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User Reviews for: Spider-Man

SkinnyFilmBuff
8/10  2 years ago
Part 1 (of 8) of my Spider-Man movie re-watch marathon in preparation for No Way Home. Because this is the first, in this post I'm going to include a bit more background. I saw the first two Sam Raimi Spider-Man films plenty of times growing up, as we owned them both on DVD. Plus they, along with X-Men, were the first big superhero films of my life time. The other six movies (Spider-Man 3, Amazing 1 & 2, Homecoming, Far from Home, and Into the Spiderverse) I've probably only seen once or twice. As such, I expected these first two to be the most nostalgic experiences, which certainly proved to be the case here. So.... how did it hold up?

Well, it was a mixed bag. Before I get into the details, I'll say that I'm not updating my score based on this viewing. When I first joined Trakt (or more accurately, IMDB) I gave all movies I had seen previously scores from memory, and for this movie that score was an 8/10. This movie is a product of its time and so even though I certainly don't think it's as good as a modern movie that I would score an 8, it still deserves a huge amount of credit and so I wouldn't feel right lowering its score. Now, for my brief takeaways.

**THE BAD:** Lots of cheese. Rapid pacing takes away from dramatic moments (i.e. flashbacks to scenes that happened less than five minutes ago). Love triangle and everything to do with MJ was kind of a mess. Tobey Maguire unfortunately has to do a lot of heavy lifting in the acting department, and for me not enough of it lands.

**THE GOOD:** Willem Dafoe absolutely kills it. His green goblin laugh is iconic. J.K. Simmons absolutely kills it. Everything he says is iconic. Surprisingly, some of the effects hold up well enough. There's some PlayStation 2 level graphics on display here or there, but once Spidey gets his proper suit, the webslinging and fight sequences look quite solid, even leaving me impressed in a couple of moments.
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AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS6/10  2 years ago
[6.0/10] There’s time when Sam Raimi’s *Evil Dead* films feel like the closest thing we’ll ever get to a fully live action *Looney Tunes* adaptation. And in a weird way, that makes the director a good fit for comic book movies. The four-color adventures found in the comics pages were often larger than life, particularly in the era of stories 2002’s *Spider-Man* is drawing from. Raimi’s able to capture that in his translation of the web-head to the big screen, with exaggerated figures, wild action, and a big toy box sensibility to the whole project.

But as a consequence, the whole movie feels, well, pretty cartoony. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. There’s room in the superhero cinematic diet for camp, and wackiness, and colorful set pieces hither and yon. The problem is that Raimi and company also want to make an emotional film, where we’re moved by the loss of Peter’s Uncle, Ben; invested in his crush on his nextdoor neighbor and childhood dream girl, Mary Jane, and compelled by the complicated paternal relationships of Norman Osborn. *Spider-Man* tries to have it both ways and fails.

I think that’s why I struggled to connect with this movie as a kid, despite being right in the target audience for it. There’s a ton to like here in terms of style and visuals. Some of the CGI hasn’t aged especially well, but it wowed at the time, and still retains its charms today. Raimi still has an eye for movement in particular, so there’s a fun campiness to Spidey doing parkour off of parade balloons, a cool factor to him dodging blades like he’s in *The Matrix*, and panache when goes hand-to-hand with the Green Goblin.

At times, the green screening stands out, but in an age of more practical effects, Peter saving M.J.’s lunch or flipping through a fight with Flash or going toe-to-toe with a pro wrestler has more immediacy to it. Raimi and his team know how to stage and cut these scenes for maximum impact, to where you can see the traces of his *Army of Darkness*-esque splatterfests even in a squarely mainstream release. They’re far and away the highlight of the film.

The other side of the coin is that this level of exaggeration extends to the characters and the dialogue and everything else that’s supposed to make you feel something amid these heightened reality adventures. The characters are oversimplified. The performances are unconvincing. And the stories are done in such a cheesy manner that they have next to no force.

The prime offender here is Tobey Maguire as Spidey himself. It’s funny, I remember liking his performance in *Spider-Man 2* and even *Spider-Man 3*, but he’s downright terrible here. His Peter just has this strange, flat affect through everything, and his line-reads make it sound like he has the same tone of mild surprise in each delivery. Maguire’s trying to play younger and awkward, but the results just land on off-putting or unconvincing. There’s no charm to his Spider-Man, and no believability in his attempts to play a dorky eighteen-year-old kid. Maguire has some chops -- he ugly cries well in one of the few genuinely affecting scenes here -- but when he’s called upon to say dialogue or react like a human being to the moment, he falls woefully short.

