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SPIDER-MAN
Rating:  ½
USA. 2002.
Director – Sam Raimi, Screenplay – David Koepp, Based on the Comic Book Created by Steve Ditko & Stan Lee, Producers – Ian Bryce & Laura Ziskin, Photography – Don Burgess, Music – Danny Elfman, Visual Effects Supervisor – John Dykstra, Visual Effects – Sony Pictures Imageworks (Supervisor – Karen Goulekas), Additional Visual Effects – Digiscope (Supervisor – Brad Kuehn) & Pixel Magic, Special Effects Supervisor – John Frazier, Production Design – Neil Spisak, Costume/Mask Design – John David Ridge, Additional Costume/Mask Design – Amalgamated Dynamics (Supervisors – Alec Gillis & Tom Woodruff Jr). Production Company – Marvel Enterprises/Laura Ziskin.
Cast:
Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker/Spider-Man), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), Willem Dafoe (Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin), James Franco (Harry Osborn), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May), Cliff Robertson (Ben Parker), J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson), Joe Maganiello (Flash Thompson)
Plot: Teenager Peter Parker is a constantly bullied nerd and lives with an unrequited love for his next-door-neighbour Mary Jane Watson. One day on a class tour of the research laboratories at Columbia University, Peter is bitten by a genetically engineered spider. He undergoes a strange transformation to find that he now has extraordinary strength and agility and the spider-like abilities to fire webbing from his wrists and climb walls. After his Uncle Ben is killed by a car-jacker, Peter dons a blue and red costume and mask and takes to fighting crime as Spider-Man. He is able to photograph his activities and sells these to newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson, although Jameson willfully prints headlines portraying Spider-Man as a freak and criminal. At the same time, billionaire industrialist Norman Osborn, the father of Peter’s best friend Harry, under pressure to develop a power suit for a military contract, injects himself with an experimental fluid and emerges with strange powers. His mind fractured, Osborn adopts green armour and goes on an orgy of devastation where he is nicknamed The Green Goblin by Jameson. Realizing that Spider-Man is the only one who can destroy him, Osborn sets out to destroy Peter.
Spider-Man is unquestionably the most famous of all Marvel Comics superheroes. Spider-Man first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 in August 1962, created by artist Steve Ditko and written by Stan Lee, the editor responsible for the crafting of the Marvel style and the creation of most of their superheroic pantheon. Though Spider-Man only appeared in one of several stories in that particular issue, the reader response was overwhelming and the character was soon spun off into his comic-book, The Amazing Spiderman. And within only a matter of years Spider-Man had become Marvel’s most popular character and was being published in at least four simultaneous lines of titles, as well as being spunoff in various animated tv series, children’s shows, records and toy lines.
Spider-Man followed the dictum that Stan Lee demanded of all his superheroes – that they be superheroes who faced real world problems. Spider-Man’s world-shattering battles with the Green Goblin and Dr Octopus would be beset by a cold, Aunt May’s health problems or having to meet an essay deadline the next day at school. In the very first story we met Spider-Man, an episode faithfully recreated in the film here, he exhibits disinterest in helping apprehend a petty hood, only for the same hood to then kill his Uncle Ben. It was this emphasis on flawed heroes that made Marvel Comics regarded as often more mature than their nearest rival DC’s superhero lineup.
Spider-Man has often been in the eye of the media, with at least three different animated tv series made at various points between the 1960s and 1990s. Spider-Man even appeared as a live-action character in the children’s educational tv series The Electric Company between 1974 and 1977, played by Danny Seagren. The character was incarnated in a live-action tv series, The Amazing Spiderman, that lasted for one season (1977-8). The Amazing Spiderman series was clearly trying to capitalize on the popularity of various superhero tv series of the era – The Six Million Dollar Man (1973-8) and Wonder Woman/The New Adventures of Wonder Woman (1975-9). There Spider-Man was played by Nicholas Hammond in a series of drearily dull adventures fighting against various petty hoods – but never any super-villains – in routine crime dramas. Audiences outside the United States had the pilot episode served up to them in theatres, Spider-Man (1977), and then had to endure two further cinematic releases, Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) and Spiderman and the Dragon’s Challenge (1980), recut from episodes of the tv series.
