Premature Responsibility

Rating: 7/10 (23 June 2014)

As far as superhero movies go, "The Amazing Spiderman", directed by Marc Webb, was pretty predictable in how the actual plot of the movie progressed. The hero has some opening conflict—In this case it is Peter's (Andrew Garfield) search for information about his parents, who disappeared when he was younger—which starts the ball rolling on the rest of the film. When Peter stumbles upon some of his father's research, he manages to figure out whom he used to work with. Peter finds the old partner, gets bit and receives his powers, and solves the problem that the researcher was dealing with at the time. Unfortunately, this leads to the creation of the main villain of the story, Curt Connors/The Lizard (Rhys Ifans), whom Peter now has to deal with. The rest of the typical Spiderman origin unfolds as usual: Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) gets shot, Peter becomes a vigilante and finds a girlfriend, and then Spiderman fights the main villain.
If there is ever a message in a Spiderman movie, it is usually something about responsibility. This is somewhat of a recurring theme throughout the movie: Peter goes after the man who killed his uncle because he feels guilty for letting him get away; he fights the Lizard because he inadvertently created him; and he protects people because he has the ability, and therefore responsibility, to do so. Some responsibilities have to give way to others though, and that is shown when Peter abandons his search in order to stop the beast he has created. It may not have been directly shown, but Peter did have a choice to make, and he chose to fix the larger of his two most recent mistakes to correct. All of these things serve to drive home the idea that people who have power have the responsibility to use it wisely.
The only real issue that I have with the film is that it came out far too early following the end of the previous iteration of the franchise. Five years between the previous run and the reboot is simply too soon. Yes, the series needed to be saved given the awful "thing" that was "Spiderman 3", but the sudden reboot just felt a little bit jarring. That said, it was my only problem and I think that the rest of the movie actually worked pretty well for the most part. With 5 being "average" I'd give the movie a 7, so "good" but not "great."