It's one of the fundamental laws of modern movie making: A superhero film is only as good as its villain. "The Dark Knight'"s Joker? Great. "Thor'"s Loki? Good. "Green Lantern's" grumpy space smog? Yeah, not so much.

And "The Amazing Spider-Man'"s version of The Lizard? Well, now we finally have the first photos of him — and he looks pretty darn cool. 

Quick refresher course in case you flunked out of Introduction to Spider-Man: The Lizard, who is played by Rhys Ifans, is actually benevolent scientist Dr. Curt Connors. In the film, he's a former comrade of Peter Parker's father, which makes it all the more ironic when he accidentally turns himself into a monster and starts fighting Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) after a failed attempt to regrow his missing arm using regenerative cells taken from a lizard.

Naturally, that transformation and his subsequent scaly self are being rendered with CGI. So how did the effects wizards do with this one? Take a look at the first shots, courtesy of Empire, and decide for yourself: