All that could have made the new one unique seems to have been left on the cutting room floor, although some of it squeaked into the trailers before vanishing from the finished film.
I'd rank Spider-Man 2 at the top. I enjoyed the tone of the first two Raimi films. They had more joy and color and charm and heart than what I saw today. ASM had some potential but squandered it, in my opinion. It gave me very little I hadn't seen before. The promise of an interesting new back story involving his parents didn't seem to make it into the final cut. Why redo the origin story if it's not going to be indisputably superior and fresh? So much of this felt the same or not quite as good.
The perfect example was Uncle Ben's speech. Instead of getting, "With great power comes great responsibility," we get a more muddled speech about doing good to others, blah, blah, responsibility. Not as tightly written or memorable. They danced around the original, not wanting to simply quote it but instead wanting to write a new version--and they ended up with something that says the same thing but in a less memorable or quotable way. Sums up the whole movie for me. Not bad, but not better. Different for the sake of being different, but not superior. In other words, change for the sake of change. Pointless retelling without enough freshness or innovation to justify the effort in the first place. Unnecessary.
