Spider-Man – Review

The first venture into the world of Spider-Man was a total success. Putting together a great director with a solid script and good casting created a wonderful atmosphere and a very entertaining film.

As doofball high school kid Peter Parker (Maguire) opens with narration on his tale of being an average kid who is totally into his next-door neighbor Mary Jane Watson (Dunst). As he is a social outcast and general butt of all jokes, as well as bullying focal point, he doesn’t feel too special. Hell, he can’t even catch the school bus on time.

Meanwhile, his actual friend Harry Osborn (Franco) pulls up in a Rolls Royce with his father Norman (Dafoe), owner of Oscorp. Norman is something of a scientist, into nanotechnology. The class hits a field trip to Columbia University’s Genetic Research Facility. The current experiment? Genetic super spiders, and one of them is missing. Hm.

Other than what appear to be 30-year-olds playing high school students at times, I do quite like the casting. The film moves at a decent pace and came out at a time where many superhero movies had longer and slower developing origins. This is not a complaint, but the film does not dive head first into Spider-Man action and instead chooses to develop most surrounding characters, and emotional motivations as it goes.

This creates a nice heft as it really gets going in the second half, and a strong ending. Spider-Man plays as a classic superhero film, and if seen as formulaic that is only because it helped cook the formula itself, and many movies later looked to it. This film also uses plenty of comic book elements and is a nice representation overall, even if there are plenty of changes to Peter and his crime fighting alter ego.

Spider-Man still plays well today despite being superseded by newer iterations. It is good that Spider-Man’s organic web does not fire out like a real spider’s would, as that would have increased the rating. Come for the web-slinging, stay for the pumpkin bombs.

“That creep is my father, alright. If I am lucky, I’ll become half of what he is.”