Andrew Garfield is far superior than Tobey Maguire as Spider-man/Peter Parker. It's not even close. As a kid Spiderman was my favorite superhero. I thought the Raimi trilogy was okay (although the third one was terrible) except for one thing. Tobey. I can't stand Tobey Maguire. I can't stand him in any movie playing any role anytime. He ruined it for me.
I know that the reason this series was rebooted so soon was because SONY didn't want the franchise rights to revert back to Disney/Marvel. There was no way they'd let this cash cow get out of their hands and into their rivals. However, I don't care why the series was rebooted. I'm just thrilled that we can begin to move past the stain of the Tobey Maguire era.
So The Amazing Spider-man is a good movie. Not as good as Iron Man or The Avengers but pretty good. And it gets a lot of points in my book for destroying Tobey Maguire's hold on the character once and for all.
Just for disclosure's sake Spider-man ceased be my favorite comic book hero a long time ago. Iron Man is the man.
One more thing: I really dug how they made Peter Parker actually make his web shooters rather than the "organic approach" used in the Raimi trilogy. This approach is faithful to the original comics and demonstrates that Peter Parker truly was a scientific genius. Adds a bit more to the character arc that was missing with Tobey Maguire's biological web shooters.
