A much more promising start than the last Spider-Man

Rating: 8/10 (15 December 2012)

2002's Spider-Man was an awful movie, mainly due to an incompetent script. It was followed by the decent Spider-Man 2 but returned to form with another bad one, Spider-Man 3.
That series was not the right way to do Spider-Man; this movie is the right way. While the 2002 film felt like it had been written by a committee who were neither familiar with the original material nor reading one another's work, this movie appears to have been written by people who repeatedly asked the question no one ever asked during the first series: "does this make sense?"
For the most part, Amazing Spider-Man does make sense, with a fairly convincing origin story (except for a lack of explanation as to why what happened to Peter couldn't be used to create millions of Spider-Mans). The movie takes its time as Peter transitions from dweeb to super hero, then it gets into a super-villain story that also makes sense, and (again unlike the earlier film) is exciting and well paced.
The surprising thing about this movie is how serious Peter is. The tradition of the series is a wise-cracking good guy, but while Spidey does get some witty lines, the movie is better represented by the way Peter removes his mask in one scene to calm a child; it's more about the Spider-Man with a deep compassion and a need to make the world better than the Spider-Man who likes to swing through the air and beat up mutant creatures. I would have liked more wise cracking, but I appreciate the approach.
Far better than the overrated The Avengers, this is a superhero movie done right. It is not the most memorable movie, and it doesn't have anything as notable as the famous upside-down kiss from the 2002 film, but it is very solid. And while in the week since I saw it most of the details have faded away, that's much better than that 2002 film, which created so many bad memories that I can still, all these years later, reel off a list of all the movie's problems.
Watch this.