Written by: James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent, Steve Kloves (based on the comics by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko)
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans
Genre: Action/Sci-Fi(ish)
Certificate: 12A
Release Year: 2012
The Amazing Spider-Man is named wrong. A better suited name would be The Slightly Above Average Spider-Man, or the The Just Managing To Step Above Mediocrity Spider-Man. Admittedly, these titles don't have the same ring to them...
From the outset, this film had alot of potential. It had the lizard (which hadn't been done in the original trilogy) and it had Andrew Garfield. But above all, it aimed to reinvent the Spidey franchise as a teen movie series, I didn't mind the first two being kids movies, but Spider-Man 3 was painfully childish.
So let's take these factors individually. The lizard looked fantastic, and Rhys Ifans did a brilliant job playing him and his human version, Dr. Curt Connors. He was definately one of the most believable characters, which is no mean feat considering he was playing a crazy scientist who injected himself with reptile juice and turned into Godzilla.
Andrew Garfield - again brilliant. He had a hard act to follow after Tobey Maguire hung up the skin-tight red and blue suit, but has certainly lived up to expectation. I've been a fan of Garfield since seeing The Social Network. This isn't because I enjoyed The Social Network - watching it was like having my eyes gouged out with a pair of gardening sheers - but because Garfield's performance made the film nearly bearable. Good job.
Finally, the change of target audience.Or the confusion over whether there was one? To some extent, The Amazing Spider-Man did feel more like a teen movie in that it focused alot on school life and thee romance between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone). But, in all honesty, this was handled quite High School Musical-y, and the level of violence wasn't very different to the original film which left me confused about how this had earned a 12A certificate.
So, was it worth rebooting the Spider-Man franchise? I have to say yes, but not on the merits of this film, but more on the downfall of Spider-Man 3. This new interpretation is pretty similar to it's predecessor, but because of this it still retains the same satire and playfulness that made the other series so popular.
6/10
What did you think of The Amazing Spider-Man? Let us know in the comments...
Tom :)
The only thing I think you've missed is the fact that in this movie Peter Parker likes to give his identity away to everyone he can, wish is just darn right wrong. Also the uncle Ben and Auntie May characters were not as thought out as they could have been.
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