Much More Enjoyable Than The Previous Films

Rating: 8/10 (16 February 2015)

The Amazing Spider-Man is a far superior film to any of the previous Sam Raimi Spider-man movies and it defies logic how anyone could like those movies over this. The action, the casting, the performances, the visuals...everything was so much better, and thankfully this version was MUCH less cheesy i.e. "You're the one who's out Gobby, out of your mind". I mean really?! The previous movies did have some decent comedic moments, but overall they were just mediocre action movies with decent CGI.
This version however, is a film with much better action and has excellent CGI AND practical effects. This film used much more practical effects than the previous movies, so it's pretty funny to see people praising the Raimi films while calling this a "CGI crap-fest". The visuals are anything but crap and they interweave seamlessly with the live action scenes. Some of the action CGI from the previous films you could tell was CGI, but here you can't and if you say you can then you're talking rubbish. Some of the scripting may be a bit predictable, but no more predictable than what we've seen previously.
Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker/Spider-man does an absolute bang up job and is the much better actor at playing these two roles than Tobey Maguire. Macguire did play a good "nerd" for Parker, but he was very two dimensional with his performances. Plus a jellyfish has more of a backbone than Maguire's Parker. I much preferred Garfield's version of Parker where he is seen more of a loner than a nerd and he captured this well in his performance. Even though she was playing a different character, Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy was far, far less annoying than Kirsten Dunst so that was a much added bonus. Sally Field, Martin Sheen, Denis Leary, and Rhys Ifans were all great in their individual roles as well, and the cameo scene involving Stan Lee in the library was a nice touch.
This Spider-man film completely out-classes the Raimi version and you'd be nuts to think otherwise.