The Amazing Spider-Man

(Marc Webb, 2012)

with Dad, Darcy, Devin, and Pete Jacobs, Winsted Cinerom, July 2012

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At last, the movie Spider-Man always deserved – a movie that lets him have the dignity, charisma, wit, and tortured humanity that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko endowed him with back in 1962.  Here is Peter Parker not as a half-asleep nebbishy cipher, but as a stubborn, angry, kindhearted, lonely, brilliant teenager with a lot to offer and a lot to learn.  Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are enormously appealing as the two young lovebirds, whose touchingly awkward romance forms the film’s centerpiece.  It’s a shame the villain is more or less a placeholder – but that’s a quibble.  The Amazing Spider-Man lives up to every word of its title.