Ever since the tv series, Spider-Man has been tossed around as a big-budget cinematic feature. It was taken up as a property by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, who had purchased Marvel Comics as a subsidiary. (Corman and New World also produced a low-budget version of Marvel’s The Fantastic Four, which still remains unreleased because of legal complexities concerning the long-planned big-budget Fantastic Four [2005]). The rights passed back and forward between New World and Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus’s Cannon Films, producers of a lot of tawdry Chuck Norris action films and one very cheap comic-book superhero adaptation, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987). Various directors had been attached to the project – everybody from Tobe Hooper of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) fame to Joseph Zito, director of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) and Stephen Herek (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). A longtime contender for the project was low-budget sf-action director Albert Pyun, director of Cyborg (1989) and Nemesis (1993) and the thoroughly miserable comic-book superhero adaptation of Captain America (1990). The most interesting name attached was that of James Cameron, director of The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986) and Titanic (1997) who was a childhood fan of the comics and expressed a longtime desire to do the Spider-Man film for much of the 1990s, but eventually found the project wound up in too much legal red tape between the various copyright holders to clear the rights.
But then come the new millennium and suddenly there came a slate of Marvel Comics films adaptations first with Blade (1998) and then Bryan Singer’s dynamic, highly successful adaptation of Marvel’s X-Men (2000). The success of X-Men brought interested parties out of the woodwork and willing to resolve their differences. Suddenly the Spider-Man project was go. The twin successes of X-Men and Spider-Man was soon followed by a whole host of other Marvel Comics adaptations, including Daredevil (2003), Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), The Punisher (2004), Elektra (2005), Fantastic Four (2005), Man-Thing (2005), Ghost Rider (2007) and Iron Man (2008), as well as a good many other Marvel projects waiting in the wings. (Fingers crossed maybe someone will even revive The Silver Surfer project that was announced way back in 1980, supposedly to be starring Olivia Newton-John!!!).
Enter Sam Raimi, a genre director who first emerged as an unknown two decades with the full tilt, high-energy horror film The Evil Dead (1982) and its hilariously over-the-top sequel, The Evil Dead II (1987). Sam Raimi is clearly a comic-book superhero fan and had previously made the superhero movie Darkman (1990), which consciously drew upon the broodingly Gothic stylistic influences of the modern graphic novel. Furthermore Sam Raimi’s production company, Renaissance Pictures, best known for the enormous successes of tv’s Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994-9) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), have made several televised forays into superherodom, most notably with the series M.A.N.T.I.S. (1994-6) and two direct-to-video Darkman sequels.
Spider-Man was a huge hit upon opening – it in fact outgrossed Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), which only emerged a few weeks after it did. There is a lot of fun to be had in the film. The special effects and stunt people have a field day – Sam Raimi’s camera gets right in there sweeping along with Spider-Man in effortless three-dimensional loops and swoops through the air, leaping from building to building, wrapping around telephone poles and the like. (It’s also nice to see John Dykstra, the original visual effects supervisor on Star Wars (1977), back at work in the industry again after having fallen silent for nearly a decade). Cinematic superheroics have always had a certain problem, at least up until the 1980s, in trying replicate the grandiose superheroism of the feats that take place on the drawn page. Two perfect examples might be The Adventures of Superman tv series (1953-8) and the aforementioned The Amazing Spiderman tv series, both of which create superheroic characters only to fail to create epic enough opponents or battles for them, at most having the characters punch through a wall to apprehend run of the mill criminals. But in terms of cinematic superheroics, Spider-Man certainly doesn’t fall short – things rarely get more epic in scope than the sequence here with the Green Goblin atop a bridge forcing Spider-Man to choose between saving Mary Jane and a falling cable car of innocent people.
But beyond all the exhilarating web-slinging superheroics and lightning paced acrobatics, Spider-Man doesn’t quite work. Perhaps one can make the rather peculiar criticism that Spider-Man is too much of a comic-book of a film. Which, one supposes, is exactly what it sets out to be. But all the great examples comic-book superheroes on film – Superman (1978), Superman II (1980), Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), The Crow (1994), X-Men – work because they are more than superhero films, they engage with something beyond the comic-book. This is usually the advantage that film can bring, namely to insert real people into the costumes – be it the earnest boyscout sincerity of Christopher Reeve in the Superman films, the urgent driven psychological complexities of the Batman movies or the intensity of Hugh Jackman at the center of X-Men. Spider-Man certainly has the near perfect casting of Tobey Maguire in the title role – Maguire is all gloopy, lost puppy dog cuteness. Neither boyishly handsome nor ruggedly superhuman, he projects just the right sort of gawkish innocence that the part requires. But beyond Tobey Maguire, Spider-Man seems perfunctory. The romance with Kirsten Dunst tries hard – there’s the almost kinky image of Dunst kissing Tobey Maguire with the lower half of his spider mask unveiled as he hangs upside down from a fire escape – but the depths that Raimi invests the film with are only shallow. And after all the buildup, the resolution the romance finally reaches in the last scene is a real wet blanket. David Koepp’s script has made a modicum of effort to invest it all with some of the psychological realism and depth. It is just, one feels, that Sam Raimi’s typical approach gets in the way.
