Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Amazing Spider-Man 2
2014 · Marc Webb · The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count how often Webb frames a hand reaching for someone. (camera)
The reach is this film's basic gesture: a web line fired at a falling body, an arm out through the dark. Webb stages it in rescues and in small domestic moments alike.
Payoff: You are being trained to treat a reach and a save as the same event. Keep count anyway. In the reading: mark. The reading calls the web line a mark: an object whose meaning is the chain it belongs to, so it promises the save.
Notice how Electro lights every room he walks into. (light)
Sony Imageworks rendered him translucent, with musculature glowing like circuitry. Daniel Mindel drops the palette into cold electric blue whenever he appears, and that blue swallows the primary colors around him.
Payoff: He is not lit by the scene. He is the light source, which is how the film builds a mood out of one character. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this a color-image: a color that absorbs a whole situation and its feeling instead of merely describing it.
Listen for whispering inside Electro's music. (sound)
Hans Zimmer and his Magnificent Six braid accusations, electrical crackle, and grid hum into the score, so you cannot tell where the power station stops and the music starts.
Payoff: You hear what Max thinks without him saying it. A man who feels unseen gets made audible instead.
Look for clocks, gears, and the wristwatch that keeps returning. (setting)
Hands and mechanisms turn up across the film, in Oscorp, in gifts, in the architecture itself. The design keeps time running visibly behind scenes about young people making plans.
Payoff: The film is counting something down while it plays as a romance. The props are the things keeping score.
Watch Garfield and Stone talk over each other. (performance)
Webb came from romantic comedy and gives the couple room: overlapping lines, unforced comic timing, scenes that slow down for no plot reason. Garfield keeps talking under the mask too.
Payoff: The romance is where this picture is actually built. The rest reads as freight it agreed to carry.
Once you have seen it
Watch the gears turning behind Peter in the clock tower. (staging)
Pietro Scalia and Elliot Graham slow the cutting right down. The reach lands exactly as it always has. The machinery of a clock keeps turning behind a man with no move left to make.
Payoff: The film breaks its own circuit in public. Doing the right thing at the right instant stops working, and there is nothing to punch. In the reading: demark. The reading calls this a demark: the point where a familiar gesture stops delivering what it always delivered, so you must interpret instead of expect.
Track how many plots the film starts and never closes. (structure)
The Oscorp vault, the special projects, Peter's parents, Harry's illness, a late rhinoceros. Sony wanted a Sinister Six, and the script carries freight no single film could land.
Payoff: A release calendar is showing through the story. Knowing that changes what you watch for in the connective scenes.
Watch how fast the film goes back to fighting afterward. (structure)
Peter stands still for a few minutes of screen time, and then the machine restarts with a man in a rhinoceros suit. The tone snaps back to where it sat before.
Payoff: The film opens something it cannot hold. You can feel the genre closing over the gap it just made.
Carry this in: Watch the hands. Webb frames a reach over and over, and teaches you to believe a reach always ends in a save.