Normally a remake is brought into existence to bring a story or idea to a whole new audience to whom the original is deemed inaccessible, be it by age or an baseless fear of subtitles.. However, when that remake is coming only a decade after the film it's inspired by and targeted at very much the same audience something really special (and different) needs to be done. You know where we're going with this. The Amazing Spider-Man only existed because Sony needed to put something Spidey out before the rights reverted back to Marvel and it was clear another Raimi movie just wouldn't happen. At first this reboot was set to go back to basics, with a small-ish budget (less than $100 million) and a focus on Peter Parker's high-school life over his vigilante extra-curricular activities. Hence why Marc Webb, director of (500) Days Of Summer was hired (that, or they just thought his last name would be a good pun). As with Spider-Man 3, however, Sony quickly remember this property was too big for that and soon the thing ballooned into a massive project. It takes the Batman Begins route of superhero origins. Whereas the original had Peter bit by the spider ten minutes in, here the origin story is the whole film. Or at least it sets out to be. About halfway it baulks at having such a grounded, real-world take on the hero and feels compelled to throw in a CGI villain scheme, putting the set up plot beats on ice. Had the Lizard been cut, with the hunt for Uncle Ben's killer and the mystery of Richard Parker's research forming the central narrative drive then we could have had something genuinely original. Instead we have a bunch of nice ideas that hew too close to Raimi's first film.
