Film Review: The Amazing Spiderman

Director: Marc Webb

In many ways, the people involved with making this movie didn't have a tough act to follow given the colossal failure that the previous franchise was as it rumbled on to Spiderman 3. The reboot of the franchise was kick-started by the cancellation of Spiderman 4 which ended Sam Raimi's series. I entered with reasonably low expectations which meant I wasn't too disappointed with the outcome but when comparing it to the latest Batman franchise (which is inevitable) then it fails to live up to it.

Andrew Garfield as Spiderman

The film revolves around the ''back story'' of Peter Parker becoming Spiderman and tries to find out who he is by finding out about his father and who he was after he left when Peter was very young. He slowly develops his skills after being bitten by the Spiderman with good and bad results but then has to use them to combat an enemy that is threatening the entire city.

Andrew Garfield is definitely an upgrade on Tobey MacGuire as the leading man which improves the film from the outset but that is not to say he is great in this movie as some of the acting on the ''funnier'' moments really fell flat. The other concern especially with a sequel looming, don't leave as soon as the credits start rolling if you haven't seen it like 90% of the people did next to me, is whether Garfield can continue to play someone in high school since he is now 28. Emma Stone is under-utilized within the film until the end which is a shame.

Spiderman with Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone)

As you would expect there are a lot of thrilling scenes of Spiderman swinging through New York City and CGI to make this happen. There are also a lot of similar plot lines to the original in 2002 but it is always hard to separate yourself in these circumstances. The backstory just seemed like a similar but slightly altered version of previous ideas; the bigger criticism is that many of the ideas seem to be overly stretched out. The film runs for 136mins but feels more like a full three hours as there isn't enough really happening to keep you glued to the screen the whole time.

2/4 slightly long and rehashed version but still an improvement on previous attempts.