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Amazing Spider-Man 2 wasn't what Andrew Garfield wanted - SciFiNow

Amazing Spider-Man 2 wasn’t what Andrew Garfield wanted

“We fucked up with The Amazing Spider-Man 2” admits Spidey star Andrew Garfield

Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Andrew Garfield has responded to the criticism of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and has acknowledged that a lot was cut while refusing to condemn the movie.

“It’s interesting,” he told The Daily Beast. “I read a lot of the reactions from people and I had to stop because I could feel I was getting away from how I actually felt about it. For me, I read the script that Alex [Kurtzman] and Bob [Orci] wrote, and I genuinely loved it. There was this thread running through it.

“I think what happened was, through the pre-production, production, and post-production, when you have something that works as a whole, and then you start removing portions of it—because there was even more of it than was in the final cut, and everything was related.”

“Once you start removing things and saying, ‘No, that doesn’t work,’ then the thread is broken, and it’s hard to go with the flow of the story. Certain people at the studio had problems with certain parts of it, and ultimately the studio is the final say in those movies because they’re the tentpoles, so you have to answer to those people.”

He goes on to say that some of the sequences that were trimmed were some of his favourites, including those which would have further developed Peter Parker himself. “I got to work in deep scenes that you don’t usually see in comic book movies, and I got to explore this orphan boy—a lot of which was taken out, and which we’d explored more. It’s interesting to do a postmortem. I’m proud of a lot of it and had a good time, and was a bit taken aback by the response.”

Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in The Amazing Spider-Man 2

However, Garfield is keen to point out that it’s important not to dismiss the movie outright and that it’s important to learn from their mistakes, to listen to the complaints and move forward.

“It’s a discernment thing,” he explained. “What are the people actually saying? What’s underneath the complaint, and how can we learn from that? We can’t go, ‘Oh God, we fucked up because all these people are saying all these things. It’s shit.’ We have to ask ourselves, ‘What do we believe to be true?’ Is it that this is the fifth Spider-Man movie in however many years, and there’s a bit of fatigue? Is it that there was too much in there? Is it that it didn’t link? If it linked seamlessly, would that be too much? Were there tonal issues? What is it?

“I think all that is valuable. Constructive criticism is different from people just being dicks, and I love constructive criticism. Hopefully, we can get underneath what the criticism was about, and if we missed anything.”

What did you think of The Amazing Spider-Man 2? Many fans complained that there was simply too much going on, particularly when it came to the villains. Would more time spent with Peter have helped the film?

The scenes between him and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) provided the movie with a great emotional core and writing the film off would be to ignore Garfield and Stone’s excellent work, not to mention Dane DeHaan and Jamie Foxx’s performances as Harry Osborn/Green Goblin and Max Dillon/Electro. Has all the criticism levelled at the movie been overly harsh?

You can buy The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on Blu-ray for £17.63 at Amazon.co.uk. Find out more about the comics that inspired the film with new digital magazine Uncanny Comics. Thwip thwip.