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movie review - The Amazing Spider-Man

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

This movie features a 29-year-old actor playing a seventeen year old, in a retelling of Peter Parker's becoming Spider-Man. This was just just a few years prior to this movie's release, and I am not convinced that a replacement of the lead role warranted a new set of movies and a retelling. Parker is written as being fairly unsympathetic in this movie, which is not without precedent - he could be a prankster in the old comic books, and not in a good way. But his opponent is one an arc that allows disallows redemption, so it's difficult to hope for any particular outcome while you're slogging through a clumsy show-down between people with whom you're not too connected.

Super-hero movies make a lot of trade-offs according to some pat formulas: you don't get much emotional resonance from the result. Charisma and nobility are musts. Or, strong, purposeful anti-heroism. Or, humor and theatrics. Something; not this.

Perhaps if they'd gone with a script featuring an adult Peter Parker, one that has the problems of an adult and was perhaps much more involved in the company that's producing the serum that allows The Lizard to do what he does, that could have worked. Instead we have Peter's teenage love interest working at said company. As what? How? Isn't she also a high school senior?

Not recommended.