(Originally written July 19th, 2012)
So a couple days ago I went and saw The Amazing Spiderman and I thought I’d write up a brief little review of it. I’ll keep it as spoiler free as possible and just hit on some general things I liked and disliked about it. This movie is a reboot to the Spiderman film franchise and that seems to be an issue a lot of people had with this movie before it came out. I know I was thinking the same thing: “a reboot already?” The last Spiderman movie being back in 2007 and many people hated on it and I can’t say I liked it either. So it’s only been 5 years since the last Spiderman movie. A decade had pasted when they rebooted Batman… Is there some rule of thumb about how long you should wait till a movie series is rebooted? Anyway, it doesn’t matter because The Amazing Spiderman is a very good reboot. I liked it better than Batman Begins and I’m a hardcore Batman fan.
I feel they are going for a darker tone with this new Spiderman movie series (oh yes, there will be sequels). The tone is a little more realistic and more serious. There were a few brief graphically violent scenes for a PG-13 movie but I personally don’t mind. That being said, don’t think this is a completely serious movie, there are some really funny scenes and good acting, better acting than from the previous trilogy in my opinion. I personally didn’t like the way to movie started and from my understanding, I’m not alone on that but once Peter starts getting his powers it really picks up. Spiderman doesn’t naturally shoot web from his wrists in this one, he has to build the web shooters.
I wasn’t crazy about the new actor for Spiderman at first who is played by Andrew Garfield. He has that Edward Cullen look to him but did a good job balancing be awkward and being badass when he becomes Spiderman and gets into the groove of being the super hero. It works out over all. Emma Stone plays Gwen Stacy, who I assumed as Mary Jane in trailers so I was like ‘WTF? A blonde Mary Jane?! NOOOOO!’ But when they said it was Gwen Stacy I was like ‘Ah! That’s better.’ She does a good job in the role and isn’t having to always be rescued as much as Mary Jane did in the previous movies. Rhys Ifans plays Dr. Curt Connors aka The Lizard and actually turns into the Lizard in this movie unlike the previous trilogy. He does an overall excellent job in this role both in human and monster lizard form. His lizard form is, of course, is all CG and looks about how I think Killer Croc would look if they put him in a live action Batman movie.
The cinematography generally has a darker look to it which is what made me think they were trying to go the whole Christopher Nolan route with Spiderman but it’s not that dark in tone. The action scenes ranged from awesome to what the heck is going on? Please zoom out type scenes. One thing I really didn’t like was there were quite a few scenes that were made to pander to the 3D gimmick (I saw it in 2D) and if you know me, I hate 3D movies and that there are so many movies being made just for the 3D gimmick. For example, there are a lot of first person shots of Spiderman swinging around and a couple scenes where he shoots web directly at the camera. I felt it was rather unnecessary but I’m sure I am a minority on that.
Overall, I really liked it. The friend I went with really didn’t want to see it, mainly for some of the reasons I mentioned earlier but he seemed to like it too. It’s a definite improvement from Spiderman 2 and 3 from the 2000’s and seems to be setting up a better trilogy.. maybe. I wouldn’t go to say that it’s Avengers good. I heard some people say it’s as good, if not better than the Avengers and they would be just wrong but it’s still definitely worth seeing if you’re a comic book movie fan or love action movies with plot in it. If you have doubts about it, don’t knock it till you try it. It proved me wrong.
Overall: 8.3/10
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