The Amazing Spider-Man

So it's not everyday that you can go to the cinema and watch a $230 million Hollywood blockbuster starring someone that you have acted with in your teens. And yet, such is my experience with The Amazing Spider-Man. Sadly, I can't say that we kept in touch, but that does mean I am free to be totally impartial about Andrew Garfield's big new multi-million dollar film franchise role here (with no bitterness whatsoever). Truth be told though, it's well earned. Andrew seems to slip into the red and blue lycra all too easily, and manages to carry the rebooted story incredibly ably (looking annoyingly handsome in the process).

That said, the storyline itself does seem to provide a few problems for the film. By the nature of reboots (and especially true of such a well known 'origins' story as Spider-man), the film does occasionally feel constrained in having to tick certain boxes just to get them out of the way. The spider biting for example is such an intrinsic moment for whatever comes next (which by the sounds of it will be a Hollywood trilogy at the least), that it really needs to be a bigger deal than was made of it. It almost seemed to skip by; just a minor inconvenience in the story that the film makers were trying to tell. That said however, to their credit, while some things were lost, others gained enormously. Marc Webb's version (you can't make up Hollywood puns like this) put a massive amount of focus on showing the evolving relationships of the protagonists, and as a result, pivotal scenes like Uncle Ben's death and the resulting relationship between Peter and Aunt May are truly beautiful. In fact, this film is full of incredibly poignant moments, which is a big (and in my opinion, very welcome) departure from the Spider-man franchise of old.

You seem confused. They're books Andrew. They should live in the shelf behind you...

The double-edged sword of poignancy is that the film can feel slightly slow in places, and at a little over two and a quarter hours, could possibly have benefited from a smidgen of tightening round the edges. Unfortunately, some parts also had a tendency to feel slightly schizophrenic - this film made deliberately grittier than previous installments, and yet still seeming unable to escape from certain comic book clichés that jar with the rest of the film.

Overall though, while this film seemed hell-bent on re-establishing the characters of the franchise under the new 'Amazing' paradigm, the effort put into shaping the relationships between the main characters is certainly worthy of the stars that it's been awarded. As a result though, it can feel slightly like a two-hour set up for something yet to come, so while it is a perfectly enjoyable film in it's own right, I'm hoping for truly amazing (see what I did there?!) things to come now that the producers are free of the 'shackles' of re-telling, and can focus on the story they want the world to see.