"To Him, Life is a Great Big Bang Up"

I finally got around to seeing The Amazing Spider-Man. Which is weird considering how excited I was for the first movie a mere ten years ago. (Shit, I suddenly felt old. It doesn't seem like that long ago.) I remember I made a special trip to an 11am show the day it opened in order to see it before I went on a plane for the first time. (Yes, it took me a while to get on a plane.) I thought I was going to England, but now that I see the date, it must have been my trip to San Francisco.

The point is, I was excited to see it. I had to see it! And it wasn't just that I feared dying in a plane crash and wanted to make sure I saw it before that happened. It was a movie I was legitimately excited to see. I was floored when the first clips of Spider-Man web-slinging through New York appeared. It was topped by a second movie, then the whole franchise seemed to fall apart with the third. (I don't even want to talk about it.)

So, here we are watching what is basically a reboot of a still young franchise. I wasn't excited about this one as much because I figured it was just going to be another dumb origin story with very little action. And it was going to tell the same story I already knew. BUT it turns out I was only partially right and the origin story was my favorite part of the whole thing. (Spoilers ahead.)

The Sam Raimi movie kept very close to the comics origin story. He becomes a wrestler. He tries to make money. He gets screwed. Robbery. Uncle Ben dies. Great power...etc., etc., etc.

This new version though follows a similar vein. He gets bitten by a spider, but everything around that is a little different. Peter Parker's parents are involved a lot more. Peter is actually a genius and figures out how to develop web-shooters. (I always loved the idea of physical web-shooters because it shows the audience that Peter is actually smart.) He doesn't get involved in wrestling. (Which is great because I didn't think that worked by today's standards.) Uncle Ben still dies as a result of Peter's inaction, and that's when he starts to become a vigilante. He doesn't have much of a purpose until The Lizard shows up. That's when he realizes he's a hero and the only one to save people from the monster.

I'm good with the movie up until this point. Actually, you know what, while I was figuring out the next part, I realized I liked the rest of the movie quite a bit. It didn't blow me away, but it was a great story to show how Spider-Man affects the city and how the city comes to respond to him. It also shows his building of a "Spider-Man family" with Gwen Stacy and Captain Stacy helping him along the way.

Spider-Man unlike most other heroes, is very much the story of how being Spider-Man affects Peter Parker and the people around him, as much as it is about superheroes versus supervillians. And I think it was best proven here with Marc Webb directing the talents of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. 

I do have a couple complaints though and this is kind of nit picky. The first is that Spider-Man needed to quip a lot more in the fight scenes, but that leads to my second complaint - not enough action. In the second one, I'd like to see more action scenes with more clever Spidey quips thrown in. But honestly, if anyone hasn't seen the movie, I recommend it. Keep in mind though, I think this was definitely made targeting a younger demographic - high school to early-20s. But it's definitely worth watching. I'm looking forward to the next one in a couple years.