The Amazing Spider-Man in Theaters Now

I went to see The Amazing Spider-Man last night. In my opinion, it's too soon for a reboot, but I was interested in seeing it, all the same. I really love Emma Stone (who plays Gwen Stacy), and the previews looked pretty awesome.

Overall, I enjoyed it. Not that it matters, but I got some great previews beforehand, all movies I'm excited to watch (The Dark Knight Rises, Breaking Dawn 2, and Total Recall). The beginning of the story was a little slow for me. I'm one of those who didn't know anything about Spider-Man before I watched Tobey Maguire play the part, so I didn't know what to expect when I saw those Spider-Man movies, which is part of the fun. I love being surprised in a story, and I generally don't like spoilers. So, this time around, with the story relatively fresh in my mind, I was a tad bored. I knew what was coming. Peter Parker gets bullied. Then he gets bitten, and suddenly he's the top dog...er, spider. His uncle dies. I wanted all this set-up to move along...although it was done differently than in Tobey Maguire's version, which I appreciated and enjoyed.

But what makes this movie stand out from previous Spider-Man movies are the characters. Yes, there's a new villain, but that's not even what I'm talking about. The actors are good, but the characters are unique. Actor Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man is still a good person (as Peter Parker is supposed to be), but he also has a rebellious streak that never quite goes away. He's a younger, edgier, saucier, leaner Spider-Man. And it works. Gwen Stacy is a different love interest, a smart, sweet girl who gets to know Parker's secret right away.

The second half of the movie picks up with a complex villain, one we haven't seen on screen before, a doctor experimenting with science to recreate his own lost limb. But the experimentation goes awry, and the doctor's evil side comes out.

I noticed, particularly, that the Spider-Man swinging sequences were different in this movie than in the Tobey Maguire version. I didn't get the same stomach-dropping feel I got watching Maguire's Peter Parker experiment with his abilities for the first time. Also, in this version, Spider-Man doesn't manufacture his own webbing. He needs special equipment to make it. Nonetheless, the special effects are great, and there are a few beautiful, iconic shots of Spider-Man in action.

Be sure to stay after the initial credits for the set-up for the next movie.

Three stars.

Hero

Mike Lupica is a pretty well-known author now, but Hero is the first book of his I've read. I was not terribly impressed. It's written for a middle school audience and targeted more toward guys, so maybe I'm missing something others would get. The style was sparse, and by that, I mean, thoughts and ideas were communicated with few words. But largely, the book is about thoughts and ideas. Not much seems to happen until halfway through, and even then, I was underwhelmed.

Hero is about a boy whose father dies and leaves him a legacy he doesn't even know about, a set of awesome superpowers. Billy begins investigating the "accident" of his father's plane crash, believing, and rightly so, that such a thing could never happen to his father accidentally. His search leads him to a mysterious old man who tells him he has "magic," just like his father. And that's where, halfway through the book, the story starts to get going. Billy faces several tests that are all leading toward a fight with the Bads. The problem is, he's not sure who the Bads really are. He gets conflicting advice from people who know his powers, so he begins to distrust everyone, even some of the people closest to him.

This is definitely an origins story for a superhero because he has to discover who he is, train, and then eventually fight. But I keep comparing it to Batman Begins (the movie starring Christian Bale), also an origins story, and there's just no contest. (I love Batman Begins, by the way.) In Hero, not enough happens. There's too much internal struggle without enough emotional payoff. The reader doesn't know who's right throughout most of the book, and that's frustrating rather than suspenseful. Morality gets confused, and I don't mean sex. The book is clean as far as the normal sex, drugs, and language go. It's more that Right and Wrong get confused so that you don't even know if Billy is a Bad, deep down. Maybe that's more true-to-life, but you don't want that in a superhero. You want him to be a hero, automatically good, and super...so, extra good.

But these are minor morality issues in a book that's main problem for me was a lack of spark. I could just be the wrong audience, and if you like Mike Lupica, there's nothing objectionable in this story for a middle school boy. But if you want my opinion, and I know I've mentioned this before in regards to superhero stories, go with H.I.V.E. instead. It's about the kids of supervillains, but surprisingly, Right and Wrong are more clear-cut, besides which, the plot is much more entertaining.