Spider-Man 2002

[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.

I grew up watching this movie, it is very nostalgic. I was afraid that I might not enjoy this one so much now, but it still remains a great film. Glad it did!

I really like Tobey, he might not bring to table the most talkative Spidey, but he certainly portrait his essence and Peter’s as well so good. Many people aren’t much into Kirsten Dunst in these movies, I’m not biggest fan too either, but she's decent. Willem Dafoe does a tremendous job, he is scary and put some psychopath facial expressions — and I like his Power Rangers’ villain outfit no matter what everyone says although his helmet doesn’t allow facial expressions. Cliff Robertson does not have a huge time on screen, he brings a great presence though, so wise and nice. “With great power comes great responsibility” are such powerful words.

Uncle Ben’s death is very sad, I could not contain my tears. You can really tell that with this moment and Uncle Ben’s words are what defines and creates Spider-Man and serves as a guideline through his whole career. This movie presents this defining moment in Peter's life in a perfect way.

I liked the action scenes. The CGI is a little bit dated, but is super acceptable. The crew did a great job with Spider-Man suit (amazing) and his stunts and acrobatic moves. Watching him web-swinging through New York is awesome.

The film has a great pacing. Danny Elfman is responsible for the soundtrack, which is simply amazing!

Also, J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson is absolutely gold.