Spidey senses say this will be a hit

Paul Peterson

Well, The Amazing Spiderman rolled out to the tune of 140 million in its first full week and while it’s really well done, I can only answer 4 of the 5 journalist’s questions.
I know the who, what where and when, I just can’t figure out the why.
Oh wait, it opened to 140 million. Nevermind.
The Amazing Spiderman is a different story stream from the conventional Marvel series. When director Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire pulled out it seemed like this project had “can’t win” written all over it.
It’s actually quite good.
I really enjoyed it.
They took the original formula and just reworked it.
All new people help give it a new face. Relative unknown Andrew Garfield captures the essence of the newly emerging superhero.
I remember when I reviewed the original I liked the fact that they let him have fun. It’s fun to fly, or at least be self-propelled and have superstrength so you can just pick up bad guys and throw them around. Or even just fire some web stuff to tie up your friendly neighborhood bad guy.
All superhero movies require a good guy and a bad guy and in this case Rhys Ifans as scientist Dr.Curt Connors head of Oscorp and evil criminal genius. He’s also Peter Parker’s dad’s former partner and has been obsessed with regeneration of cells since he lost his arm some years earlier.
Parker finds a briefcase containing some of his dad’s notes and turns out pops was looking at the implication and methodology for cross species interbreeding. Turns out dad was a brilliant scientist, just not evil.
Dr. Connors ends up being The Lizard King (not Jim Morrison as we thought) so the inevitable confrontation involves Spidey battling this giant lizard. Rhys Ifans by the way is best known as Spike from Notting Hill, but he’s ok as the bad guy. Still I kept waiting for him to show up in a smarmy T shirt.
The film is good. Entertaining and with plenty of action. Director Marc Webb makes his character interesting and sympathetic and isn’t afraid to throw in crazy wild action scenes just because he can. Webb directed the surprsingly good 500 Days of Summer, which is a little gem of a character study.
Casting is good for this year’s model. Unknown Garfield has some skills, and the always lovely Emma Stone (The Help) owns the screen as his classmate/girlfriend Gwen, who just happens to be the daughter of Police Chief Stacy (Dennis Leary). This of course makes for all kinds of dramatic issues and entanglements, since the police are not big Spidey fans. He breaks things.
Martin Sheen and Sally Field star as Uncle Ben and Aunt May. That seems a bit odd, but ok we get it.
I don’t know that we really needed a Spiderman remake only 10 years after it first appeared on the big screen but I’m glad they did.
It’s fun. There’s more depth to Spidey, and as long as none of the cast of That 70’s shows appears in any sequels it should bode well for the future.
I thought some of the CGI was too obvious, maybe because Webb seems to have an accelerated camera shot half the time but other than that it’s a great watch.
As always, other opinions are welcome, but wrong. That’s it for this week. The cheque’s in the mail and I’m outta here. Paul