Spider-Man

[Ditchy McAbandonpants]

jekylljuice: Wow...you know what, the more I look at Mr. Century, the more I become convinced that Paul Newman might actually work. And hey, from my point of view, it's bound to be better than Spider-Man 3, eh? If you want to see a fairly damning (not to mention incredibly foul-mouthed) analysis of Turny D, check out this profile of him. Amusing pictures abound!


Also, I just finished rewatching Spider-Man like I said I was going to...I'm not going to pretend that it's not a flawed movie, but my lord, I can't get over how badly I think this film mops the floor with its sequels. The first hour or so in particular, where the film is dealing with Peter's transformation into Spider-Man, is just a joyful, innocent and satisfying ride that channels, if not the exact details, then definitely the honest and relatable spirit of the old comics that I loved, grounded by a sweetly likable Tobey Maguire and pleasant support work from Kirsten Dunst and James Franco, as well as Rosemary Harris and Cliff Robertson. David Koepp's script keeps things moving at a pretty brisk pace, but it hits all the right emotional beats along the way, and he sells the characters with his straightforward and lighthearted yet believable dialogue; Raimi does his part with good, sensible direction punctuated by some stylish flourishes (the costume design sequence is so much fun) and slick action scenes, despite the rubbery CG.

Most of the flaws of this film arise in the second half; once Peter has become Spider-Man, the momentum of the origin story itself runs out, and the film seems to struggle to replace it with anything. Willem Dafoe is thoroughly brilliant as Norman Osborn, throwing himself whole-heartedly into the cackling Goblin persona yet also really selling him as a friendly mentor and as a callous, conflicted father, but in his role as the movie's villain, he's a little weak. The unthreatening costume doesn't help, but worse than that the film seems to have trouble establishing and justifying his conflict with Spider-Man, meaning their battles some off as somewhat forced and unclear in terms of narrative purpose and significance. Maybe to compensate, the film starts ratcheting up the corn, with certain scenes and lines starting to stretch credibilty too far, notably Peter and MJ's conversations in the hospital and the graveyard, and of course the ridiculous "New Yorkers beat the Goblin by throwing trash at him" scene.

Despite those problems though, this remains a film that I really like, and I just cannot get my head around the fact that the same creative team could have produced sequels that I hated so much. The obvious answer is the one area that saw a significant personnel change between this and 2 and 3: writing, with the replacement of the very accomplished blockbuster writer David Koepp with Alvin Sargent, a man who, despite having won two Oscars, to me honestly seems like someone who doesn't know how to structure a scene or invest it with any sense of purpose, or how to put a together a logically flowing story, or indeed even have a clue what human beings sound like (interestingly, I hear he did an uncredited rewrite on the first film, which might explain those problematic Pete/MJ conversations that I referred to earlier). Still, that doesn't explain why Raimi's ability to structure and pace went out of the window as well as his ability to shoot action coherently (I'm sorry, but the famous Spider-Man 2 train sequence gave me a headache), or why the likes of Maguire, Franco, Dunst and Harris suddenly became so awful...

Ugh, sorry, I'm getting sucked back in to that negative mindset again, and I don't want to do that; what I wanted to do was remind people that Spider-Man, even though people have started to overlook it somewhat, remains a great movie, a bright, fun and lovingly-crafted superhero movie, and a worthy treatment of our Spidey.