Spiderman's lizard scale new heights

The Amazing Spider-Man seems to be the Peter Parker of this year's summer blockbusters, sitting alone in the corner of the school canteen while cool kids The Avengers, Prometheus and The Dark Knight Rises get all the attention. If film fans aren't upset that the series is being rebooted only a few years after the pretty successful Tobey Maguire trilogy, they're pointing out that the Lizard looks like a rather ropey villain. Hence, perhaps, the arrival of a new featurette give us a detailed lowdown on Rhys Ifans's character, who starts out as one-armed, over-reaching scientist Dr Curt Connors, and ends up as a nine-foot tall reptile with anger management problems.Everything we've seen so far suggests the scaly menace runs the risk of being the CGI elephant in the room of Marc Webb's film: a guileless bundle of reptilian pixels careering mindlessly through Manhattan like a mini-Godzilla minus the kitsch factor. And now it looks as though the film-makers' decision to use one of Spidey's lesser known antagonists has led them to rewrite the wallcrawler's origin story. Yes, Andrew Garfield's version reverts to the original comics' mechanical web shooters and features the canonically-correct Gwen Stacy as Parker's first love (rather than Mary Jane Watson). But what's all this angsty nonsense about a mysterious secret surrounding his absentee dad? No one's going to mind a little tinkering with the webslinger backstory if The Amazing Spider-Man turns out well, of course. And much of the rest of Webb's take looks spot on, from Spidey's laser-guided jibes to the tense and eerie tone, which ought to differentiate it nicely from Sam Raimi's bright and breezy efforts. But this is nevertheless a brave, and rather risky move for such an established and familiar character. Is your money on Parker to take down his more fancied rivals, or are you expecting this particular reboot to deliver the celluloid equivalent of the dreaded blue screen of death?