Review of The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) by Halfwelshman — 23 Sep 2012

The Amazing Spider-Man is a decent quality film and a pretty fun ride. Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are excellent, with Garfield remembering to be a human first and a superhero second, and stone having great chemistry with the web-head as Peter Parker's highschool sweetheart Gwen Stacy.

Denis Leary is also superb as Gwen's over-protective, condescending but well-meaning police captain dad. Rhys Ifans is less successful as The Lizard, the film's most prominent antagonist, his performance inconsistent, his character's motivations ill-defined and his CGI-transformed appearance looking a little off (an anthropomorphic face grafted onto a reptilian body turns out not to be the cleverest design decision in motion picture history).

It's nice to see a new take on the titular hero that's more like Smallville than Sam Raimi's trilogy, but you do feel a little cheated at the film's conclusion with its many hanging plot threads that will doubtless be resolved in the sequel(s).

Though The Amazing Spider-Man breaks new ground in terms of its slow-burning style of storytelling, the key beats in the plot are predictable and cliched, and the film as a whole is far too long, though I'm not sure which scenes could justifiably be cut to improve pacing without negatively impacting the story as a whole.

It's oddly gratifying to see director Marc Webb finally attempt to address the (theoretical) physics involved in someone swinging from skyscrapers, and by executing many of the film's stunts in reality using sophisticated wire-work and harnesses, he manages to avoid the slightly rubbery Spidey of the Raimi era.

The Amazing Spider-Man is a solid foundation for a new franchise that remains pleasingly grounded and promises to explore the lesser-known lore of the Spideyverse. The post-credits scene also suggests that the sequel could go to some really interesting places now all that lengthy exposition is out of the way again.