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The Amazing
Spider-Man
Get over it. There's a new Spider-Man in town, and he's amazing. Okay, maybe he hasn't quite earned that adjective in his new movie reboot, nor has he quite gotten to spectacular, but would you go see a film called The Reasonably Entertaining Spider-Man?
It's 2012, and things have gotten darker, despite many people on the production team holding over from the previous version. Going back to Peter Parker's high school days, The Amazing Spider-Man plays out almost like a horror film – this time quite intentionally.
The story begins further back. A young Peter Parker (Max Charles) discovers that his father's study has been broken into, causing Richard Parker (Campbell Scott) to scoop up the boy and sequester him at the home of his brother. The mystery of this fateful night haunts Peter (Andrew Garfield) into his teen years, and the consequences of his search for answers will be fatal for some, merely devastating for others.
Not quite the goofy tone that Sam Raimi's take had, though both deal with the gloom inherent in the story. If superheroes are our modern myths, then as audiences part of the tension comes from seeing how the familiar story elements get treated. We know what has to come in order for Peter Parker to become Spider-Man; it's how the film tells it that will make or break it.
Director Marc Webb works hard establishing the nuts and bolts of Peter's high school days. While that does delay that spider bite, it makes for a more human drama. Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field) are a little younger this time around, overworked but not completely useless at dealing with a sullen teen-ager.
 Despite his sullenness, Peter really is a good kid. Smart but isolated, he doesn't just tinker with photography – honestly, holding onto that character bit seems out of step with 2012 as he's still using film. Webb also shows Peter to be good with science, or at least mechanical engineering. He has self-built devices lying around his room long before developing his webshooters.
But he isn't the only character given more depth this time around. Star athlete Flash Thompson (Chris Zylka) starts off as a bully, but reveals a more human side later, giving the audience an in to the common man's reaction to Spider-Man's existence. Though sometimes handled awkwardly, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) gets an upgrade as more than Peter's crush object; she's also quite possibly a better student than him, and thus well-suited to help him as Spider-Man.
That would be if not for her father (Denis Leary). Instead of the better known J. Jonah Jameson hunting for Spider-Man, the film presents Captain George Stacy as the dark side of Commissioner Gordon. Spider-Man is a vigilante, getting in the way of police investigations as he conducts his war on crime.
 That war gets recast here, too, in an interesting variation. Webb doesn't seem quite as interested in guilt as Peter's motivation, though it hovers in the background. It is about the responsibility, which at first makes him an angry crime fighter. But the film shows us a moment when it shifts from being about avenging Ben Parker to being the right thing to do. It's not particularly subtle, but it's well-handled and holy cow is that C. Thomas Howell in a major movie again?
And then comes the Lizard.
Played by Rhys Ifans, the cinematic Dr. Curt Connors is awkward and a little aloof (come to think of it, Dylan Baker's brief take on the character was the same). He also carries an air of menace long before his experiments turn him. Working at Oscorp with Peter's father, Connors holds the key to what happened to the Parkers, but Peter forgets that the second he gets sucked into Connors' work.
In general, the Lizard serves the purpose of driving the plot, but he doesn't have nearly the complexity of the characters in the first third of the movie. He's stock, even arguing with himself like Willem Dafoe did in the first Spider-Man. It just never becomes clear if the Lizard and Connors are two separate personalities, because Connors falls from apparent noble intentions very quickly.
The movie leaves more than a few questions unanswered, but most of us would have gone in expecting a "new trilogy" anyway. While it's nice to see that as an intentional design, it also leaves some moments frustrating. For one thing, it does mess with a key piece of Spider-Man's origin, and raises the specter of following the same path that the previous trilogy did, albeit more honestly.
Overall, Garfield's take on Spider-Man feels truer to the origins of the character, and the "Ultimate" version. Without the mask, he speaks in the rhythms of Brian Michael Bendis (though the credits only acknowledge Stan Lee and Steve Ditko), often unable to complete a sentence or an idea when faced with Gwen Stacy.
Put the mask on, though, and he becomes the wise-cracking Spidey that ascended to pop culture stardom. That disappears for a while, too, as the needs of a sprawling epic keep getting in the way of the truly interesting things Webb seems to be trying to do with the characters.
So not quite amazing. Maybe it's not even a super story. But for me, it feels like the closest to the comics that the film adaptations have gotten, and I want to see where it goes. A certain major villain lurks on the edges, and is clearly meant to be the end of the trilogy. If this creative team plays it well, we could very well have something spectacular.
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