolan and I HATE Spider-Man!” But underneath it all, there was one thing that the Garfield movies did better than the films that came before and after it: the romance.

 

Directed by Marc Webb (a puntastic gift from the universe), The Amazing Spider-Man movies revolve around the believable, touching, and, honestly, totally adorable relationship between Garfield’s Peter Parker and Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy. In every other production, Spidey’s love life was a secondary concern at best and a “reward” at worst, unintentionally reducing large parts of his motivation to a quest for physical affection. A kind of “kisses for crimefighting” sort of deal. And I realize that romance isn’t what people typically go to see superhero movies for. But seeing as The Amazing Spider-Man films already have plenty of great action, throwing in a great romance into the mix can only work to the franchise’s advantage.

 

So what exactly did the Webb movies do that was so different? A better question is what they didn’t do. The answer: the whole “will they, won’t they” shtick. Look, if a Spider-Man movie has a girl named Mary Jane, MJ, Gwen, or Felicia, the character will end up with one of them. Trying to pretend otherwise or, worse, building entire subplots around “the suspense” about Peter Parker’s love life (looking right at you, Sam Raimi) is, frankly, a little insulting to the audience, not to mention a waste of perfectly good film.

So, The Amazing Spider-Manmovies do… not that. From the first scene of Garfield and Stone together, it’s clear their characters like each other so Peter asks Gwen out around the 30-minute mark of the first movie and she of course says yes. Done. And even after the two seem to break up during the finale, it lasts all of 5 minutes before they’re back together in the sequel and going on regular dates. The movie didn’t have to show this but it was set on treating these two people as, well, people, and it knew that long-lasting relationships need more than just bonding over fighting supervillains. The sequel cares about Peter and Gwen as a couple, which in turn makes us care because giving a shit is contagious like that.

 

Making us care about Peter was easy. He’s the protagonist with the most screentime. It’s much harder to flesh out a character when they’re not constantly in the spotlight. This is where the previous Spidey movies dropped the ball hard like how we mainly saw the live-action Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) from Peter’s POV. She is his reward, his obsession, a constant part of his world. Gwen, on the other hand, is a three-dimensional character with dreams, desires, determination, and probably other things that start with a D and which, most importantly, do not revolve around Peter. She is a scientist working in the first movie for the best R&D company in the city and planning to move to England in the sequel because of a scholarship she got to Oxford.

 

When The Lizard attacks her school in The Amazing Spider-Man, she helps out without by distracting him, then makes a serum to cure the monster (plus a little makeshift flamethrower to fight him off). In the sequel, she researches Electro on her own and is instrumental to defeating him. Garfield’s Peter Parker could not do those things because he is more of a garage geek variety of “smart.” The TAS Gwen is vastly more intelligent than Peter, which he doesn’t mind because he thankfully isn’t the Cybertruck’s target demographic.

 

And yet, for all this, Gwen is not perfect. She’s still a teen who gets flustered when Peter drops in on her late in the day and she has to hide him from his dad. When it looks like Peter is rejecting her advances, she gets sulky and embarrassed, and maybe even feels a little insulted. I think there is a lot of this Gwen in Zendaya’s “MJ” in Tom Holland’s Spider-Man movies, but Marc Webb still has the upper hand here because his love interest is not one person.

Yes, Zendaya was weird and quirky and her own person, but the movies still mainly presented her to us as being part of Peter Parker’s world. She was his classmate, his partner in wacky adventures, and then his girlfriend. Also, and I say this with all due respect, Zendaya and Tom Holland have toddler faces in the MCU movies despite being in their 20s. If we MUST see superhero kissing on film, can it please not be between people who look like they could successfully infiltrate a Chuck E. Cheese without arousing suspicion?

 

On the other hand, there’s nothing in the MCU movies like the scene of Gwen inviting Peter to family dinner where we got to see that there is more than one Gwen. There is school Gwen, Gwen the scientist, Gwen the daughter, Gwen the older sister. That’s why her death in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (look, after 10 years, it’s no longer a spoiler) hit so hard: Gwen’s death didn’t just mean a superhero lost his girlfriend.

Her death means the loss of a talented scientist, of someone who tried to do good but was punished for it, of someone who didn’t deserve it, and of a beloved family member. In a way, the end to Peter and Gwen’s relationship made their relationship feel so much more believable, cementing it as just one part of a complex life of a fascinating person. So perhaps it’s not so bad that the series ended after The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Bringing Gwen back or replacing her with another love interest would ruin everything the movies had built. So let’s not be sad for all the Webb Spider-Man movies we never saw and focus on what we did get: one of the best superhero romances on film.