The Amazing Spider-Man 2

I went to see the Amazing Spider-Man 2 in its first week and, naturally, went to join the big queue at the door.

"Is this for Spider-Man?" I asked.

"No; Captain America."

It's pretty damning when a franchise can't compete with a rival over a month into its run, but it's actually not unfair. Spider-Man has a lot to like about it, but not very much that surprises and there's not quite anything to love. It's not a bad film - it's not even a bad superhero film - but that just makes its failure to deliver a more powerful indication of how much the main MCU has raised the bar since X-Men and Raimi's first Spider-Man were the canine genitals of the sub-genre.

Now, this is not to say either that I didn't like the film. I had a good time. Andrew Garfield is mostly likable in a lead role that desperately needs its actor to be likable, despite a couple of failures of Dawson casting (he is just a bit too old to be so stroppy), and Emma Stone returns as a formidable interpretation of Gwen Stacey. Jamie Foxx brings a wonderful fragile rage to the role of Electro and Dane DeHaan is basically already a goblin as Harry Osborn. The effects are good, as they have to be, and the action set pieces properly dramatic, if occasionally a little hard to follow.

But we've seen so much of this before. Spider-Man kind of needs a new direction, and while 'with great power comes great responsibility' will never get old, the 'can I, can't I narrative' of Spidey's love life needs a gear change, and not the one that comes from dating Gwen Stacey.

Actually... and here's a thing that needs some spoiler warnings.

I know, on some level, that Gwen Stacey was always going to die, that it is what she does. I still wish that they hadn't killed her. I liked her as a character, and I'm not convinced that the narrative benefited from her death.

I guess it's kind of a fixed point of comics history - it did kind of end an age and all - but this isn't the Silver Age, and post-Incredibles I think that we could stand to move away from heroism as the preserve of the superpowered. It's what I like about Black Widow and Hawkeye in the Avengers, and it's what I liked about this Gwen Stacey, but her death makes her into another victim and I think that she deserved more. If nothing else, she deserved to die doing, not falling.

And unfortunately, that is the impression I take away from TASM2; that they made Gwen Stacey awesome, only to shove her into the fridge.