The Amazing Spider-Man

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Director: Marc Webb
Actors: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans

Synopsis: Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) traces a genetic equation made by his long-since-missing father to Oscorp, and there he gets bitten by a genetically-mutated spider, thereby making him…Spider-Man!

Review: Does the world really want another Spider-Man movie (and another ‘origin’ one at that) less than ten years after the previous cycle started? Well, clearly the studios think so, as the superhero cash cow needs some further milking. And before you mention Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy which followed only eight years after the end of the Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman run, that was completely different as those films in their entirety were spread over almost 25 years, and Nolan was taking Batman into far more innovative, artier territory away from Burton’s fantasy-gothic aesthetic and Schumacher’s camp, cartoony numbers.

This new Spider-Man movie, given the highly enlightening ‘Amazing’ prefix to separate it from Sam Raimi’s trilogy, doesn’t really add anything of note to distinguish it from Raimi’s earlier films, and has even dispensed with most of their endearing, ‘boy’s own’, fantasy charm. Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker is definitely posited as far cooler than Tobey Maguire’s incarnation, with his parkour skills, hoodie and skateboard. Garfield also pretty much gets the girl immediately, and doesn’t suffer too much of a crisis over keeping his alter-ego secret. Also, Raimi’s Spider-Man gave a real sense of New York and Parker’s blue collar Queens neighbourhood, where as Marc Webb’s Amazing is a generic, CGI metropolis, that symbolises, in total, the prosaic bent of this film’s execution. (August 2013)