We are almost halfway through the year and it's looking like a rather vintage one for fanboy fare. Of the four high-profile genre films that looked likely to make the biggest impact back in January, The Avengers reinvented the superhero ensemble movie as a vehicle for Joss Whedon's inimitable brand of razor-sharp wisecracking, Prometheus delivered a muddled and portentous but undeniably enjoyable take on the space thriller, and The Dark Knight Rising is shaping up to be a fittingly epic conclusion to Christopher Nolan's excellent Batman trilogy.
The Amazing Spider-Man was always the odd movie out, the film most of us felt had been green-lit largely for commercially driven reasons, but the first reviews of Marc Webb's reboot are surprisingly positive. The film arrives in UK and US cinemas on the same day, 3 July, but British critics have stolen a march on their colleagues over the pond. The general consensus points to a superhero origins story that's as bright and breezy as Sam Raimi's Spider-Man from 2002, but with an added veneer of lovelorn intensity that was missing from the earlier effort. Only my colleague Andrew Pulver makes mention of the ropey CGI employed to create the villain Lizard, which is something of a relief given the obvious issues with the character that we've been able to glean from some of the advance trailers. I'll be seeing the film on Monday night, and on this evidence I'm rather looking forward to it.
The Telegraph's Robbie Collin has the most intriguing theory surrounding Webb's effort. In his eyes, The Amazing Spider-Man, with a fawning, lovelorn Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy and the pale-faced Brit Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker, is a comic book movie for the Twilight generation. Yes: Sony has delivered the first ever female-skewed superhero flick.
"Around three-quarters of an hour into The Amazing Spider-Man, I stopped waiting for the wise-cracking and the web-slinging to begin and twigged what the film was actually about," writes Collin. "In Marc Webb's version – yes, the director of the new Spider-Man film is called Webb – Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) is no goofily lovable teenage geek; he's a bright, introverted young man with a furrowed brow, a Tintin quiff and a pasty home counties complexion.
"Then there's his needle-sharp young girlfriend, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), who wants to get under his skin even more than that radioactive arachnid did [and] find out what it is that makes his Spidey-senses tingle. Amid all the soul-searching and lip-biting, it suddenly struck me: Webb has created the first superhero movie aimed primarily at women.
"Raimi's films were for the teenage boys who used to dress up in Spider-Man pyjamas; Webb's is for girls whose other halves may soon be dressing up in Spider-Man pyjamas for their benefit."
To be fair, Collin does end his review by pointing out that all that Twilight-esque heightened emotional tension actually helps to make The Amazing Spider-Man a decent watch, a verdict somewhat echoed by Pulver.
"The gear-shift in the superhero movie is now unmistakeable," Pulver writes. "Where once they aimed to essentially replicate the experience of reading a comic book, they now strive to be edgy, risk-taking dramas that do more than simply pay lip-service to their characters' emotional lives.
"In re-engineering Parker into the introspective, uncertain male more typical of his previous film, Webb is aided by a terrific performance from Andrew Garfield, who brings a genial unflappability that allows him to negotiate the often-ludicrous demands of the superhero plotline. At the same time, Webb also shows an unarguable facility for the more traditional action elements of the story, and the 3D certainly helps: he pulls off some properly nauseating shots as Parker dives off skyscrapers, rescues kids from falling, and the like.
"It's the successful synthesis of the two – action and emotion – that means this Spider-Man is as enjoyable as it is impressive."
Dave Calhoun of Time Out sees The Amazing Spider-Man as a "rom-com upgraded to include 3D and industrial cobwebs".
He writes: "Webb and the film's writers have done a smart job of making a snappy blockbuster with few obvious pretensions: The Amazing Spider-Man is light on its feet and feels both intimate and expansive, smoothly making the transition from hanging out in school corridors to hanging off the sides of buildings. Webb offers no radical rethink about how to craft a comic-book summer movie, but still he delivers an enjoyable rush over a patchwork of genres – romance, action, sci-fi, horror and comedy (there's almost one for every leg of a spider) – while avoiding bumps at the joins."
The only naysayer among the early reviews posted online is The London Evening Standard's Nick Curtis, who turns his nose up at "this premature reboot of the Marvel franchise" and moans about the 3D while offering no obvious reason for his displeasure. "Director Marc Webb aims for a new realism, stripping away the brio of Sam Raimi's 2002 version with Tobey Maguire [but] he also dispenses with much of the character and sass that always made this character fun. It's not Garfield's fault: he is a convincingly troubled, inarticulate Peter Parker, a springily athletic Spider-Man, and has awesome hair. His greatest enemy is the script. That, and the rather wearisome 3D."
Over on the reviews aggregator rottentomatoes.com, Webb's film is currently sitting pretty with an impressive 83% "fresh" rating, though only from a small sample of six UK-based reviews. That would suggest the film is not quite as good as Raimi's series opener, which got 89%, but still qualifies it as one of the better-reviewed tentpole movies of the year so far.
I have to say I'm most interested here in Collin's verdict. I imagine some of our female readers will bristle at the suggestion that Twilight movies are necessarily their demographic, but it's probably fair to suggest that studio execs might be rather intrigued by the potential to mop up both the teen romance crowd and the fanboy brigade. We've had "emo spidey" before, of course, in Raimi's ill-received Spider-Man 3, but could a little Stephenie Meyeresque navel-gazing be just the thing Webb's film needs this time around?
