Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield), whose parents disappeared while believing they were in a James Bond movie, is just your average, everyday super genius high school teenager. While attempting to connect with Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), his fatherâs old one-armed colleague, he is bitten by a genetically altered spider and yada yada yada, Spider-Man, dead Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen)âyou know the score. His girlfriend this time is Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), whose father (Denis Leary) is the police captain and a jerk. And Connors becomes a giant evil lizard, because every adult Peter knows turns into a super-villain.
It is hard to get past how unnecessary The Amazing Spider-Man is. No one needed a second telling of Spider-Manâs origin story in ten years. I wasnât all that fond of Raimiâs trilogy, but that didnât mean it needed to be redone. If we were stuck with a reboot, did it need to be one made up of piece of Raimiâs Spider-Man films? Raimi had already run the same basic story into the ground, but here it is again.
If you want to see scenes youâve seen before, youâll get to. We have the Uncle Ben speech and his death. We get Peter breaking things and learning to swing. We get confrontations with the villain that are re-writes from the earlier films. We get the girlfriend rejection scene. Weâre even given the working-Joes of New York all getting behind Spider-Man just like in the 2002 film. This is not the place to look for anything new.
If Sony insisted on doing it all again, they should have tried to do somethingâanythingâbetter. Instead they once again failed with humor (Spider-Man is supposed to be funny) and gave us characters I am excited to ignore. Every second of family melodrama is unpleasant and there is a lot of family melodrama.
And they canât get Peter right. At least this 29-year-old actor looks a little younger than the 27-year-old they tried last time. Too old, but better. They missed on âdweeby, average teenâ as well as this Peter is handsome, agile, cool, and intelligent. Not just intelligent, but Einstein-was-an-idiot level of intelligence. And heâs the greatest tailor in the history of mankind. If they wanted to tell a story about this very special guy, thatâs fine; rewrite the story so that it isnât about a teen with regular problems growing up. This Peter is not someone with regular problems. Peter does now have an unnatural stutter. Iâm guessing this was their nod to making him uncool. It doesnât work but it is annoying.
The villain is a composite of past villains, without any concern for if that makes sense. Heâs Doc Octaviusâfriendly to Peter, acting as a minor father-figure and, of course, being a super scientist. He suddenly finds his funding being taken away and his lifeâs work taken, so he tests his untried, super serum on himself, exactly like Norman Osborn. He even starts raving to himself like the Green Goblin. And like the Goblin, he figures out who Spider-Man really is and goes after him.
They added an espionage side-story that ran on into the sequel but never arrived anywhere. Maybe if the super secret spy Parkers had a purpose. Or maybe if Uncle Ben was less Yoda.
Andrew Garfield had potential, if heâd been allowed to play an age-appropriate Spidey. And been given a script that had any reason to exist. The filmâs colorful and the FX is OK. And thatâs about it.
It was followed by The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which killed the franchise, and forced Sony to make a deal for Spider-Man to appear in the MCU, starting with Captain America: Civil War and then Spider-Man: Homecoming.