The Amaz­ing Spider-Man

There’s a scene in The Amaz­ing Spi­der-Man that inad­ver­tent­ly cap­tures the mag­ic and cyn­i­cism that coa­lesce in the sum­mer block­buster. Spi­der-Man (Andrew Garfield) has just seen off a giant lizard on the Williams­burg Bridge in a jaw-drop­ping dis­play of CG wizardry.

Now a child is trapped in a burn­ing car dan­gling over the riv­er and our hero must go to the res­cue. As the flames creep clos­er, Spidey removes his mask and hands it to the boy. ​“Put this on,” he says, ​“it’ll give you strength.” And as the trem­bling child pulls the mask over his head – becom­ing Spi­der-Man in a moment of ecsta­t­ic trans­fig­u­ra­tion – you can prac­ti­cal­ly hear the cash tills reg­is­ter­ing a mil­lion extra sales of offi­cial merchandise.

The uneasy splic­ing of art and com­merce has long been typ­i­cal of Hollywood’s tent­pole event movies, but it stands out in The Amaz­ing Spi­der-Man pre­cise­ly because Marvel’s com­ic-book do-over is such an atyp­i­cal film in almost every oth­er respect.

There is, of course, the ques­tion of con­text. Where Super­man went 19 years between iter­a­tions, and Bat­man man­aged eight, it’s been just five years since Tobey Maguire hung up his web-slingers. Nev­er­the­less, (500) Days of Sum­mer direc­tor Marc Webb has start­ed from scratch, recruit­ing smart­ly from the ranks of teen idols-in-wait­ing and rein­vest­ing in his sto­ry some of the heart, humour and human­i­ty absent from Sam Raimi’s unwit­ting finale.

So here we go again – Peter Park­er, Uncle Ben, spi­der bites and super­pow­ers; an ori­gin sto­ry but not as we know it. There’s the mys­te­ri­ous dis­ap­pear­ance of Peter’s father, a sci­en­tist work­ing on a for­mu­la to splice ani­mal genes into human subjects.

And there’s a new love inter­est, Gwen Sta­cy (Emma Stone), a class­mate of Parker’s who moon­lights (implau­si­bly) as an intern at genet­ics giant Oscorp, where Dr Curt Con­nors (Rhys Ifans) dreams of regen­er­at­ing his arm from lizard DNA despite the increas­ing­ly capri­cious demands of old man Osborn himself.

For all its quirks, this open­ing act is the film’s most labo­ri­ous: the recipe may be new but the ingre­di­ents are stale. Still, there are hints that what’s to come will be worth the wait. The spi­der-bite scene is creepy, and Peter’s explo­ration of his pow­ers show­cas­es an earthy aes­thet­ic ground­ed by DP John Schwartzman’s nat­u­ral­is­tic palette of dense greys and sharp blacks that does much to make Parker’s jour­ney (lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal) more credible.

And then, final­ly, Spi­der-Man takes to the air, the film takes flight, and Webb’s vision comes soar­ing into its own. For all the lib­er­al use of CGI – in the trans­for­ma­tion of Con­nors into the Lizard; in con­jur­ing the play­ground roof­s­capes of New York; in the cli­mac­tic sky­scraper show­down between good and good-gone-awry – what’s most impres­sive about The Amaz­ing Spi­der-Man is how root­ed in real­i­ty it is.

Webb has one big advan­tage over Rai­mi – 3D – and he uses it to cre­ate a sense of scale, to show how tiny Peter Park­er is against the back­drop of this city and these events, and how, coura­geous­ly, he steps out into its midst and earns the right to become Spider-Man.

Even as Park­er wres­tles with his respon­si­bil­i­ties, Spi­der-Man dis­cov­ers his pow­er with a fero­cious sense of free­dom. The cam­era responds, peer­ing pre­cip­i­tous­ly over ledges, free-falling, flash­ing from first-per­son to slo-mo. Webb demon­strates an unex­pect­ed flu­en­cy for action cin­e­ma, effort­less­ly inte­grat­ing the real and the com­put­er-ren­dered, giv­ing Spidey a def­i­nite style and mus­cu­lar­i­ty in the film’s fight sequences.

As for Garfield, he may be too pret­ty to play the nerd, but his Spidey is a more organ­ic, more insec­tile cre­ation than we’ve seen before, while his Peter Park­er is seduc­tive and sym­pa­thet­ic in the film’s more inti­mate moments. With a mega-watt smile to go with the new­ly bulging biceps, this is the stuff of movie stardom.

There’s the usu­al Stan Lee cameo non­sense, of course. The under­writ­ten female role. Moments where the film adheres too close­ly to Raimi’s orig­i­nal (what… more blue-col­lar New York­ers com­ing to Spidey’s res­cue?). And an emo­tion­al coda that reeks of focus-testing.

But The Amaz­ing Spi­der-Man is a major suc­cess sto­ry. Webb’s film stands com­par­i­son with Raimi’s, but does so much more than that, too. It cre­ates its own mythol­o­gy, its own mag­ic, and it’s own future. Spi­der-Man is dead. Long live Spider-Man.