The Amazing Spider Man Movie Review

The Amazing Spider Man Review
                                                                      

The Amazing Spider-Man is an American superhero film released in 2012. As we all know, this movie is based on the famous Marvel Comics character “Spider-Man”.  The Amazing Spider Man is the fourth movie of this Spider -Man series, but after the third, this one starts again from the very beginning of the original story, thus serving as a reboot. This movie is written by James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves, directed by Marc Webb and starred by Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Denis Leary, Campbell Scott, Irrfan Khan, Martin Sheen and Sally Field. This movie is released also in 3D.

A scene from the movie The Amazing Spider Man

Plot:

The plot starts when Peter Parker was a kid. One night, in a hurry, Peter’s father takes Peter to Uncle Ben and Aunt May’s house and leaves him there taking Peter’s mother with him. They never returned. Their fate was not shown at that time of the movie.

Peter grew up to a teenager. In his school, he was regularly bullied by some other teens. He always carried a camera with him as he was fond of photography. But one day, some bullies beat him and break his camera when he refuses to take photos of those boys bullying another student. This incident also helps him to earn respect from beautiful Gwen.

One day Peter accidentally discovers his father’s secret documents. From his uncle Ben, he learns that his father was working with Dr. Curt Connors of Oscorp and then we see how his parents died. To learn more, Peter goes to Oscorp and enters there taking the identity of an intern. Then he sees Gwen from his school is taking the interns to a tour in Oscorp and he mixes with that team. Soon, with his brilliance, he gets noticed by Dr. Curt Connors, who, at that time, was working on cross species genetic exchange to cure the human from different disease. Dr. Connors target was to cure the head of Oscorp and also to get his arm back.

Peter gets detached from the intern group and sneaks into a special lab, where he was bitten by some exceptional type of spiders. His suspicious activities got caught by Gwen and she throws him away from the group. While returning home, he starts to feel his extraordinary abilities.

Soon Peter learns to control and use his new abilities and teaches the bullies at his school a lesson. Peter also meets Dr. Connors in his house and gives him some clue (which he has found from his father’s research) to complete his unfinished research. Peter gives Dr. Connors his identity and starts to help him with his research, which finally brings the success to regenerate an arm on a mouse. But after returning him, Peter gets scolded by his uncle Ben for forgetting his responsibility. Angrily, Peter leaves the house and his uncle follows to search for him. In a store, he meets a thief who helps him, but accidentally kills his uncle Ben. Peter finds the body of his uncle. Peter also realizes that it was him, who saw the thief stealing and had let him go. Later on, police gave him some clue about that thief.

Peter starts to beat up criminals to find that thief. From a painting on a gym’s wall, he gets inspired to make a costume. He makes that costume and also creates some kind of machine to shoot web from his wrist.

In the meantime, Dr. Connors’ boss pressures him to apply his newly found serum on human. When Dr. Connors rejects, his boss threatens him that he will shut down the whole project and also says, Peter’s father also didn’t agree to test his medicine on human. Out of desperation, Dr. Connors applies the serum on himself and turns into a big human-lizard.

Peter goes to Gwen’s house to attend her invitation and finds that, Gwen’s father is the police chief, who is looking for spider-man. They both had a little argument on the dinner table. After the dinner, Peter reveals his identity (as spider-man) to Gwen and they kiss. Then he hears police siren and Gwen’s dad rushes to a bridge where the lizard-man attacks. Peter also rushes there and saves some people.

On the next few days, Peter does some research and finds a possible hiding place of the lizard-man in the sewer. He then fights the lizard, but loses and escapes from there. Peter tells the police chief about the identity of the lizard-man, but he doesn’t trust him completely. The lizard man (Dr. Connors) learns Spider-Man’s identity from his camera and attacks his school to stop him, but Spider-Man again saves the students.  Later, he finds the plan of the lizard-man, that is, to use a special machine of Oscorp to convert all the people of the city to a stronger version of human, i.e., lizard-man.

The next part of the movie is about the plan of the lizard-man and the attempts of the spider-man to stop him.

My Review about this movie:

First of all, I liked this movie. Although I didn’t find it mind-blowing or extra-ordinary amazing, but I still liked it.

The plot is simple and pretty predictable. Almost all of us know the story of Spider-Man, like what happened to his uncle, how he got transformed etc, and this movie gives no surprise. The ending is also very predictable.

The dialogues are okay, not bad or nothing special. I didn’t like the acting of Andrew Garfield. I mean, his acting was not bad at all, but to me, he seemed too smart to be a kid who is regularly being bullied by his classmates. Here I missed Tobey Maguire, who’s innocent (and sometimes, confused) face and beautiful acting matched perfectly with the character he was playing in Spider-Man (part 1). The acting of all other characters were also good, but again I missed beautiful  Kirsten Dunst. I’m not complaining about the artists here, I just missed the old ones.

The make-ups are goods, except the lizard-man. To me, it looked funny, not the image of a scary villain. Here the villain is not evil, his intentions were not bad, but harmful and wrong. He himself is a tragic hero.

The special effects are very good in this movie. Specially, the continuous shot in the action scene in the school where the Spider-Man was running over the lizard all around it trying to put it in nets looked awesome. All other flying and action scenes also looked beautiful.

At the last parts of the movie, I was really hoping to see some more lizards after the lizard -man used gas on some police, but there was nothing like that. I think it could be a good addition to the movie.

