Why you should watch The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on Netflix

The most important aspect of Garfield’s performance is that he feels like Peter Parker. That means more than just a quip and a flip. When Peter has reasons to grieve, Garfield throws himself into that aspect of his character as well. And Garfield also more than holds his own with his screen partner, Emma Stone, who plays Gwen Stacy.

Peter and Gwen’s romance is off the charts

Non-comic book readers may not know this, but Gwen Stacy’s comic book counterpart was a boring character with only superficial attributes. Women weren’t exactly well-written or even understood by the early Marvel creators. They only existed to pine over their absent boyfriends or get kidnapped by the supervillains. Infamously in Gwen’s case, she was also the first romantic love interest at Marvel to get killed off. Gwen was ultimately a throw-away character until her alternate-world counterpart, Spider-Gwen, was introduced.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and its predecessor, deepened Gwen’s character in part by making her a scientific genius who could match Peter’s passion for the subject, and by letting her in on Peter’s double life as Spider-Man rather than keeping her in the dark. That’s why Stone’s Gwen Stacy plays more like a partner to Peter, rather than a mere love interest. It also helps that Stone and Garfield have great chemistry on screen. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 does have a subplot about Peter potentially losing Gwen to outside forces including college in the United Kingdom. But even that conflict can’t keep these two lovebirds apart.

Now that the emotional arc of Garfield’s Peter ends in No Way Home, it makes The Amazing Spider-Man 2 a lot more engaging because we can see where he went wrong and how he failed the first time, while also secure in the knowledge that Peter does eventually overcome his trauma. Spider-Man wins in the end, and that’s what we always want to see.