The Amazing Spider-Man: Review

WARNING: THIS POST WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS!!

As forementioned, I went and saw this last night with Paul and as the title suggests, it was amazing! 

It starts off with a young Peter Parker discovering that his dad's office has been searched which panics their parents into leaving him with his aunt and uncle vowing to return for him. But they never do. Years later he's a teenager at high school and he's an outcast/geek/loner despite being quite good-looking! Oh Hollywood, sticking glasses on someone doesn't make them ugly ya know!

After discovering that his dead dad used to work with a scientist called Curt, he goes and finds him by sneaking into his company as an intern. Curt only has one arm and has made it his life work to find a way to cross DNA with other species such as reptiles who have regenerative genes with humans in a hope of making his other arm regenerate. They explain it much better than I do so don't worry.

Whilst there, he gets bitten by a strange spider. Well actually a hole bunch of them fall on him and it wasn't pleasant to watch! *shudder*. Afterwards, he gets a bunch of side effects such as his hands keep sticking to things, he's always breaking things due to being incredibly strong and developing really really fast reflexes. The discovery of each and every one of these side effects is hilarious!

He then has an arguement with his uncle and runs out of the house. His uncle follows him and gets caught up in a robbery and dies after being shot. Peter then uses his new found skills to hunt the murderer down but never finds him. After fighting a bunch of guys that turn out not to be the shooter, he learns to cover his face using a mask. Eventually he makes a pretty darn good outfit that I refuse to believe a teenager could make.

Whilst this is happening, Curt is being pressured to find the serum that will make regeneration possible. Peter helps by supplying him with an equation that his dad had in his secret notes and eventually Curt tries his serum on himself. It turns him into a lizard and he causes a disturbance on a bridge which attracts Peter. Lizard Curt eventually leaves and Peter saves a boy and finally calls himself Spider-Man.

Throughout the film, Peter fancies a girl in his class called Gwen who happens to work for Curt. She didn't really take any notice of him until he got bit and started acting more confident. At dinner at her place where him and her dad, the police chief, get into an arguement over Spider-Man, he reveals to Gwen that he is indeed Spider-Man. 

Curt starts to get more and more crazy the more times he transforms himself into the lizard and decides to turn people into lizard people too "to cure them of human weakness" by heading to his workplace to release the serum into the city via a huge machine. He manages to get a few people turned when he drops the serum in gas containers in the streets however. All the while he is fighting Spider-Man but the police intercept Spider-Man and eventually Gwen's dad discovers that it is Peter. However he lets him go because at that moment Gwen is working on an antidote to the serum in the building Lizard Curt is heading towards and he knows Peter can protect her.

In the end, Gwen's dad distracts Lizard Curt long enough for Spider-Man to release the antidote into the air which causes the infected people plus Lizard Curt to return to normal. Curt is also not evil anymore which to me made me feel that his character was roughly based on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Gwen's dad dies however after making Peter promise to leave his daughter alone in order to protect her. He heartbreakingly follows this promise for a while but by the end of the film it's clear that he's not going to keep it...  

And a final, after credits scene shows Curt in prison where someone confronts him asking if he told Peter the truth about his parents' death...

I really really enjoyed this movie, especially because it was so cleverly written and really funny. I think they stayed relatively close to the comics too but don't quote me on that! And I actually preferred it to the original trilogy with Tobey Maguire. It's pretty long though so be prepared for a long sit!

Highlights:

• Everything Andrew Garfield (Peter) said and did - he was very funny!
• Martin Sheen as Uncle Ben
• The chemistry between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone (Gwen)
• The funny side-effect scenes!
• The epicness when the builders helped Spider-Man using their cranes

Rating: 5/5