Movie of the Week: The Amazing Spiderman

[jacey]

Does the world need another Spiderman movie?

I wasn't at all sure that a Spiderman reboot was particularly timely - it's not as if the recent movies are old enough to have been done without benefit of CGI or that they bombed out at the box office. Maybe it was a chance to do it in 3-D, but since I hate 3-D anyway and went to the 2-D showing, that aspect was lost on me.

My ambivalence was quickly dispelled. No disrespect to the earlier films, but I really enjoyed this one. It's an origns story which ties Peter Parker's father into a genetic engineering programme so that Parker's visit to the genetics lab and subsequent spider-bite-transformation to Spiderman grow out of his drive to find out what happened to his parents.

Andrew Garfield, who is nearly 30, plays a gawky seventeen year old really well, though my cinebuddy, H, thought he looked too much like Andy Murray. Since I don't watch Wimbledon, I couldn't tell you if she's right. Emma Stone is a good Gwen Stacey, linked into the overall action by being the daughter of the police captain (Dennis Leary). It is, however, Uncle Ben and Aunt May who steal the show, played beautifully by Martin Sheen and Sally Field. Both very much on the topside of being the age to be uncle and aunt to a seventeen year old, (Sheen is 70+) neverthless they make the parts their own, particularly Martin Sheen.

I also really liked Rhys Ifans (the gangly Spike from Notting Hill) as Dr. Curt Connors. Rather than being an obvious villain, he's pushed towards the 'dark side' by his company boss, Rajit Ratha, played by Irrfan Khan. By the way did anyone else notice that the unethical slimeball who sparked off Connors' rash action was played by the only person of colour in the whole movie? (Mind you, being Hollywood, I'm only surprised that the bad guy wasn't being played by a Brit. We do seem to produce villains of choice these days.)

The CGI is seamless. In fact it's so easy to forget that all those wild leaps and swings are not performed by actors at all. At the end of the movie I realised I had more than willingly suspended my disbelief, I'd left it out in the cinema lobby for the duration.

Overall, yes. An intelligent take on Spiderman well worth an hour or two of your time. And if you sit through the credits there's a teaser nscene for a second movie.

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I think in the early 1960s, when the comics were first written, and earlier when the writers were growing up and reading older literature, a parent or uncle/aunt was an ancient creature broken down by work or ill health (it might be that people often could not afford to marry at all until a later age, but you'd have to ask a social historian how true that actually is). Now we expect parental figures to look quite youthful. John and Martha Kent look surprisingly young to me in the television series Smallville, but they'd be modern parents rather than the 1940s kind.

Another early 20th century social expectation might be that with large extended families, an Uncle and Aunt could be from the next generation up: the siblings of your grandparents rather than parents. Either way, I remember not seeing it as odd that "Uncle" Ben and "Aunt" May looked like pensioners with one foot in the grave when I was a kid, nor did I think there was anything strange about Dennis the Menace's dad looking like a middle-aged man. Now I am a middle-aged man who wears a suit to work, but I still don't look like Dennis's dad.

(for American readers, this would be the British Dennis, a different animal)

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Well, it's true that in a large family the older siblings could be a generation apart from the younger ones, especially in the first half of the 20th century, but it seems to me that there aren't any other aunts and uncles on the Spidey horizon, so I would have expected uncle and aunt to be between 50 and 60 not 70+. As I say, though, Martin Sheen's 'uncle Ben' is a solid delight.