Too close to the Rami movies to be anything exciting

Rating: 6/10 (15 July 2012)

I must admit that I preferred and still prefer the Rami Spiderman than this newer version of the story. This is basically a reboot, and in a way I did not really see the need for a reboot, but then there could have been a number of reasons, such as Rami not wanting to do anymore, or the major actors (Maguire and Dunst) not wanting to do a sequel either. However it should be noted that what Webb has done is to try to remain faithful to the comics, and this means that there is more of a focus on Peter Parker in high school, and his first love interest is not Mary-Jane but rather Gwen Stacey, who I believe (I have not really read the comics, and it is likely to be very hard, or expensive, to get my hands on the first Spiderman comic) was actually his first girlfriend (in the Rami movies she does not appear until the third one, and only acts as competition to Mary-Jane, who has been blackmailed to dump Spiderman).
I did like how they made the story much grittier than the Rami movies, and while Oscorp still plays a major role, we do not see or interact with the people at the top, as happened with Rami. It appears that Peter Parker does not know Harry Osborne. Also, the movie plays on the fact that while Spiderman is a super hero, he still gets injured, and we have a number of scenes in which Stacey is cleaning up wounds that he suffered from fighting the Lizardman. I also noticed that while we know of the Daily Bugle, and that Peter Parker does like photography, he is yet to take a job as a reporter.
Okay, enough with what I liked, because there were a number of things that really did drag the movie down, and the major one was the casting of Spiderman. Basically Andrew Garfield looks an awful lot like James Franco (who played Harry Osborne in the Rami movies). This, in many cases, was really confusing because every time I looked at him a part of me would think of the Green Goblin, despite knowing that he is not the Green Goblin. The movie also came across a little lazy in a way because, even though the canonical comic strips have Uncle Ben killed in a mugging, the way it was done in this movie was too similar to the Rami movies, and in fact it looked as if the same plot had been taken, and a few changes were made, but in general it was much the same.
In the end, I did enjoy the movie, but will continue to say that the Rami movies simply outshine this reboot (unlike the Nolan Batman movies, which simply outshine all of the previous attempts at Batman, with of course the exception of that really old one where Robin gets attacked by a rubber shark).