So apparently we're cool with massive spoilers now? XD Note, I'm aware that I'm not the first to address these points, and that some of them have been acknowledged. I'm just adding more details to the discussion.
I saw the Amazing Spider-Man 2 just now, I give it a 2 out of 5. I aaaalmost gave it a 3.
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What was the use of Peter's dad uploading the virus in the opening scene? [...] The inclusion of the peter parker's dad, and the ghost dad were indeed unsubstantial and silly, respectively. Etcetera, etcetera.
As it's been explained, that was backup. That was pivotal to the plot of uncovering the mystery of Peter's parents' deaths, because otherwise it's a neverending mystery because all of the truth was lost. If you preferred that the mystery never be solved, then that's another discussion entirely. Unlike the Raimi films which COMPLETELY ignored the reasons for why Peter was orphaned and living with his Aunt and Uncle, the Webb films address this; THAT'S the point, and it's a very important one, as far as narrative is concerned. Whether you simply ignore a nagging concern or whether you turn the answer for that nag into some massive undertaking of a story don't have to be the only two options available, thematically, but they didn't do a bad job of going in the latter's direction. People complained that TAS1 dropped a mystery in the audience's laps and then NEVER did anything with it, which to me just seems like those people didn't WATCH the movie (or watched it with very short attention spans) because it was revisited on multiple occasions throughout the film, including the final scene. It didn't give the mystery away yet it didn't dangle it in front of our faces the entire time, so we had a narrative to work with. I believe people simply were spoiled by movies addressing EVERY loose thread neatly and perfectly so a movie making good artistic use of an UNSOLVED mystery was just upsetting to them because that's not what they're used to, not that it was on its own handled poorly.
TAS2 picked up where TAS1 left off with that mystery and, sadly (for me), solved it. I wouldn't have minded if they explained more of it but left it ultimately hanging, because that IS an important dynamic to Peter's identity, but they addressed it in a manner that, while somewhat over-simplified (e.g. Oscorp doing evil things, making people vanish, I must flee), gave a suitable destination for one of Peter's many character arcs. Remember that in TAS1 he spent some time egotistically hunting down thugs that all matched the same physical characteristics, and until Captain Stacey pointed out to him that this behavior wasn't noble at all but clearly some sort of grudge or vendetta, Peter hadn't considered that what he was doing could be an abuse of his gifts. Learning that was one of the many lessons, just like keeping the final voicemail from his Uncle Ben was another, that led his character to grow from A to B. All important plot points, and I felt they were handled wonderfully. In the Roosevelt Station scene in TAS2, the climax of this particular character arc, it represented the culmination of Peter's identity, because now he knew what to make of his late family, as well as what his remaining family meant to him. If anything, solving the mystery of what happened to the Parkers in TAS2 was just not handled AS magnificently as Peter's growth was in the first film.
The same problem, I'd say, is what plagued the "ghost" of Captain Stacey, not because Peter imagining him was portrayed in a silly way, but because his reactions in the scenes that involved were just a little jarring. This was somewhat mitigated by Gwen mentioning that this behavior had been repetitious of him, and that she'd finally gotten sick of it, but still, until she said that, as viewers we didn't know that, so seeing Peter go from happily in a relationship to suddenly guilt-stricken seemed very sudden and out-of-place. That can just be attributed to how the scenes were cut, and it could have simply been done better.
Paul Giamatti was hamming it up very badly. How did Electro disolving again at the end kill him? Electro's motivation wasn't logical.
I really don't see the "hamming" people are talking about, they just characterize him as a witless brute, and he does a great job at that. As said before, there was no confirmation that Electro did indeed die, and for all we know he'll return in the Sinister Six film BECAUSE his consciousness catches on to the fact that he can reconstitute his body. He only needed to be "out of the way" because a character such as his (the rather godlike kind) poses a huge plothole in any narrative that he's included if he's not "dealt with" in some fashion, for at least some amount of time. The scenes at Ravencroft Institute portrayed that he CAN be contained, but getting him from omnipotent point A to pacified point B wasn't going to be as simple as administering an airborne anti-mutagen this time around.
And the worst problem for me was how weird the green goblin was. It was a weird change I couldn't buy into, when he put on the suit and the glider. How did he know the suit would help him anyway? That was something they didn't set up properly. He gets injected, we know he will die because of the lack of Parker bloodline, and the suit is just there to magically solve this. There were a lot of handwaves in this script.
The greatest issue I had with the Green Goblin was that they made him Harry to begin with. Harry WAS one of the Green Goblins, but he was ultimately a tragic pawn who had assumed that mantle, while the real Goblin, Norman Osborn, was far more insidious, powerful, and resourceful. That was switched around in this film, and that's just something that I'll need to get used to, not something that altogether makes his character "bad". But as for how he knew that the suit would help him, there was a scene earlier in the film (when he discovered his father's "life's work" use) where he reviewed the many top-secret projects Oscorp had developed, and in that scene the powered combat suit was explained while he was reviewing these, even mentioning that it had field-medicating features; that how he "knew it would help him". So you have to admit it was set up right, you might've simply forgotten that earlier part. The worst part of it, I feel, was that the Webb version of Osborn died in his 50s/60s, so clearly even if he inherited the disease, Harry had many decades ahead of him to solve that, but he felt much more rushed, and visually we saw those patches of skin indicating the same thing. If Harry was rushed on his own, but he wasn't exhibiting any acceleration of the disease more than his father, then I think that would have been much better. But presumably they wanted to include that visual indicator so we the audience would understand why his incompatible mutation with the spider venom resulted in more green patches of skin. Another matter that simply could have been done better, but not that it was bad.
Fair points. I'm not trying to persuade you from liking the movie. I didn't hate it either. So let's leave it at that.
It's never about persuading people to like what they dislike, or dislike what they'd otherwise like. It's just a matter of discussion, that when one person's qualms has a substantiated cause, that it's possible those can be explained. It's the purpose of discussions, the exchange of ideas, not persuasion. I always hate when people think that simple discussion is always "trying to change [their] minds", because it reeks of such a simple-minded insecurity that their perspective was probably shallow enough on its own that on some subconscious level they feared the notion of exploring it very deeply because it would force them to face that thing they lacked the commitment to stand by and defend. If anything, some of us might just want to "persuade" you to use different movie reviewing sources because of how subjective particular ones might be. But ultimately, we all saw the same movie, so there's ample cause to explore how one scene or one character or one anything could have elicited such wildly different reactions for different people. It's not a matter of persuading you to give up your ways, just an exploration of why that is.
I've seen many, especially amateur reviewers, review movies that were not for them to see or review in the first place.