‘With great power comes great responsibility…’
Now that the dust has settled and the Marvel Cinematic Universe finally appears to be loosening its stranglehold on the world of cinema, there can be no doubting that those movies have been bad for the world of film. Their monopolisation of movie theatres has pushed original intellectual property to the side lines. The odd thing is that they started out great. Christopher Nolan (Batman), Sam Raimi (Spider-Man) and to a lesser extent Bryan Singer (X-Men) are all singular filmmakers, auteurs with something real to say, and the comic book adaptations that they made were genuinely fantastic cinema. Spider-Man kicked off a trilogy that contained two of the greatest comic book adaptations ever made. Starting with…
Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is a high school nerd who lives in the shadow of his rich best friend Harry Osborn (James Franco) and pines after his next door neighbour MJ Watson (Kirsten Dunst). After being bitten by a radioactive spider, Parker develops strange powers, powers that he will need now that New York City is under attack from a malevolent lunatic christened the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) by the local press.
It’s been a while since I last saw Spider-Man, but it was certainly a massive film during my adolescence. Returning to it now was like reuniting with an old friend after many years away. I’d forgotten how good this film can be. Whilst the CGI looks a little creaky now, the product placement a little too on-the-nose, on the whole this is still the great movie that it was back in 2002. Raimi does an incredible job in imbuing the action sequences with stakes and tension, something that the MCU has struggled with massively since those halcyon days. The whole thing is less polished and safe than what Marvel films have since become. This doesn’t feel like filmmaking by committee. The fact that all of the central cast, Maguire, Franco and Dunst, have continually gone on to choose unpredictable and challenging roles is a testament to the level of talent that Raimi assembled for this film, and it only makes repeated viewings more rewarding in retrospect. Elsewhere, Dafoe’s Green Goblin remains one of the greatest comic book villains of all time, and we are also treated to the introduction of J.K Simmons’ hilarious take on J. Jonah Jameson – a performance so good that he was asked back again for the inferior Andrew Garfield iteration of Spider-Man.
Ultimately, this shouldn’t be a review about what the MCU isn’t, but about what this film is. And it is a franchise starter, of course. But it’s also a lovingly crafted, slam-dunk of a movie that literally changed the cinematic landscape forever. Sure, it birthed a monster, but boy, what a truly wonderful piece of filmmaking Spider-Man is.