Mr. Webb is certainly not an untalented director; he just might have been the wrong guy for this project

Rating: 6/10 (12 August 2012)

Considering that only a mere ten years have passed since Sam Raimi rebooted the popular Spider-Man franchise to the big screen, one does wonder why Hollywood has decided to start afresh once again rather than just continue what Mr. Raimi had begun. Part of the reason, I suppose, would be the anger and disappointment—which I shared—over Mr. Raimi's Spider-Man 3. The other reason might be the disappointment over the casting of Tobey Maguire as the titular, web-spraying superhero—disappointment which I did not share. But why start over? James Bond has gone through many incarnations without going back to the beginning again. Imagine how repetitive and frustrating it would have been to see him get his double-O status every time a new actor decided to play him. So I saw no real need for this Spider-Man reboot beforehand; my reluctance is enhanced in hindsight, as The Amazing Spider-Man is a valiant but mostly unimpressive effort.
It would seem as though the trio of screenwriters (James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent, and Steve Kloves) shared the general audiences' disappointment in Tobey Maguire playing Peter Parker/Spider-Man ten years ago, but were utterly in love with the first movie's story. Obviously, I am fully aware that both movies are based on the same comic book, but they do follow a rather similar narrative pattern. In fact, it's much too similar. Our hero starts off as a tormented dweeb, gets bitten by a genetically altered spider, starts suffering strange side-effects, watches his uncle die in the streets, goes on a vengeance mission, makes a costume, runs from the police, sees a previous father-figure turn into a vile green monster after injecting himself with some kind of solution, and so on. Both climaxes also conclude with a supporting character being stabbed clean through the torso and dying, and the hero making a moralistic call regarding his love interest.
Every twist and turn in the plot seems all that familiar, because again, it has not been that long. History has shown that familiar stories can be effectively told when done with a certain level of style or discipline. The director of The Amazing Spider-Man is certainly a filmmaker with style and discipline. His last movie was (500) Days of Summer, which I regard as one of the very best of contemporary American love stories. In supervising an action-packed spectacle, however, Mr. Webb seems to lose his head. He is not yet much of an action specialist and a number of the fight sequences seem choppy. A squabble onboard a subway train, with every shot filmed much too short and each camera sweep far too blurry, lacks the sense of humor and surprise that was obviously intended. Even the CGI shots of Spider-Man whisking over the rooftops of New York have an unfinished feeling to them, as if key shots were missing. At one point, he throws himself off a high-rise, catches a wall with his web, is about halfway down the building, and in the next shot is just two feet from the pavement and already slowed down. It is in the quieter moments—a scene where our protagonist ponders over a genetics algorithm in his bedroom—that his montage and gift for camera angles falls into place. Mr. Webb is certainly not an untalented director; he just might have been the wrong guy for this project.
The film also suffers from a schizophrenic screenplay: one that toggles between overwritten and underwritten. It is overwritten in its dialogue; would-be comical banters between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, as his love interest, go on much too long, repeat themselves too often, and do not deliver the touching bits of humor they were meant to. Underwritten are the plot points: the chemical developed by the villain as a means to regenerate amputations; Peter Parker's dynamic with his doomed uncle; the dynamic between Parker and his love interest's hard-as-nails father, who works on the police force. As played by Mr. Garfield, this new Peter Parker is rather irritating; this good actor's talents come to life in more subtle roles—the way this character should have been written. But his frantic dialogue delivery and quirky mannerisms seem phony, unlike the more plausible performance that Tobey Maguire gave ten years before. We don't learn much about the character; the most interesting thing I learned was that he was obviously a Hitchcock fan, as I spotted a poster of Rear Window on his bedroom wall. Yes, that was the most interesting thing that came to my mind after considering the film. Worse still is a completely uninteresting villain. Spider-Man's adversary this time around is the Lizard: a dinosaur-like brute with a permanent smile on his face. The computer graphics are decent enough; but the character is not given ample screen-time for us to really feel the impact of his motives. The Lizard has been written in a way as if the filmmakers really did not care who Spider-Man went up against, as if they only included him because the world expects a bad guy in every superhero story ever told.
In fact, that's the feel of this picture entirely. I got the impression that the filmmakers really did not care whether or not The Amazing Spider-Man was a success or not. The audience apparently wanted a big, lavish reboot and they got one. But is this picture really necessary? I don't think so, as I could have easily spent half the money to rent Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man picture, which featured almost the exact same story, same surprises, same twists, and all done with more energy and excitement.