Spider-Man the movie

I’m a Amazing Spider-Man reader from way back, so I wanted to like this movie even more than I ended up liking it walking out of the theater, which is itself more than I think I like it as I am sitting here at home writing this now. Spider-Man is the ultimate Hollywood comic book blockbuster. As such, it has all the virtues and limitations of the comic book form. It’s young, flashy, colorful, dynamic, sweet as cotton candy, corny, seriously silly, horrifyingly temporary, and two-dimensional.

It’s barely had time to break all box office records for opening weekend and already Sony Pictures is announcing a sequel (tentatively slated for May 7, 2004). Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst have confirmed they will be back for Spider-Man 2. Can you say franchise?

Spider-Man is the purest translation of a story from comic book to motion picture yet. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if this is a good thing or bad thing. Spider-Man is pretty much as advertised and little more. Once you’ve seen the trailers and TV ads, you’ve pretty much seen all there is to see in the movie. I tell you this not to dissuade you from seeing the movie, but just to put you in the right frame of mind.

I enjoyed this movie, though I can’t really recommend it to anyone not devoted enough to have been reading Spider-Man comics since sometime in the late 70’s. The movie is dead-on in terms of the tone of early Spider-Man comics, although it does take some liberties with chronologies and some relatively minor story details*

The film’s performances are surprisingly good, particularly Willam Dafoe as Norman Osbourne/The Green Goblin. Maguire and Dunst manage to inject a little life into a lot of fairly stale dialogue. The movie is least effective when Spiderman and/or the Green Goblin are on camera in full costume—heavily edited, effects-heavy action scenes that are glaringly stagy.

The film is weighted with all the required comic book adaptation baggage: telling the three requisite stories—origin and the superhero, origin of the super villain, and the always corny romantic subplot, which leaves precious little time before the expensive, special effects-laden confrontations between good and evil.

Director Sam Raimi has a gift for pleasantly superficial filmmaking: the slapstick horror of the “Evil Dead” trilogy, the muddled imitation pulp fiction of Darkman, the revisionist Western The Quick and the Dead, the faux film noir of A Simple Plan, Raimi makes kinetic films that are very watchable, very entertaining, and very forgettable. Spider-Man continues is another of the sort of movie Raimi does best, style over substance, attitude over subtlety.

Unlike earlier Hollywood forays into comicbookness with DC Comic’s Superman and Batman characters, Marvel Comic’s Spiderman features a hero and love interest who are teenagers at the story’s inception, rather than middle-agers like Clark Kent/Superman/Lois Lane and Bruce Wayne/Batman/Vicki Vale, so it’s likely they can dash off three or four Spider-Man films before Tobey and Kirsten hit 40 and no longer look like comic book characters.

Spider-Man is a mild entertainment that has made tons of money, in part due to an over-the-top marketing campaign which currently has a picture of Spider-Man slapped on to almost everything available for sale in the United States. Overall, it’s a pretty good movie, and a better adaptation than any of the Batman and Superman films.

--Matt Parks

*The most obvious example is the synchronization of the origin of the Green Goblin with Spiderman’s. In the original Amazing Spider-Man, he did not actually appear until issue #14, and did not die until years later. Also of note, the story deletes the character of Gwen Stacy, who was actually Peter love interest in the early years of Amazing Spider-Man. Peter only got together with Mary Jane after the Green Goblin murders Gwen and accidentally kills himself trying to kill Spider-Man.