Summer 2012: The Summer I Fell in Love with Movies!
If you are a movie fan, like me, you have been asked “when did you fall in love with movies?” Or “what movie made you fall in love with movies?” I have been thinking about that recently, so here is a quick breakdown of where my love for movies started and when that happened. Let us get started!
Nerd Culture: If you know my love for movies, you know that I have an enormous amount of love and passion for comic book movies. Comic book movies and superheroes in general were my gateway into nerd culture and helped shape the nerd that I am today. With Batman in my early years, that is really what set in motion my love for nerd culture. Where I would watch Batman movies, tv shows, and play Batman video games, especially the LEGO Batman video games and all of that dominated by childhood. I dressed up as Batman two different times for Halloween, one was Christian Bale’s Batman and the other one was as Batman from The Batman, not with Robert Pattinson but an animated Batman tv show from the mid-2000s that’s absolutely fantastic and wonderful if you haven’t watched it. Beyond that, I was a huge fan of Cars, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and several other things that dominated my childhood. But I view Batman as my main gateway into nerd culture and helped shape me into the nerd I am today.
Summer of 2012
As far as movies, what movies made me fall in love. I have been asked this question multiple times over the years, and I never really had an answer until recently. I look back at the summer of 2012 as one of those defining chapters in my love for movies. That summer we got The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Dark Knight Rises, three comic book movies which should not be too surprising if you know me. But that summer I feel like I changed my perspective on movies and made me realize that movies are cool.
I of course was already a big Batman fan by the time The Dark Knight Rises came out, and I had seen Batman Begins and The Dark Knight before and loved them. So, getting to see a Batman movie on the big screen was important for me. If you have seen my Batman and superhero movie rankings, I tend to rank The Dark Knight Rises higher than most people. Some of that is that I can forgive the issues with the film more than others can. I acknowledge the film’s issues and the logic of certain elements and the timeline of Bruce Wayne getting back to Gotham does not fully add up. But the things the film gets right, it gets right. The film is an incredibly emotionally satisfying conclusion to this trilogy. In the final moments, the film can pay everything off well. There are some incredible sequences in this movie, depending on the day. I prefer this film’s opening sequence to the opening sequence of The Dark Knight. Both are fantastic, but this film’s introduction to Bane is fantastic. It really put Christopher Nolan on my radar who of course has gone on to have a fantastic filmography and his latest film, The Odyssey is one of my favorite movies of the year so far.
The other two movies are both of course Marvel movies with The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man helped me fall in love with Marvel. I did not really watch many Marvel tv shows as a kid. There are several animated Spider-Man tv shows that were running in my formative years. And I have seen episodes of those shows over the years, but they were never shows that I watched the same way I watched Batman tv shows. The one-two punch of The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man just really put me on the Marvel train. I had seen Captain America: The First Avenger the summer prior on the big screen which was the first superhero movie I ever saw on the big screen. So, I was already a MCU fan because of that, and I had seen Iron Man which is fantastic. Getting to see The Avengers and all the heroes coming together was truly awesome. If you were not around or were not old enough when The Avengers came out, then you might not realize just how big of an event and deal this movie was. This shattered box office records; at the time of release, it had the biggest domestic opening of all time. I remember the superhero nerd inside of me just loved getting to see all the heroes on screen together, it was this big deal, and I have continued to love this movie 14 years later.
The Amazing Spider-Man is the film that made me a Spider-Man fan. I do not believe I had seen the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films prior to The Amazing Spider-Man. So, there is a chance that The Amazing Spider-Man was my introduction to Spider-Man in general. Like The Dark Knight Rises, I rank The Amazing Spider-Man higher in some of my rankings compared to most people. One of my hot takes is The Amazing Spider-Man is better than the entirety of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. I connect with The Amazing Spider-Man more than I do with Tobey’s films. That is not to say that Tobey’s films are bad, I really like Spider-Man (2002) but I just like The Amazing Spider-Man more. Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man is one of those defining castings of my childhood. Where I go back and forth between him and Tom Holland as my favorite Spider-Man. I think I would give it to Holland because he is the most well rounded. But I really like a lot of what Andrew does and especially on pure acting chops, he’s the best actor to be Spider-Man. Getting to see Andrew return in Spider-Man: No Way Home was really special to me and getting to see audiences fall in love with Andrew was really cool, because I’ve always loved Andrew’s Spider-Man and seeing more and more people fall in love with him is really cool.
Final Thoughts: My journey into falling in love with movies is different from most other people. But what is cool about movies is that we can all love movies but have different journeys to loving movies. I have a lot more love for comic book movies compared to some of my friends who also love movies, and that is cool. The summer of 2012 is the summer in which I fell in love with movies with the help of The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Dark Knight Rises.
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