Review: The Amazing Spider-Man

       This movie should never have been made. It's only been 10 years since the first Spider-Man movie with Tobey Maguire, and just five years since the last one. The reason that a reboot came so soon is that for legal reasons, Sony has to continue making Spider-Man movies in order to maintain the rights to the web slinger, otherwise the rights will default back to Marvel. Because this movie is being made for financial reasons rather than artistic ones, it has every reason to be terrible. Because of this, I went into watching this movie with low expectations, and as a result I was pleasantly surprised. While this movie does have many flaws, it is still an effective super hero movie that is largely entertaining.

       The first hour or so of this movie deals with Spidey's origin story, the bite from a genetically enhanced spider, letting a robber get away only to have that theif murder his uncle (Martin Sheen), thus instilling a sense of responsibility to do good, blah blah blah. It's a story that any comic book nerd worth his mylar sleeves knows by heart. And while taking so much time to go over this story is tiresome, it does establish the motives behind Peter Parker's actions much better than the previous trilogy. Andrew Garfield plays Peter Parker as a more of a loose cannon that what we've seen in the past, it's the first time that we're not sure if he has a plan before he leaps off of a building. He is prone to showing off his new skills and taunting his foes. He still is into photography, but he doesn't work for the Daily Globe (and J.K. Simmons' J. Jonah Jameson is sorely missed). Instead he works with his father's old partner, Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) on developing cross-species genetics to help cure sickness. The idea is that lizards have the ability to regrow lost limbs, so how can we give that ability to humans? Connors, who is missing an arm, is particularly passionate about this and overdoses on lizard DNA(?) and transforms into The Lizard, a giant half man/half lizard villain who tears apart Manhattan in his effort to make everyone else like him. Meanwhile, Parker falls for Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) and the two of them become close, but wouldn't you know it, Gwen's father (Denis Leary) is the Chief of police determined to lock up the vigilante menace, Spider-Man.

       Ifans is pretty lackluster as The Lizard, whose emotional range is comparable to Godzilla. The CGI is frequently overused, and attempts to play to the 3D audience are overdone, although I imagine the first person web swinging scenes would be pretty cool in three dimensions. Martin Sheen is impressive as the stern uncle whose death inspires Spider-Man to fight crime, but it was a little distracting how he didn't say the famous line from the 2002's Spider-Man, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Some touches, like having the love interest be Gwen Stacy rather than Mary Jane and having Peter build a web shooting device rather than having web shoot out of his wrists organically made this movie truer to the source material. This movie isn't as good as Spider-Man 2, which is one of the best super hero movies of all time, but it's certainly better than the train wreck that was Spider-Man 3. It's about on par with the first Spider-Man, which only serves to show that this movie didn't necessarily have to be made. Hopefully rumors are true that Sony's recent financial woes could lead to Spidey being sold back to Marvel, which would mean that Spider-Man could join his friends in The Avengers.