Sam Raimi is an interestingly schizophrenic talent. The Evil Dead was a ferocious splatter film, but his subsequent films – the flop Coen Brothers collaboration Crimewave (1985), The Evil Dead II – became increasingly more cartoonish to the point of the third Evil Dead film, Army of Darkness (1992), which is more comedy than it is ever horror. Even Raimi’s dark and ‘serious’ superhero film, Darkman, is underscored by moments of black humour and bizarrely cartoonish effects. After Army, Raimi left fantasy cinema behind and seemed to be making a concerted effort to become a ‘serious’ filmmaker with the Western The Quick and the Dead (1995), the excellent thriller A Simple Plan (1998) – still his best film, and the increasingly banal likes of the Kevin Costner baseball drama For the Love of the Game (1999) and the clairvoyant thriller The Gift (2000). Certainly by the time of For the Love of the Game and The Gift, Sam Raimi’s films had become so boringly respectable and so clearly intended for the Middle American Academy Awards voter crowds, that it was high time that Raimi needed to revisit his genre roots and rediscover what it was that made the Evil Dead films work again.
And that is exactly what Raimi does in Spider-Man – sort of. Raimi has the greatest fun with the acrobatics, fight scenes and the camera-leaps through the Manhattan skies. Unfortunately Spider-Man really needed to be more than that and when it comes to the psychological depth, Raimi just inserts mawkishly simplistic emotional cues – Aunt May saying her prayers just before the Green Goblin bursts in, the good passers-by on the bridge booing and pelting the Green Goblin, the winsome earnestness of the romantic scenes and so on. David Koepp’s script sets up a complex tangle of romantic interests and jealousies between Peter, Spider-Man, Mary Jane, Osborn and Osborn’s son, but rather than an attempt to render psychological depth to the various characters, as say the psychologically interwoven complexity of the relationship between Batman and The Joker in the 1989 Batman, it just seems contrived around the level of Melrose Place (1992-9)-type melodrama.
As in Darkman, which tried to mimic Batman’s dark psychology, Sam Raimi tends to insert ludicrously melodramatic effect in lieu of psychological motivation. This is no better demonstrated than when it comes to The Green Goblin. Rather than take the character down to its psychological roots and discover the things that drives him, all that Raimi does is resort to extraordinarily corny devices to demonstrate the Goblin’s psychological split such as having good and bad Willem Dafoe’s arguing with themselves in a mirror or he talking to a green mask sitting on a chair. Stripped of psychological complexity and depth, all that the Goblin consists of is a stuntman in a green suit and an overacting Dafoe.
Raimi himself seems not unlike his characterization of the Green Goblin – as a character who is split between two people, one being a lunatic who loves splatter and cartoons and has the greatest of glee contriving slapstick scenes and macabre jokes, and the other a boy who makes films like A Simple Plan and For the Love of the Game, who believes in decent ordinariness and who wants most earnestly to be accepted by the respectable establishment. Spider-Man’s failings are that Sam Raimi can never quite manage to find a ground that allows him to merge the two extremes. Or rather, that when they do they just merge on the level of mawkish naivete that a children’s film operates on. The trouble with Spider-Man is that it really needed Raimi to have employed some of the winsome earnestness and plaintive honesty that he managed to invest A Simple Plan and The Gift with, rather than feel the need to write it down to a simplistic level while indulging the comic-book side of himself.
In fact one actually wishes that Spider-Man might have been directed by its scriptwriter David Koepp. David Koepp has written a lot of commercial films of recent years, including Jurassic Park (1993), Mission: Impossible (1996) and one other quite good superhero film, The Shadow (1994). But it is as director with his three excellent films so far, the downfall of civilization drama The Trigger Effect (1996), the ghost story Stir of Echoes (1999) and Secret Window (2004), that Koepp demonstrated he was a director of considerable finesse. If only they had employed David Koepp rather than Sam Raimi, Spider-Man might have emerged as a genuine classic.
Sam Raimi and most of the cast (but not David Koepp) returned with two infinitely superior sequels Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), both of which were everything that this film should have been. Spider-Man was pariodied in Superhero Movie (2008).
(Winner for Most Overrated Film, Nominee for Best Actor (Tobey Maguire) and Best Special Effects at this site’s Best of 2002 Awards. No. 1 on the SF, Horror & Fantasy Box-Office Top 10 of 2002 list).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2002
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