Thoughts on The Amazing Spiderman

LOVED IT! 

Just going to cut the chase there. The Amazing Spider-man lives up to the title's adjective. 

Random thoughts about the film:

• How does it compare to the Sam Raimi films with Toby Maguire? The first of those two movies were great, the third not so much. The reboot is as good as the first and in my opinion way better than the second and third. 
• The casting is excellent! Andrew Garfield is better as Peter Parker and Emma Stone  is phenomenal as Gwen Stacy. The Lizard character was really good as well.
• A lot of the negative critiques I've read complain that they feel like they are watching the first movie with Toby Maguire all over again. This is shallow and petty to me. It's a reboot not a rewrite! The Spider-man story remains intact so of course they are going to have to reenact various scenes, Uncle Ben getting shot for example. But it never came across like they were using the same script to me.
• Best cameo of Stan Lee EVER!
• Liked the the gritty human element that was added (and missing from originally trilogy): anger/hurt over parents absence and actually being cut and bruised under the mask for example. Plus humorous things: playing a game on his cell phone, call from his aunt, etc.
• No really big negatives, just minor things. The plot was a tad clunky in places; the jump to the school fight and out of that scene happened really fast. The cranes started out a little cheesy for me but it ended up being OK. Just little things, nothing major.

The general consensus on Spider-man 3 is that it was horrible. Too much going on, two many villains, and whoever wrote in emo Peter Parker needs to be forever fired from Hollywood writing. When I heard they were rebooting the series I was both excited and skeptical. Excited because Spider-man has always been a favorite and a redemption of the story was welcome, but skeptical because it seemed too soon. Even Jeannette wasn't really thrilled about it at first but went along last night to humor her husband (she agreed at the end that it was awesome). 

Yet Sony proved that you can reboot a series. Sure it could have failed and that would have been the end of Spider-man for awhile, but the gamble paid off. I'd bet the movie will be around for awhile this summer as the positive word of mouth travels and skeptics end up being convinced to see it.

Here's hoping for more sequels of this caliber. As long as they work the cast and story in the same way they did for this one, and if they keep out Emo Peter, then things should stay amazing.