Rated: M
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Director: Marc Webb
Stars: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Irrfan Khan, Denis Leary, Martin Sheen
Screening: general release
Rating: ***1/2
TEN years after the release of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man starring Tobey Maguire, we’re back where we started, in a way. That movie was a critical and box office smash, and produced two sequels. But rather than suiting up for a fourth instalment, the decision was made to start all over again.
To go back to school, as it were, to the way the story began the first time around, but with a new actor playing a youthful Peter Parker discovering the wonders of vengeance, first love and leaping tall buildings with a lot of help from super-strong spiderweb cables.
It makes sense, in a way. Spider-Man is, after all, at its heart a story of adolescence, of a character dramatically transformed by physical changes – catapulted into new expectations and responsibilities, feeling surges of power, a sense of wonder, mood swings and bewilderment.
And it’s the adolescent transformation that The Amazing Spider-Man does best. The film comes from a trio of scriptwriters, James Vanderbilt (Zodiac), veteran Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves (who worked on all the Harry Potter movies). It is directed by Marc Webb, whose name is not associated with action blockbusters. His previous movie was the artfully out-of-sequence tale of hipster love-gone-wrong, (500) Days Of Summer. Perhaps not surprisingly, the early stages of The Amazing Spider-Man are the strongest.
The movie also makes the most of English actor Andrew Garfield (The Social Network, Never Let Me Go), who gives Peter Parker the perfect combination of vulnerability and intensity. Angular, hesitant, startled, he seems at first an almost impossibly uncertain candidate for a superhero suit.
Emma Stone makes a strong, smart, appealing heroine and crush object. But where the film disappoints a little is in the use it makes of Spider-Man’s opponent (Rhys Ifans).
There’s something scrambled and incomplete about the way the plot plays out, in a tale of scientific experiments gone awry and potentially idealistic genetic research hijacked for other ends. This is never really explored in sufficient detail, pushed too quickly to one side for the exuberant, kinetic, 3D action sequences.
