"The Amazing Spider-Man"

Retitling the SpideReboot "The Amazing Spider-Man" is, by any objective measure, a smart move on behalf of Sony Pictures: It reaffirms that it's a new start, plus by specifically evoking the source-material it strongly implies that it's "of a kind" with the current wave of more "faithful" adaptations.

It also reveals a certain level of confidence in the project: Part of the reason you DON'T see a lot of positive-adjectives used in movie titles is that doing so is pretty-much inviting the media to have fun with it if and when they have to report negative reviews or performance (re: "The Underwhelming Spider-Man" or "Amazing? Not Quite.") Either way, I like it (the title) and if they so-choose to use the same font/text-design for it as the comics I'll like that, too.

They've also seen fit to counteract all those less-than-impressive set photos of the new costume by giving us the first "official" look at the thing with the mask on, in an action-pose, properly lit and color-corrected. That's it on the right. I stand by my initial impressions up to this point: It's overdesigned, the blue fingers make it look like he's wearing ugly finger-gloves over his uniform, and as much as I like mechanical-webshooters I'm not fond of them being big silver buttons on the outside of fabric. BUT, he looks more like Spider-Man than TDK's Batman looks like Batman, so it's not terribly unpleasant.

Hey, wait a sec... where are his feet?


Look close: The shadowing has been staged in such a way as to completely obscure both of his feet below the calf. Aside from lending the image a somewhat-ironic Leifeldian quality, it denies sharp-eyed fans an answer to the biggest costume-question to come out of all those unplanned candids: Are those metal toe-shoes he seems to be wearing over his boots part of the onscreen costume or just a stunt/safety thing for certain shots? And if they ARE part of the actual outfit, why exactly does Spider-Man need to armor his toes?

I dropped it into photoshop, blew up the bottom portion and cranked the brightness/contrast to try and bring up the detail and make them out. There basically ISN'T any detail to raise on the feet, as though it's been darkened even beyond the shadows from the photography, but I got a small hint of what looks like the shiny non--red "tip" of a boot, which leads me to believe that he WAS wearing them in this shot and that they ARE part of the costume-proper. Take a look:

So, if the new Spider-Man has metal feet... what are they? Is the wall-crawling a mechanical-aparatus now as well? Does he have shooters on his FEET, too?