TRAILER REVIEW: The Amazing Spiderman 2 looks exciting

Raja Sen feels The Amazing Spiderman 2 trailer is solid and shows us a very ambitious film.

Spidey’s back.

And, fittingly enough, the trailer starts with a shot of the webslinger’s back as he freefalls limply towards his beloved New York City.

It’s a passive fall till he leans his upper body downwards with the practised ease of an ace skydiver marking a target for landing before the friendly neighbourhood superhero does what only he can and his right arm shoots forward, thwips out webbing, and he Tarzans it gracefully through skyscraper-tops.

But that isn't what we've been wondering about, for we know the movies have managed to capture our hero’s aerial acrobatics and spider-motion quite elegantly. What we care about is how Marc Webb’s film will balance a slew of villains, all of whom are glimpsed more than once in this tightly-packed yet generous teaser trailer.

Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker, wisecracking about being caught in traffic and gigglingly agreeing with girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) that machine-gun fire "is implied" looks in fine form but the cards seem stacked pretty heavily against him this time around.

We see Rhino in what looks like a mechanical armour (and then without the armour, Paul Giamatti with a scary tattoo and a machine gun), we see Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan of The Chronicle and The Place Beyond The Pines) channelling a young Nicolas Cage every time he speaks, and finally we see, as promised, Jamie Foxx as Electro.

This incarnation of Electro can fly -- or at least glide through electric waves he shoots across the sky -- and looks to be almost made of electricity. It’s a suitably creepy look though I must say I sorely miss the big yellow star-shaped mask (even though that’d never cut it in a movie). Ah well. This here is Electro Unchained, y’all.

It’s a solid, meaty trailer and shows us a film with many ambitions: Peter learning more secrets, Spidey having fun being Spidey, puppetmaster Norman Osborne (Chris Cooper) sounding like he’s in charge, and a sequence of events that perhaps lays the roots for that fatal collaboration between the spider-foes: The Sinister Six.

Will it be awesome? Or will it be overkill? We’ll find out in 2014.

Meanwhile those of us who love the spider can take solace in the way he hurls a manhole-cover with style that puts shield-throwing Captain America to shame.

Amazing, yes.