Spider-Man, after a long bout of legal red tape, has finally made it to the screen. So how is the movie? Pretty good, actually, so you should go see it. Thanks for your time.
What, I need to post more for a review? Okay, fine, here are the details. The main character is Peter Parker [an excellent turn by Tobey Maguire], a nerdy high school student living in New York. One day his science class takes a field trip to a gonzo research facility where someone got the bright idea to breed up genetically altered "super spiders." Thanks to better living through movie science and sloppy handling procedures a spider gets loose and bites poor Parker, infusing him with it's re-jiggered genetic code. Trouble ensues.
Credit must be given to the directing job Sam Raimi does. Raimi's never met a cheap special effect he didn't like and he's not shy about using untraditional, sometimes downright odd, camera tricks and bucking cinematic tradition in order to tell a story. But while Raimi is a creative director he's also, thankfully, improved over the years. A lot of his early success with such films as the Evil Dead movies could be traced to a few clever shots and the swaggering, silly performance of Bruce Campbell. But with Spider-Man Raimi has managed to meld his boisterous side with the story-telling ability he has shown in movies such as A Simple Plan to make a movie that's full of wild visuals but still remembers to spend time developing the characters.
A person can be defined by the company they keep, and Parker has quite the motley crew surrounding him. What's interesting about the movie is that none of the main characters are particularly happy and are, in their own ways, almost as miserable as Parker. Aunt May [Rosemary Harris], Parker's guardian, misses Ben Parker and frets over Peter while his buddy Harry Osborn [James Franco] can't seem to do anything that works out right or that will win the approval of his father Norman [Willem Dafoe.] Mary Jane Watson [Kirsten Dunst], the girl next door Parker's been quietly in love with for most of his life, comes from an abusive home, her dreams of acting -or just getting out of her working class life- aren't going anywhere and she's almost more alone in the world than Parker is. But because she's young, cute, and female her problems and her attempts to resolve them [failed auditions, dating a string of losers, what have you] aren't as visually dramatic as Parker's burden. Not being bitten by a scientifically charged spider also keeps her from bursting out in quite the same manner as Parker does, which also means she gets stuck having to occasionally get rescued by Spider-Man.
Special note must be given to Willem Dafoe as the elder Osborne and Spider-Man's nemesis Green Goblin. True, his life is life is falling apart and he's becoming progressively more violent and insane, but becoming a super villain loosened the guy up to a remarkable degree. Instead of obsessing about his company to the point that he's distanced himself from his son he's free to put on a green body costume, fly around town, and blow up anything that peturbs him. It must be remarkably liberating in a psychotic megalomaniac sort of way. Thanks to Dafoe's facial expressions he's also one of the few villains who's noticeably creepier without his mask on.
But all the characters in the film are there to help describe and shape Peter Parker. A creation of the bombastic, inviting prose of Stan Lee and the objectivist outlook of Steve Ditko, Peter Parker is unlike any super hero that came before him. Spider-Man's success was due to shifting the emphasis of the story away from super human exploits in order to examine the man underneath the costume. Before he gained his powers Parker was a smart, introverted student living at home who was simply doing his best to get from one day to the next. After getting spider-derived super powers Parker turns into a smart, introverted student living at home who is simply doing his best to get from one day to the next and who occasionally crawls around on buildings and beats up crooks. Peter Parker is the main character and not simply a civilian identity Spider-Man masquerades as. This distinction makes Spider-Man a character that can be related to and sets him apart from the all-powerful Superman or other costumed heroes who seem more like distanced authority figures than anything else.
The other major factor that sets Spider-Man apart is that he's a loser. While it's initially guilt over not preventing the death of his Uncle Ben [Cliff Robertson] that drives Parker to take up his crusade as Spider-Man he soon takes the idea that "with great power comes great responsibility" to heart and decides that he must fight the good fight as Spider-Man for no other reason than that he has the ability to. When Parker first gets a whiff of his power he, like any good adolescent, thinks his worries are over. It doesn't take long for him to realize that with his new abilities comes a whole new world of obligations and problems he never dreamed of. Instead of the liberating anarchy Green Goblin embraces Parker has to deal with the double burden of both becoming an adult and saving New York. An example of the quandary Spider-Man lives in: Parker gets a job selling pictures of himself in costume to a grumpy newspaper publisher [J. Jonah Jameson played by J.K. Simmons] who figures he can sell more papers by running a smear campaign against Spider-Man. The only way Parker can make ends meet is by participating in the public denouncement of himself. Parker realizes he is doomed to remain miserable but it's his struggle to keep going in spite of the consequences that makes him a hero and it's this drive that the Spider-Man movie captures so well. Get out there and lose Spider-Man! Lose for us all!
Drop me a line at gleep9@hotmail.com if you want to discuss the finer aspects of wall crawling, where Spider-Man got that keen costume from, or how good Kirsten Dunst looks wet. Swing on out of here to either the Third Movie or Main page.