After Sam Raimi and company piledrove the Spiderman films into the dirt with Spiderman 3 in 2007, Sony needed to kick start their franchise again (for legal and creative differences). The Amazing Spiderman reboot is the result and it’s pretty much a success.

I consider the first move to be overrated, 2 is a truley great movie and 3 is a complete mess. Here we are given a new cast, new director, new stunt team, slightly new story. Here’s the main problem with the movie: it’s a reboot. There’s really no reason to do an origin story again when it’s only a decade after it was first brought to the movies. This could have just been a direct sequel, ignoring anything that happened in 3. Everyone knows the start so it’s just redundant. That said, it’s done well. A different take on the Peter Parker and Uncle Ben catalyst for the superhero starts us off and thankfully they’ve done with a new villain with Dr. Curt Connors (The Lizard).

I really liked the new cast, Andrew Garfield is a perfect Peter Parker and Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy is a perfect match. I didn’t miss Tobey Maguire at all. He’s more of the comic smart ass here and they have him using mechanical web shooters like the comic as well. It’s a nicely layered movie, it’s a smooth track to setting up the loveable teenager to heroic hero as the stakes are gradually ratcheted up. “With great power comes great responsibility” is well at work here.

The unique fight scenes are great, really pushing the difference between Spiderman and all other superheroes abilities. There’s a great weight to all the hits but the quickness of a super nimble person. It’s a lot of fun to watch him disable people with webbing and then swing around different ways in each scene. The 3D isn’t anything really worth mentioning. It’s used subtly in dialog scenes but there is next to no separation during the big action scenes. There’s some great work done with traveling as Spiderman in the first person perspective, but it looked surprisingly flat in 3D. There either very little visual depth or the background is in such a blur the whole image just turns into a streak. Not worth the money.

I think it’s worth watching, if only to get another one with this cast. Spiderman has some life in him, something I didn’t think was possible after watching 3.