The Amazing Spider-man: A Review

When I heard that the Spider-man film franchise was being rebooted, I wasn’t happy.  Not only is Sam Raimi’s Spider-man trilogy not even ten years old, but it was actually good.  Sure, Spider-man 3 wasn’t as good as the first two, but I don’t think it was a bad movie.  I certainly didn’t think it was any justification to start over with a reboot so soon.  I could’ve seen a reboot in ten years, but not now.

That’s what I was telling myself when The Amazing Spider-man was first announced.  I had no interest in it, and figured it was just following the current trend of rebooting stalled or failed movie franchises.  After all, the recent reboots for Batman, James Bond and Star Trek all made a ton of money, so why not Spider-man?  Never mind that the last Spider-man movie came out just five years ago.

I started to change my mind about the concept when I saw the trailers though.  Andrew Garfield looked like a great Peter Parker, and while the movie looked darker than the Raimi Films it also looked exciting.  I was intrigued, so I decided to check it out for myself at a midnight showing last night.

It’s been said that The Amazing Spider-man borrows a lot from Christopher Nolan’s Batman films with its darker tone and attempts to ground the movie in reality.  In fact, it’s been said so often that it’s almost a cliche by now.  A lot of hack critics love to compare new movies to whatever is popular at the time, and I’m sure I could find a review that describes this movie as The Avengers meets The Dark Knight.  As much as I hate to think that I’m stooping to the level of a hack film critic, I have to say that this movie’s comparison to the Nolan Batman films isn’t entirely inappropriate.  It’s darker in that Spider-man starts out as an angry, vengeance-driven vigilante obsessed with finding his uncle’s killer, and it’s more grounded in reality in that the action scenes feel more realistic than those in Raimi’s films.  This sounds pretty horrible for a movie about Spider-man, a character that’s supposed to be fantastic and fun, but it’s better in execution than it is on paper.  Yes, Spider-man starts out wanting to find his uncle’s killer, but he soon learns that he should be using his powers to help people instead of just beating up thugs.  It’s how he learns the lesson of great power and great responsibility here; he has the power to help people, so it’s his responsibility to do just that.  It allows him to grow as a character in a way that wasn’t apparent in the earlier films.  As for the action scenes, they look more realistic this time around.  When we see Spider-man swinging through the city or flipping around during fight scenes, it looks like it’s actually happening.  I’m sure there was no small amount of CGI used, but at least it’s more convincing that a lot of CGI we’ve seen in previous Spider-man movies..  It feels organic.  I believed that what I was seeing was really happening when before I felt like I was watching a cartoon or video game. A visually impressive cartoon or video game, but a cartoon or video game all the same.

The rest of the movie worked just fine for me, although it’s not perfect.  It’s basically a retelling of Spider-man’s origin story.  This time around, Peter Parker is a quirky yet charming loner instead of an awkward nerd.  He’s still bitten by a mutated spider, but this time it happens when he’s snooping around the mysterious laboratory where his deceased father used to work.  His beloved Uncle Ben still gets killed by someone he could’ve stopped.  He still becomes a hero, but it’s a slower progression in which he goes from being a maskless vigilante to a masked vigilante to a full-blown superhero who realizes that he should be helping people in need instead of just beating up criminals.  Like I said before, it gives Peter a logical and smart character arc that is totally believable.

Speaking of Peter Parker, I can’t write a review of this movie without mentioning Andrew Garfield’s excellent portrayal of the character.  He’s odd and quirky, but also very sweet and charming.  He has moments of angst, but he never gets too dark.  He can be very funny, especially when he goes into full Spider-man mode and tosses quips left and right (something that was sorely lacking in Raimi’s films).  He’s incredibly likable, and he carries the movie well.  He also has great chemistry with Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy.  Both Garfield and Stone come off as awkward, smitten teenagers, and they have exactly the kind of relationship a good coming-of-age teenage drama needs.

Unfortunately, this movie isn’t perfect.  First of all, I didn’t feel that Uncle Ben’s death carried as much weight as it should have.  It felt a little like he was killed off just because that’s how the story goes.  Uncle Ben has to die in a Spider-man origin story, just like Krypton has to explode in a Superman origin story, and Bruce Wayne’s parents have to be murdered in a Batman story.  It’s too integral to Spider-man’s origin not to be included.  Ben’s actual death scene is handled well enough, but the rest of the movie treats it almost as an afterthought.  We get a couple of scenes of Peter angsting about it and a revenge subplot that gets dropped as soon as Peter figures out what his true calling is, but that’s about it.  Uncle Ben’s presence should be felt throughout the movie even after he’s killed, yet when it’s finally brought up again towards the end I found myself thinking, “Oh yeah, that’s right, his uncle died,” as if it was a minor footnote in the script.  The loss of a beloved father figure should have a greater impact than that.

Another complaint that I have is that the villain is uninteresting.  Rhys Ifans plays Curt Connors and the Lizard well enough, but I never really bought into the character.  He starts out as a benevolent scientist wanting to do something to help humanity, but after injecting himself with a serum and turning into a giant lizard creature he almost immediately becomes a mad scientist bent on "fixing" the human race with his serum.  He even has a secret lab in the sewers.  I can understand that his transformation affects his mind, but he goes from benevolent scientist to supervillain too quickly and with little motivation.  At least his fight scenes with Spider-man look cool.

There’s also some business of trying to set up a sequel by leaving some plot threads unresolved.  There are hints of an evil corporate overlord/criminal mastermind pulling everyone’s strings, and the mystery of why Peter’s parents disappeared is never resolved.  It’s fairly transparent sequel baiting that’s common in movies these days.  It’s frustrating to see in most movies, but what we’re given is intriguing enough to pique my curiosity, so I'm more willing to give it a pass this time.

Overall, I have to say that The Amazing Spider-man is a smarter and more satisfying reboot than I expected it to be.  It has its flaws, but the good outweighs the bad.  I’m not sure I like it as much as Spider-man or Spider-man 2, but it’s definitely better than Spider-man 3.  For what it’s worth, I hope it does well enough to warrant a couple of sequels.  I’d love to see where this story is headed.