HERE BE SPOILERS! DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVE NOT YET SEEN THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2!

Rarely in a large scale action-film does a superhero face any real consequences. For all the talk of “great power and great responsibility”, it is not often that superheroes are ever held accountable for their choice to put themselves and their loved ones in danger for the sake of saving the world. And it is even less often that we as an audience actually feel the pain of these larger than life characters. And never in my life has a superhero film actually moved me to tears.

Which is part of what makes The Amazing Spider-Man 2 a very special film for me. This is a film whose climax ends in truly profound loss for its title character. A film that not only hits its protagonist right across the face with the gravity of the situation, but then takes time exploring the effects of tragedy on a young man and his journey from despair and back to hope.

When Gwen Stacy hits the ground, Peter Parker is almost completely unaware. It’s one of, if not the only moment in the film that the audience actually knows a little more than the web-slinger. He is blinded by the hope that he might have actually saved her life.

But reality comes rushing towards him very quickly as he realizes what has happened. Gwen Stacy, the girl who he is madly in love with, the girl who mere minutes ago he made plans to go to England with, the girl who he made a vow to protect, has died, and in a way, it’s kind of his fault.

And the fact that we’ve spent the whole movie laughing at their banter and getting wrapped up in their romance (which probably owes to the fact that Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are a real life couple), makes her death all the more devastating.

When the film takes almost the rest of its duration to show Peter in a profound state of depression as he grasps to find hope, we feel his pain and confusion too. And when he finds that hope, and dons the Spider-Man outfit for the first time in months, we are as thrilled as he is to have found his purpose again.

But none of that would matter if the rest of the film didn’t build up to its emotional conclusion. This is where the Internet is split on this movie. One half thinks that the film does not logically build to its intended emotional crescendo, which renders the film’s ending, while theoretically touching, not nearly as affecting as it wants to be. The other half of the Internet, however, feels that the film totally deserves its emotional punch and as such is a fantastic superhero film.

It happened with last year’s Man of Steel, which had a similarly emotionally charged ending and even wound up with a comparable Rotten Tomatoes score (56, in comparison to TASM2’s 54.)

However, while I found Man of Steel’s ending to be totally unearned, TASM2’s final minutes, to me, were as effective as they wanted to be, if not more.

This is due partially to the quality of the film’s performances. Everyone, with the possible exception of Jamie Foxx’s Electro (but we’ll get there in a minute), gives a deep, layered performance that we don’t usually see in comic book films, not even in the first Amazing Spider-Man.

I already talked about the positively beautiful chemistry between Garfield and Stone (that sounds like a law firm, or maybe an ice cream company), but I have not yet touched on the absolutely tragic performance that Dane DeHaan gives as Harry Osborne. Harry catches a glimpse at his potential fate in his introduction, where he visits his dying father (a perhaps under-utilized Chris Cooper). He knows, or at least thinks, that he needs Spider-Man’s blood to save him and the scene in which Spider-Man tells him that he can’t in good conscience give Osborne his blood is heart-breaking. I 100% bought Osborne’s anger at Spider-Man and the world thanks to DeHaan’s wonderful performance, which might actually be his best since Chronicle (which come to think of it shares some striking similarities to Osborne’s arc in this film). His transformation from rejected son to dangerous menace is captured beautifully throughout the film.

But none of that would work if the screenwriters didn’t give the actors strong material to work from, but in my opinion, they did. With so many characters, it’s difficult to make us understand and care about all of them, but, with the exception Paul Giamatti’s Rhino (who is such a small presence that Sony shouldn’t have bothered putting him in their marketing), everyone is given personality and meaningful motivation.

That includes Electro. Yes, Jamie Foxx’s portrayal may be a tad cartoonish, but that’s no fault of the script, which gives him an understandable motivation and actually makes you feel kind of bad when he dies. It’s gonna sound ridiculous, but I saw some interesting parallels between Electro’s “I just wanna be noticed” ambitions and the mass murderers that we’ve been seeing on the news lately. It’s all about recognition for those people and the same could be said for Electro.

And of course, I can’t go through this article without commenting on Hans Zimmer’s decidedly non-Zimmerish score or cinematographer Daniel Mindel’s appropriately comic-booky coloring and framing. Well, both are absolutely first-rate and reason enough to warrant a theater experience.

I rarely flat-out cry during movies. I may get choked up but it is uncommon that a film makes my glasses fog up and my tear ducts practically explode. And never in my film-going life has a superhero movie made me explode into a puddle of salty tears. Until The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Is it the best superhero film I’ve ever seen? It might be. Only time will tell, but after my first two viewings, I am totally prepared to place this film among the best summer blockbusters of all time. Sure, it has its flaws (the web that Peter shoots in his attempt to save Gwen resembling a hand might be a tad much), but don’t all films have problems?

The fact of the matter is that from the moment Gwen Stacy hit the floor of that clock tower till about a minute after the credits started rolling, I was a complete emotional wreck. And that a fast-paced summer romp was able to do that to me is a sign of something special. It may only be special to me, but since I am me, that’s enough.