What's the point?

Rating: 4/10 (18 November 2012)

The Amazing Spider-Man isn't quite a horrible film; it has some redeeming features. Most surprising of all to me was Andrew Garfield - I really had very little faith in his ability to play the titular character, but he did an excellent job, better, in fact, than Tobey Maguire ever did, as both Spider-Man and Peter Parker. Coupled with Emma Stone playing a very charismatic and likable Gwen Stacy, they manage to inject real feeling and humanity into the high-school and the romantic scenes, that was sorely lacking with Maguire and Dunst.
But that's just not enough. Obviously, in almost every film, there's one actor that I'd have liked to replace with someone else - but is that a good enough reason to remake the film with a different actor? That's what The Amazing Spider-Man is. Maybe it's a little more gritty than Sam Raimi's version; maybe it's a little more teenager-oriented; maybe it stays more true to the comics on some plot points, at least to certain versions of the comics. But it's not different enough that it can be viewed as its own creation, rather than compare it to Raimi's films, which is apparently what the producers wanted to avoid. They jumped the gun way too fast, rebooting the series when the Raimi films are still fresh in our memories, and in doing that prevented their film from ever being appreciated as a new one.
And in that comparison, it loses, badly. For every redeeming quality there are ten screw-ups staring us right in the face. The script is very poorly written; Spider-Man's origin story once again takes up half the film, but it's done so much less convincingly than in the 2002 version, and followed by very awkward, nonsensical scenes of Peter Parker skateboarding around and doing slam dunks, apparently in a condescending attempt to make the film more appealing to teenagers. Instead of the appealing and menacing villains of the first two Sam Raimi films, we get Rhys Ifans - a talented character actor - doing his best with a poor script and with a very unconvincing CGI human lizard, which makes for a very dull, gray, cartoonish villain that goes starkly against the more realistic approach Marc Webb was trying to go for. As for Martin Sheen and Sally Field - they're both terrific actors, but they bring nothing more into the characters of Uncle Ben and Aunt May than the weak lines the script gives them.
The Amazing Spider-Man is just good enough to make for an entertaining summertime braindead blockbuster, but even though it's not a terrible film, it's something worse - a film that doesn't deserve to exist. Kudos to Andrew Garfield on his work; in a good film he could have been great. But this isn't it.