<Review by: Sailesh Ghelani>

Okay so the news is that The Amazing Spider-Man will debut in India a couple of days before (June 29) its US release scheduled for July 3. Are you excited? Well maybe. Many are arguing about the logic in rebooting the franchise all over again. Agreed, the Tobey Maguire lead trilogy from 2002-2007 wasn’t the best super hero set of movies (even though Spider-Man 2 was pretty darn good). And the fact that they’ve regressed Peter Parker (played now by Andrew Garfield) into college doesn’t really change the game. We still have to sit through the whole ‘transformation’ process: watching him get bitten by a spider, go through bodily changes and performing parkour on top of buildings. Of course there’s a love interest in the form of Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) and the usual high school angst.

Gwen and Peter get entangled

The question here is do we need to be told the story of Spider-Man over again? Well no one asked us so let’s leave that aside for now. Because apparently this is ‘The Untold Story’. The story about Peter Parker’s parents and their mysterious disappearance (weren’t they killed in some sort of accident?).

Back to school with Spider-Man

A privileged few of us from the press got to watch some unseen footage (about 8 minutes worth) from the film recently. But there’s also a Super Preview (4 minutes available online May 15, 2012 now, which you can see). Here’s that preview first (only about 2 minutes is really unseen):

Here are the salient points/observations:

1. It’s sort of like Smallville isn’t it. What with Peter’s high school crush on Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) and his awkward moments with her.

2. Getting revenge on the high school bully.

3. Finding a suitcase that reveals secrets about his father who worked at Oscorp with Dr Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) the soon-to-be Lizard villain of the movie.

4. Some unused production footage with blue screen and a scene where a mugger with a large knife tries to hold up Spider-Man. If you recall from one of the trailers, they actually use a take with the thief holding a smaller knife and Spider-Man drops to his knees and jokes: “You found my weakness, it’s small knives!”

5. Shots of Peter experimenting with his new web slingers (no they are not supposed to shoot directly out of his wrists like they did in Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man), which was quite funny.

6. The scene on the bridge seems like quite an edge-of-the-seat moment.

7. I don’t really remember anything else apart from similar footage I saw in the trailers and perhaps an obligatory Irrfan Khan (as Dr Ratha) scene to show us some pride of India. A bit disappointing considering I remember being taken to Los Angeles a few years ago by Sony/Columbia Pictures for Spider-Man 3. I saw at least half-an-hour of unseen footage and got to interview all the stars from the movie for Filmfare. Yes, James Franco too. (Check out the jpegs of the Spider-Man 3 interviews in the Photo Gallery at the bottom).

We’ve already done one Trailer Review for Spider-Man (check it out here). Alright, let’s take a look at the Newest and probably final Spider-Man Trailer:

Looks pretty good. What I found interesting in it all was:

Gwen and Peter: will the love story be different?

George Stacy (Denis Leary)

Gwen Stacy’s (Emma Stone) dad, the police chief George Stacy (Denis Leary) is also going to be giving Spider-Man a tough time.

The evil Oscorp

“Do you think what happened to you Peter was an accident…” says Dr Connors. Well then what was it?

Dr Connors and the mysterious man

The mysterious daddy Parker

Intriguing is the scene with Dr Connors (Rhys Ifans) in what looks like a prison with a man in the shadows who says, “Did you tell the boy about his father?”

Web shooter

Web fluid experiments

Fans of the comic books will be overjoyed at seeing how Peter develops his web slinging apparatus. The last trilogy showed Spider-Man shooting his web ropes directly from his wrist, which isn’t actually how it is supposed to work. Being a science student he develops the special material and devices to shoot it so he can swing from building to building. And this lead to many comical moments in the comics and cartoons when he ran out of web slinging fluid plummeting several hundred feet down.

Spidey and Lizard battling it out

The Lizard avatar of Dr Connor doesn’t seem too exciting; he seems a lot more interesting as the good/evil doctor.

Devastation

The funny 'small knife' scene

Of course there’s your usual action and destruction: the city of New York is always the place for that. The bridge scene with cars hanging off it with webbing looks impressive and we’ll see if 3D makes those web swinging (and hopefully falling) moments any more enjoyable.

The Lizard lashes for Irrfan Khan's Dr Ratha

In the first trailer we didn’t even realise Indian actor Irrfan Khan was the guy sitting in the yellow cab as the Lizard attacks it from above. Now you have a clearer shot of him and contrary to reports he will not be ‘Proto-Goblin’ in the film. We’ll have to wait and see if he has a significant role or a blink-and-miss appearance like Anil Kapoor’s in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

Will Spider-Man join The Avengers sequel?

 Check out the gallery of The Amazing Spider-Man movie stills: