You'll Frown! You'll Cry! You'll Kiss 10 Bucks Goodbye!

Rating: 5/10 (30 July 2012)

Rating this movie comes down to a value judgment. If you are an aficionado of the silver age comic books, it may leave you wanting. Significant liberties were taken with the characters and their story lines to create a Spider-Man that today's kids may relate to more, as well as to improve the believability overall. Is Andrew Garfield the Peter Parker we grew up with? Hardly. But he's a Peter Parker that makes sense in 2012. The original Peter Parker was better played by Toby Maguire--straight-edge to the point of sickening, always worrying about his Aunt May getting upset. This Peter Parker, like a typical teen, wants as little to do with "'rent" figures as possible. Gwen Stacy has been updated as well; her demeanor is more like that of a 30-year-old than a teen in the beginning, then she deteriorates into a love object straight out of any teen exploitation television series. Martin Sheen and Sally Field are good choices for their roles, but again, you need to be ready for major storyline alterations. It is as if the writer and director went out of their ways to change things for the sake of changing them.
My chief complaint about the movie is the CGI. CGI is like makeup on a woman: it should only be used by someone who knows what they are doing, and usually less is more. As many years as Hollywood has been using it, very little progress has been made in making organic things look realistic; the technology so far lends itself much better to machinery and starships than to living things. The Lizard looks like a setback to the original Shrek animation--clumsy and cartoonish. Even the Geico gecko is more convincing. Hopefully in my lifetime, they will perfect the movement techniques to the point where most CGI looks real and not like a FPS game.
To be fair, if they were going to reboot a franchise, they couldn't just repackage old ideas. The movie is watchable, regardless of your background. But a sequel to it probably wouldn't be. I shudder to think what this crew would do to the Green Goblin.