1) The Amazing Spider-Man
It may be true that movies which get designated as “unnecessary” most often fulfill their low expectations. This is no reason, however, to write off a movie altogether before even seeing it. Indeed, it would be more fair to judge the merits of a movie in light of the difficulty imposed by the widespread hope for the film’s failure out of resentment for its existence.
In the past few years, when talk of a movie’s necessity came standard in a pool of reviews for every big release, no movie seems to have suffered more from talk of its necessity than The Amazing Spider-Man. I will forever be a defender of this film; I maintain that it’s among the finest superhero movies to date, and an improvement on the previous—and good—Sam Raimi version of the character. And yet nearly every review I’ve read about Marc Webb’s latest effort criticizes it for being made so soon after the previous trilogy.
That’s a perfectly fine, if obvious, observation, but says nothing about the quality of the actual movie. In terms of its storytelling, its characterization and performances, its Spidey-sarcastic tone and its gorgeous visual sequences, The Amazing Spider-Man surpasses its predecessor all over the place. But the thing reviewers latched onto was that it “retold” a story they claimed to have already watched.
I think it’s worth mentioning that making multiple versions of the same story is not new to Hollywood, though the objections to this practice seem to be. The Maltese Falcon was adapted by Warner Bros three separate times in ten years, and the 1941 version, the third attempt, is considered one of the greatest movies of all time. If only audiences were as open-minded now as they were in the 1940s.