Among all the box office news and interviews for The Avengers and that fricking awesome The Dark Knight Rises trailer, a new trailer for reboot The Amazing Spider-Man emerged. It’s not quite what some fans expected (or wanted), but heck, a lot of people did like it, myself included. And to celebrate the release of the new trailer (I would do one for the TDKR trailer, but that’s been done way too many times for me to do anything original) and the five-year and one day anniversary of the sad death of Sam Raimi’s trilogy, I’m putting the third trailer for the reboot under my microscope….

It’s not easy being Spider-Man…

The opening lines of the trailer seem to indicate that despite the perks of having super-powers, being Spider-Man isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. It’s an interesting reverse to the current superhero trend, with a lot more superheroes who don’t mind being superheroes coming through. But TASM has gone for the traditional route of the reluctant hero. Whether that pays off or just descends into cliche is yet to be seen…

Yup, Gwen Stacy knows that Peter Parker is Spider-Man

Previous trailers indicated that Gwen Stacy (the love interest of the movie) will be aware of Peter Parker’s identity pretty early on: and an exchange in the middle of the trailer between Peter and Gwen confirms that Gwen is aware of Spider-Man’s identity. Gwen has it easy – Mary Jane had to wait until the end of Spider-Man 2 to find out that Spidey is Peter Parker…

The Amusing Spider-Man

Spider-Man’s trademark quipping, absent completely from the Sam Raimi trilogy, returns in style with this line: ”You’ve found my weakness! It’s small knives!”. It’s an aspect of Spidey’s character that fans have been waiting to see on the big-screen, and this trailer gives me no doubt that Marc Webb will bring out the funny in Spider-Man.

Family history

This intriguing shot of a young Peter watching his father trying to erase writing from a blackboard hammers home the reboot’s unique premise of Peter attempting to find out the truth about his parents. And it gets even more intriguing if you check out the writing on the blackboard: ”Delivery Agent: Arachnid Genone”. Origin story change alert!

Gosh, look at this rather cool-looking shot

Tell me this shot doesn’t look awesome. It shows Spidey and the Lizard engaging in some ceiling battles in what appears to be Peter’s school (note the lockers), and the (a fact that it’s clearly daylight outside and (b that it’s a very different location to where we’ve seen the Spidey vs Lizard smackdowns before indicates that there’s going to be a fair bit of Spider-Man vs the Lizard in TASM…

That guy looks familiar

This shows Curt Connors (aka the Lizard) in a dark room, being talked to by… well, who is it? The answer, not-so-subtly foreshadowed by the large Oscorp logo on a building earlier on in the trailer, is most likely Norman Osborn. Yup, that Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin, Spidey’s arch-enemy and the Big Bad of the first Raimi movie. Your first thought might be that the appearance of Osborn is mostly to set up a sequel with the Green Goblin as the Big Bad, and that’s probably true. You could even have Osborn turning into the Green Goblin at the end of the first movie, and hit the ground running in the 2014-released sequel…

Blue clouds?

The trailer finishes with an extended look at the shot that ended the second trailer – Spidey on a building that’s just about to be smashed to bits by a pole. There’s also some interesting-looking blue clouds that you can clearly see to the side of Spider-Man. If the clouds don’t have anything to do with the Lizard, I’ll eat my hat. Or something resembling a hat.