![]() ![]() Poor Peter is now hopelessly in love with classmate Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) and is being looked after by his tolerant Uncle Ben, played by Martin Sheen (effectively reprising the blue-collar dad he played opposite Charlie Sheen in Wall Street), and Aunt May, played by Sally Field. His work is now being carried on by the faintly sinister Dr Curt Connors – played by Rhys Ifans – a man with just one arm, who longs for a lizard's ability to regrow limbs. ![]() Instead of the arbitrary happenstance of getting bitten by a radioactive or genetically modified spider, Parker is the orphan of troubled scientist Richard Parker (Campbell Scott) who was working on inter-species DNA splicing, before being killed with Peter's mother in a mysterious car wreck. Peter Parker's arachnid destiny is made manifest from the get-go, and for me the narrative has more power. In the digital age, that market may have collapsed in any case. That character doesn't appear here, and Parker does not feel the need to earn pocket money selling pictures of Spidey to the press. And there is no alpha-male/beta-male badinage between Parker and the irascible newspaper editor J Jonah Jameson. This is a Spider-Man who comes out to the people who are important to him pretty quickly. There isn't the same emphasis on secret identities and hiddenness and having to grit your teeth and bottle up your feelings while the woman you're in love with swoons over Spider-Man and is politely turned off by your conventional academic attainments. The director, Marc Webb, is known for his relationship comedy (500) Days of Summer, and this is a more feminised and emotionally literate Spider-Man. However, at 28 years old he may not be able to carry off playing 17 for all that much longer. This item is – sadly, perhaps – ditched the moment he gets his powers, showcased in spectacular action sequences. Garfield's Peter Parker is a science star and all-round high school mathlete in the traditional mould, but in this movie he's allowed a soupçon of outsider cool on account of having a skateboard. He looks clever, physically slight yet wiry, with exactly the right hunched and passive-aggressive body language when needed. ![]() As if moving back in time, Andrew Garfield is the Spidey Sean Connery, as opposed to Tobey Maguire's Roger Moore. And it is amazing how potent and entertaining the Spider-Man myth continues to be: the bullied brainy teenager whose weakness and unpopularity are somehow alchemised into super-powers. We have gone back to the beginning with a new star, a new villain, a smarter, leaner and more interesting "origin" storyline and that all-important adjective restored to the title. J ust five years after the ropey Spider-Man 3 crawled out of the multiplex plughole in 2007, starring an increasingly jaded and malign-looking Tobey Maguire, the reset button has been pressed. ![]()
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