Director Marc Webb gave Peter Parker mechanical web-shooters in his upcoming movie because they show off the character’s creativity and genius-level intellect.
When the trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man surfaced a couple of weeks ago, it was met with mixed results. On one hand, the look of the film seems to be darker and much more serious than the Sam Raimi trilogy. On the other hand, there was that dreadful first-person sequence at the end that made it seem like someone owed EA an apology for stealing footage from Mirror’s Edge.
However, one thing that left many people confused was just how Spidey was able to websling around town, since he seemed to be spinning webs via his neck. It turns out that Peter Parker will be returning back to his comic book origins via mechanical web-shooters, and director Marc Webb wants you to know why he and his crew went with this decision.
As Webb recently explained in an interview, having Peter Parker invent mechanical web-shooters was a great way to develop his character and establish him as a smart guy. Not only that, but Webb got some ideas about the devices from the man who created Spider-Man: Stan Lee himself.
“I had a meeting with Stan Lee and we talked about the web-shooters. I was curious about the incarnation of them [because] of course in the previous films [they went away from them] and we wanted to reestablish ourselves. That was one thing but the other thing was the fact that the web-shooters were able to dramatize Peter’s intellect and I thought that was really cool. … It was in the comics and we have a different design but it’s a cool element to have. It’s not something we over-use or over-exploit. To me, it’s something I remember from when I was a kid and thinking ‘It would be cool if I could build those.'”
While the teaser trailer may seem a little dubious, it sounds like Webb is at least taking the character seriously. The Amazing Spider-Man is due out next July, so it’ll be a little while before we get to see if Webb’s vision was worth the wait.
Source: Hero Complex via io9
