Amazing, indeed! EW’s Lisa Schwarzbaum nails my experience of the re-boot in her recent review:
“Through it all, Garfield fills both his slackerish Peter Parker identity as well as his Spider-Man rubberwear with star-quality confidence. Mixing self-effacing sweetness with believable teen boy arrogance, then adding a wee drop of snark, the exciting British-American actor with the JFK Jr. dark good looks defies anyone to hate him because he’s beautiful — or because he’s not Tobey Maguire. And any time the actor shares a scene with the radiant Ms. Stone…well, the two are a chemistry experiment gone as blindingly right as reptilian Dr. Curt Connors’ little lab test goes terribly wrong. What’s most amazing in The Amazing Spider-Man turns out to be not the shared sensations of blockbuster wow! the picture elicits, but rather the shared satisfactions of intimate awww.”
I loved Raimi’s films for how they incorporate New York City (and my nabe in Queens) as major characters in the narrative, but Marc Webb’s update gets closer to the character and history of Peter Parker and Spidey far more than any of the previous three films. TASM is jaw-dropping AND moving—which surprised (and delighted) me most of all.
