The Amazing Spider-Man: Review
As we all know Spider-Man released this past week. Now for the record, I have to say that I had no problems with the original Spider-Man series. I thought some parts of it were better than others, and I thought some of some of the movies were better than others. It had its problems like most movies have but overall I thought it was a very good series of movies and enjoyed each and every one of them.
Now, I’m not sure if it is just me or does it seem like there are a tremendous amount of comic book movies coming out not only recently, but over the past few years? It seems that Marvel has figured out a really good pattern with their Iron Man series, the Thor movie, and the not so wonderful Hulk movie, and then to top it off they ended with the Avengers. This, however, was not matched by DC comics and their movies produced over the last few years, these include, the 2004 Catwoman, 2005 Batman Begins, 2006 Superman Returns, 2008 The Dark Knight, the 2009 Watchmen, the 2010 Jonah Hex, the 2011 Green Lantern, and now coming out this weekend The Dark Knight Rises. Over all several decent movies, but it doesn’t seem to me that they have the magic that was created by Marvel comics with their Avengers series of movies.
That said, here we find ourselves the week following the release of this new Spider-Man movie. Overall not a bad performance, and I have to say Andrew Garfield played a pretty decent Peter Parker. And if we recall, I remember a year ago at this time we are all talking about the lousy costume. As it turns, out it was a non-issue even if we leave out the fact that no one ever got to see the mask because it was never actually on. Emma Stone played Gwen Stacy very well; not only was the acting good, but the actress looked even better. Martin Sheen, who played uncle Ben, and Sally Field, who played aunt May, both performed their parts very well, and overall I would have to say a well done job of casting.
Now let’s get on to the story.  The overall concept of the story and surprisingly the origin story remains the same for Peter Parker. For those of you who watched the trailers thinking that you were going to see something new pertaining around the origin story, well, let me tell you… you’re going to be disappointed. Not only did they not incorporate what looked like what was going to be a new origin story, they left that part of the story hanging and unanswered just as it was in the trailers. No answers, more questions, and quite a bit of puzzlement over why it was even included. My only guess is that it was included to make sure that you hungered for more. Not only did that not work, but it left me kind of disappointed that, going into the movie, the one thing I wanted to know I still don’t know.
Truly, I am not one to have problems with movies like this Spider-Man. But that said, I have serious issues with Spider-Man pulling his mask off at every corner, in every chase, on every building top, running through every school, while stringing up every hanging car, and any other time that there was more than 16 seconds of screen time consecutively. This puzzles me, as it was one of the original complaints that many Spider-Man fans had with previous movies. Not only did it persist more than previous movies, but it persisted to the point that it was extremely annoying and almost made me want to throw up my hands and say, not again.
In conclusion, overall I give the rating of 7 out of a total of 10. I enjoyed most of it, but do not feel that it has the re-watch ability of the more recent comic book success movies. However, I do look forward to seeing Spider-Man on the Avengers.