His opposite, and the real saving grace of the film, is Willem Dafoe as Norman Osborn/Green Goblin. Make no mistake, he is absolutely chewing the scenery at every turn. But Dafoe is one of the few performers able to modulate his performance with the movie, channeling that exaggeration to different modes to where he seems genuinely menacing, pathetic, insane, and reprehensible depending on which guise he’s in. (The other, of course, is J.K. Simmons’ brilliant take on J. Jonah Jameson.) Dafeo throws himself into an oversized role with gusto, and it makes him the most memorable part of this thing.

Even then, there’s an undercurrent of unrelenting cheese that runs through *Spider-Man*. Green Goblin isn’t a human being losing his grip on reality as the urge for revenge and thirst for power consumes him. He’s just a cackling baddie who causes mischief and mayhem for mayhem’s sake. The movie wants to have it both ways, but can’t deliver on the solid idea at the core of the character, instead losing him in a wash of cartoonish evil and maniacal laughter.

Then again, maybe it’s not Raimi’s fault. Maybe it was just the style at the time. One of the most striking things of revisiting this movie so many years later is how utterly disconnected it feels from the post-*Batman Begins* lean towards realism in superhero cinema. Instead, it’s indebted to Tim Burton’s *Batman ‘89* and its progeny, with a version of New York City that feels like a giant playset, a sense of being a throwback despite a nominal present day setting, and in the tradition of Jack Nicholson as The Joker, a celebrity villain there to go full ham at every turn. It’s easy to forget the strain of comic movie Hollywood was chasing before grittier films changed the game, but *Spider-Man* scans as a very of a piece with Burton’s batty blockbusters.

But while the early Batman films could be messy, they’re not as disjointed as this first Spider-Man film. Raimi’s 2002 release is basically two movies in one: (1.) Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man and (2.) Spider-Man fights the Green Goblin. The two parts of the plot don’t really have much to do with one another. Peter’s loss of his uncle and the fable that teaches him to follow Ben’s principles are all but disconnected from his later skirmishes with the film’s villain.

Screenwriter David Koepp tries to thread in Peter’s relationships with Mary Jane and Harry Osborn to connect the two halves. But the truth is that Spidey’s arc is basically over at the halfway point of the movie. Everything that comes after is basically a separate adventure. The best you can say for the structure is that it’s a way to capture the episodic nature of the original comic books in miniature.

The only connection between the two is a thematic one. As the film’s voiceover practically beats the audience over the head regarding, the message of *Spider-Man* is that with great power, comes great responsibility. Peter thinks his enhanced abilities are a way to feather his own nest: earn money for cool cars and fancy dates to impress the girl of his dreams. But he sees that when treating bad deeds as “not my problem,” people get hurt, and his burden as a hero is to see to it that no one else has to suffer the same sort of loss. He’s humbled, rather than arrogant, when he levels up.

That contrasts him with Green Goblin, who sees power as something that confers privilege and right, rather than responsibility. Norman’s a good foe for Peter given their contrasts. Rich versus poor. Confident vs. hesitant. But most importantly, someone who sees special abilities as a reason to dominate others versus someone who sees them as a way to help them.

The closest thing to a major throughline between the two parts of the story comes in Peter rejecting Norman as a devilish father figure, because he’s already embracing the angelic one who’s no longer with him. There’s meat in that idea. It’s fueled Spidey stories across mediums for decades. Sadly, though, *Spider-Man* only grazes its potential, rather than fully capitalizes on it.

The other major problem is that the movie is, apart from its broader machinations, a love story that doesn’t really work. The film wants the viewers to invest in Peter’s romance with Mary Jane, without really doing the work to have it make any sense. We never really understand *why* Peter likes M.J., beyond the fact that she’s the pretty girl at school who’s nice to him every now and again. It’s more clear why M.J. would like Peter -- he does the nice guy shtick and cares about her goals and interests. But while Kirsten Dunst does a solid job in the role, the chemistry between them isn’t particularly strong, and Maguire’s stilted performances submerges all boats.

Worse yet, Mary Jane seems...not great as a potential romantic partner? Her two competing love interests here are the one-dimensional jerky jock, Flash Thompson, and Harry Osborn, who’s mostly reduced to being a mumbling douchebag who treats her like a trophy. (Not for nothing, rather than being Peter’s loyal best friend, Harry seems like a prick who steals his good pal’s crush and then hides it.) If you squint, you can read some subtext about the fact that her dad is also an asshole, and like Peter, she comes from a poor family, so there’s psychological reasons why she might gravitate toward wealthy jerks. In the text though, there's not much of a conflict since she seems attracted to self-evidently terrible dudes.