To all Spider-Man fans, this movie should come as a big relief after the last part (part 3) of the previous Spider-Man series, the series which started with an amazing movie but kept getting worse at each sequel.

If you think after watching pervious three movies, there is nothing new to watch in Spider-Man, you’ll make a wrong guess. There are a lot of differences in this movie with the previous one. For example, here Spider-Man doesn’t enjoy public fame like the previous ones, here he doesn’t have a photo-journalism career, here webs doesn’t come out of his hands, he makes an electronics device for that, here he hunts criminals for his personal vendetta, not to help people. In this movie, most of the Spider-Man’s moves are also different.

In my judgment, between Spider-Man (part one) and The Amazing Spider-Man, I’ll keep Spider-Man (part 1) on top. But The Amazing Spider-Man has a great potential and I’m looking forward to enjoy The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Whatever, this is a nice movie. An IMDB rating of 7.1 supports it. By watching this movie, I felt my time nicely spent. If you are a Spider-Manfan or a superhero movie fan, I’d recommend this movie to you.

How do you feel about this movie? Feel free to write in the comments.

For those who are interested:

IMDB Link: The Amazing Spider-Man IMDB

Wikipedia Link: The Amazing Spider-Man Wiki

Lookout Movie Review

Lookout
                                                   

Lookout is a science fiction action movie released in 2012. It is directed by James Mather and Stephen St. Leger, and written by Mather, St. Leger, and Luc Besson. The major characters of this movie is played by Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace, Vincent Regan, Joseph Gilgun, Lennie James, and Peter Stormare.  Don’t confuse this movie with the crime thriller ‘The Lookout’ of 2007.

A scene from the movie Lookout

Plot:

This movie tells a story of 2079. A man (maybe a spy)named Snow gets wrongly accused by secret service for killing a secret service agent and for trading confidential data. He is shown evidence that he has killed the agent, but he denies it. He is then sent to jail. But before he gets arrested, he manages to slip a briefcase (which was supposed to have the important data) to his friend, who hides it in a locker.

In the meantime, the daughter of U.S.A. president Emiliegoes to visit a prison in space, referred as MS1 (for Maximum Security). She interviews a prisoner (Hydell) but during the interview, Hydell brakes free from the chains and then he frees all the prisoners in that jail. The prisoners start a riot and kill most of the security guards and officers of the prison, led by Hydell’s elder bother. They just keep some (including Emillie) alive as a bait and takes control of the whole prison.

Secret service gets informed about this situation and knows about the condition of the President’s daughter. They convinces Snow to go to a rescue mission to MS1 to bring Emilie alive out of there. Snow agrees to go there knowing his friend was in that prison.

At MS1, Emilie manages to run from the hold-up and hides in a room with her bodyguard. But as oxygen gets almost finished in that room, her bodyguard commits suicide to give her a few more minutes. After she becomes unconscious, Snow brakes in that room and takes Emilie out before the prisoners enter the room by cutting the doors.

Snow then takes Emily to a hidden place and helps her to disguise. Then they starts to look for his friend, but only to find him gone insane. Snow cannot learn anything from him about the briefcase’s location.

The next part of the movie is about Snow’s rescue mission, about his fight to get out of that prison alive, about his getting out of the things he’s accused for.

My review about this movie:

First of all, I’d say, I liked this movie.

This is a pretty regular science fiction action movie which is not very rare, but this one is well made and well directed.

One interesting thing about this movie is Guy Pearce’s dialogues. They are hilarious! Its something like the famous ‘Men in Black’ series, which is a serious movie itself, but the hero’s dialogues will make you laugh every now and then. Just like that, there is no comedy scene in the whole movie and Snow is a pretty badass action hero, but his dialogues are massively humorous. Although by reading this review, you may think the funny dialogues may not properly fit with a serious crime movie, but in this one, the dialogues are enjoyable and have not harmed the movie’s seriousness, not even a bit.

The acting of the major characters is okay, but I wont say perfect. In a movie like this, there were opportunities and they could be better. Same goes for the make up.

The special effects are also good. There is no lack or no over-do. 

I think the plot is the only thing which has kept this movie away from being perfect. I mean, the plot is good, but there are a few plot-holes or weakness in this movie which has harmed the solidness of the plot. For example, the security system at the prison (MS1) seemed unrealistic. How come such a high priority prison did not have any proper isolation for the prisoners planned for a case like this? The prisoners could break free and could take control of the whole situation very easily (for example, we saw a very good illustration of kind of similar scenario in the movie “Conair”). Someone wanted to use sleeping gas on the whole premise, but failed as the rebel leader killed him. How come there was no option to that from the control room? Snow’s identity was not shown in this movie. He could be a criminal, a spy or a secret service agent, but none of them was explained. The way Snow was plotted seemed very weak. Why the right person was on the right place on the right time is also not shown. We also didn’t get to see how the president was put back to his post after being pulled from it.

But don’t let this confuse you, as I said, even with this weakness, the plot is good.

Although there is no nudity in this movie, but for violence and language this one is not a good choice for children.

So, overall, the movie is good, if not excellent. I’d recommend it to the action movie lover. According to my guess, you may not love it, but should like it.

What do you think of it? Let me know in the comments.

To know more:

IMDB link: Lookout (2012)

Wikipedia link: Lookout (2012) wiki