Thursday 8 May 2014

Revisiting the Spider-Man Trilogy

2012 was undoubtedly the year of the comic book movie with a blockbuster season that saw Marvel bring together all of it's greatest heroes in one film for The Avengers, Christopher Nolan conclude his Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises and Marc Webb reboot the Spider-Man franchise with The Amazing Spider-Man.

The Avengers ran away with the title of best comic book film that summer, and for some reason most people maintain that The Dark Knight Rises was a strong second place and equally great. As a result it became the cool thing to hate on The Amazing Spider-Man. I'm not claiming that the film was without flaws or on par with The Avengers, but it was a much better film than many considered it and suffered greatly from being released amongst such heavy-hitters that had the advantage of being hyped up by previous successful films in their respective series'.

Three weeks ago, and then again last week, I went to see The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a film which I was incredibly excited for and enjoyed just as much as the first. Unfortunately it seems that the general consensus on this series is staying strong and I've seen a steady stream of hate being thrown at the sequel. A common statement being tossed about by said 'haters' is that Webb's films will never match the greatness of Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man films (I think we all know of his third films reputation), and so I thought it was time to revisit Raimi's trilogy and see exactly what Webb's films are supposedly failing to live up to.