More to the point, she’s a pretty awful girlfriend. While she’s dating (and seemingly committed to) Harry, she flirts with Peter and practically dares him to steal her away, and later makes out with Spider-Man. (Granted, that’s just one guy, but she doesn’t know that.) We’re supposed to think Peter and Mary Jane are destined to be, because that’s the canonical pairing from the comics and dear Aunt May practically decrees it so. But there’s very little in what we see to suggest this would be a healthy or successful relationship. That isn’t the worst thing in the world. Plenty of movies have unconvincing romances. Except that *Spider-Man* hinges a solid portion of the movie on this one.

Still, it gets credit for not going all the way with it. The deftest choice the film makes is to have Peter get the thing he wants, M.J.’s affections, only to decide, in the end, that he can’t accept them, because after what happened to her and his aunt and uncle, he can’t let anyone get close to him lest they become hurt. It speaks to a central truth of the Spider-Man character -- that even when he wins, he loses, to where even good deeds and triumphs end in sacrifices and personal tragedies. Raimi and company get the spirit of the character right, even if the execution on a scene to scene basis is variable at best.

Much of that comes from the fact that *Spider-Man* is downright hokey most of the time. There’s little in the way of lived-in humanity. Instead, everything from costume-building montages to screeches of The Lord’s Prayer to doofy visions of Goblin’s chortling visage trends toward the cornball. The movie succeeds in encompassing the outlandish possibilities of its genre, but very little of it is grounded enough to move you.

And yet, there’s exceptions, little moments that show glimpses of a film more rooted in real emotions and experiences despite the grand ambit of superhero tales. The heartbreaking last exchange between Peter and Uncle Ben, the police officer who tells Spidey to “just go” when he’s supposed to arrest the wall-crawler but sees the good he could do, even Norman’s simple “Oh” before he’s impaled by his glider reflect small injections of humanity in this otherwise up-to-eleven project. Too often, *Spider-Man* goes for big emotions and stumbles amid the melodrama, but has greater success when it aims for smaller moments like these.

The best you can say is that the 2002 *Spider-Man* film is true to the tone of its source material. Most modern day superhero movies are adaptations, efforts that attempt to take a fresh look at these old stories and reshape them to fit modern sensibilities of storytelling and presentation. Raimi, on the other hand, offers more of a translation, something faithful to the big bold conventions and stylistic choices of the comics from which Spidey sprang. The approaches that worked in 1962 don’t necessarily succeed forty years later, let alone sixty. But successful or not, you have to admire the devotion in the attempt, even when the results are more attuned to ink and paint than flesh and blood.
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ColdStream96
7/10  5 years ago
**The Good**:

+ **Sam Raimi's** classic superhero flick has a nostalgic cast; **Tobey Maguire**, **Kirsten Dunst**, **James Franco**, **Willem Dafoe**, **Rosemary Harris** and **J.K. Simmons** all breathe life into their characters
+ Simmons and Dafoe are the particular standouts here - it's difficult to understand how we didn't figure out that Dafoe has been the Green Goblin all this time.
+ It's the now classic retelling of how Peter Parker got his superpowers. Everything moves along at such a brisk pace we barely even get to know the characters properly before they change drastically.
+ The storytelling is classic in its style and feels like a living comic book.
+ From a hilarious first hour with Peter discovering his superpowers, culminating in the touching death of Uncle Ben, we are moved into the splendid superhero territory.
+ The interactions between Spidey and the Goblin are among the finest moments in the movie
+ The script handles Norman Osborn/Green Goblin well, and makes him feel like a real human, even if he is less likeable than Octavius in the sequel.

**The Bad**:

- Released in the middle era between the classic camp superhero movies of the 90s and the modern era mega blockbusters, the first _Spider-Man_ is surprisingly dated by today's standards.
- Having seen Tom Holland play a believable, funny and likeable version of Peter Parker, Maguire feels overly awkward and stiff in his portrayal.
- Maguire and Dunst lack any real chemistry and their scenes together are quite painful to watch.
- None of the primary cast members are particularly believable as high school students, and that bothers me.
- Some of the CGI hasn't aged well.
- _Spider-Man_ features some huge and inventive action scenes, but a couple of them are clumsy and somewhat camp.

**Verdict**:

Sam Raimi's _Spider-Man_ began the new era of superhero movies, but nostalgia has made us forget about the dated action scenes, bland performances and simplistic storytelling.
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Justin Lopez
/10  4 years ago
So many Spiderman movies out there but this will always be the original. Though the other ones have better CGI and maybe action sequences, none can match the plot this one has.
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LoganWright
/10  4 years ago
This is one of the few films that you can watch when you're bored and still be excited about what's going to happen (even though you've watched it over and over already and you've memorized almost all of the lines).
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