The new era of the spider man

Rating: 8/10 (4 July 2012)

I have been a spider man fan for over 30 years now, and one of my very first memories was watching the spider man TV series from the late 70's with Nicholas Hammond, which i still love till today, so i was obviously overjoyed when the Sam raimi film came out in 2002, which i thought was fantastic, then spideman 2 came, which unusually was much, much better than the first film, the the 3rd which was OK, but not a patch on the others, i thought that Tobey Maguire was good in the role, but looking back the whole tone of the first 3 films felt a little bit detached from reality like some sort of surreal world, where the colours, dialogue and interaction between characters seemed unreal,
So, when i heard about the amazing spider man coming out as a reboot i was skeptical like a lot of people, although i was never negative towards the film because it was like, spider man! So i have watched the film for the first time just yesterday and i can say i thought it was excellent, in some areas vastly superior to the other 3 films
I do agree with some other reviewers in that some of the important scenes are rushed ie: uncle Ben's death and the making of the suit, and i must admit i didn't like the cgi lizard at all, my personal opinion is that filmmakers should use more make up techniques in creating special effects, and use the cgi as an enhancement but not go to crazy with it,
I thought that Andrew Garfield was perfect as peter parker/spider man, and although he is 28 he easily passes for 18ish, the other actors/actresses were excellent in their roles too, yes there was a lot of the love story element in this film, but i expected that
The one aspect of this film where i thought i surpassed the other films was spider mans powers and the action/swinging scenes,
In spider man (2002) he just seems to shoot his web anywhere, attach to something and fly away with absolute ease, and i always disliked that, a lot of the action in the first 3 films seemed very "inhuman"
in my mind spider mans powers where that he could climb/stick to walls/surfaces and had incredible agility/jumping ability,speed and a sixth sense (spider sense) and he did have the web shooters in the origin so i am glad they stayed true to that,
But after all these powers had developed, it is easy to forget that spider man is still a human being, he can be cut, shot, hurt or killed like anyone else, and that is what i liked about this film, as after a night out on the town as spider man it would show him injured, exhausted and battered, which again, even though he has all these powers he is still human and gets hurt and tired
The swinging scenes i thought were the best part, the swinging is made to look very, very hard, which it would be I'm sure in reality, even with spider mans vastly increased agility and speed, i liked the way he sometime misses with the web, and crashes into buildings etc and has to climb and drag himself up the side of a building to get another good vantage point to swing off again,
one of the best scenes for me was when spider man got shot by a cop in trying to get to the oscorp building, this obviously almost disabling him as it naturally would, crashing into a building, just about managing to climb to the top, sealing his would with his webbing, and then deperately trying to run while limping to get enough speed to web off the edge of the building to save the city, again to me this seemed more "real", remember he is spider man and not superman!
So in summary i thought that spideys powers seemed more "realistic" that the other films, yes there were parts of the film that could have been done a lot better with a 200 million budget, there were some continuity issues, and as i said before i didn't like the cgi lizard at all, Andrew Garfield is the best spider man by a mile, although i did like Tobey also, some important scenes were rushed and some not so important scenes were dragged out, all of that aside it was an excellent re-boot