The bewildering, frustrating, boring thing about The Amazing Spider-Man: It's a movie that stupidly thinks it needs to tell us—again—where Spider-Man came from. And once you get past its plodding redundancy, the rest of the script for The Amazing Spider-Man isn't that spectacular either—the plot's driven by farfetched coincidences, major events are forgotten as soon as they're over, and a half-dozen half-hearted tweaks that are supposed to convince audiences that this Spider-Man is different from the one we saw a few years ago are tacked on and trivial. HOWEVER. Just about everything else in The Amazing Spider-Man is remarkably, giddily great. The Social Network's Andrew Garfield is a far better Peter Parker/Spider-Man than Tobey Maguire, and director Mark Webb—whose only previous credit is 500 Days of Summer—maximizes the spectacle of superhero action and the excitement of web-swinging through Manhattan's concrete canyons. by Erik Henriksen