We all must have some latent sixth sense to warn us of approaching danger, but evolution and civilization have dulled our ability to heed that sense to much advantage beyond giving a wide berth to rabid dogs and creepy strangers.
This gift, realized and refined through trial and error, may account for the lasting appeal of the Amazing Spider-Man, a comic-book character whose earliest exploits helped save an underdog New York publisher from bankruptcy and gave the culture a fresh standard for superhuman mythology.
As long and as well as Spider-Man has fared in the funnybook realm, he has until now translated poorly to moving pictures. An animated-cartoon series for television in 1967, a live-action network-TV hitch during the ’70s and other attempts have recaptured the letter of the source — a mild-mannered civilian, pursuing a secret life as a costumed world-beater — without nailing much of the adventurous spirit.
Count on Sam Raimi — himself an adventure-seeking talent within the popular culture — to deliver a Spider-Man movie that recaptures the wonder of those first-generation comics. This Spider-Man places advanced digital trickery, good old-fashioned stunt-man action and capable non-celebrity acting at the service of a story that plays out like some Stan Lee-Steve Ditko yarn sprung vividly to life. (Credit where due: Writer Lee and artist Ditko defined the original Spider-Man so thoroughly well that today, two generations later, they remain a difficult act to follow. The writing and the art may have become more sophisticated under Lee & Ditko’s successors, but the creators’ enthusiasm remains unsurpassed; you could look up the reprints at any well-equipped bookstore.)
Spider-Man is the tale of Peter Parker (played by Tobey Maguire, of 1999’s The Cider House Rules), an orphaned high-schooler who serves his teachers as a timid model student and his classmates as an object of ridicule and bullying. Parker longs for glamour and romance, but the closest he comes to excitement is the occasional field trip to check out the latest advances in high-tech nerdism. While visiting an expo whose main attraction is a display of genetically altered spiders, Parker suffers a bite from one of the creatures. He finds himself transformed as a consequence, gaining such attributes as strength, agility and a heightened ability to smell trouble brewing.
Now, such impossible transformations are business as usual within the realm of more-than-human fantasy, from Achilles to H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man to the comics’ own Captain Marvel and the Flash. The Spider-Man myth raises the ante by rendering Peter Parker at once unbeatably strong and utterly flabbergasted. Director Raimi, even in his grimmer horror films, has long indulged in comedy as a necessary complement to the terrors at large, and he taps Parker’s disorientation to amusing effect. An uproarious slugfest with the school’s No. 1 thug finally puts Parker wise to his newfound powers, and the kid’s attempts to equip himself with a spider-like web-spinning device accounts for plenty of slapstick hilarity.
A super-hero is useless without a dark opposite number — even Superman needs a Lex Luthor to keep him on guard — and so Spider-Man requires that one Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) subject himself to a fantastic process that is supposed to morph ordinary guys into super-soldiers for Uncle Sam. Osborn is changed instead into an ill-tempered powerhouse so deranged that he rechristens himself the Green Goblin. The identity would be laughable if the villain were not so vicious, his deeds so patently the work of a madman.
The extravagant aspect of the Green Goblin is as close as Raimi lets Spider-Man come to the sin of "cartooning the cartoon," as the critic-historian Larry Swindell has termed the big failure of most comics-on-film projects. Each key character resembles his funnybook model closely enough, but unlike the more recent Batman movies the new film stylizes its own reality to accept these beings as though they might really exist. Just as a well-conceived comic book "looks real" to the absorbed reader, Raimi’s Spider-Man lulls the viewer into that crucial suspension of disbelief by believing in its own fantasy enough to respect it. The colors are vivid but never garish, the panoramic sound effects emphatic but never cartoonish. The many coincidences of plot are outlandish but never as forcible as, say, the coincidences that pile up around Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Marc Forster’s otherwise lifelike Monster’s Ball (2001).
It is an easy task to reconstruct a super-hero costume in fabric, but quite another to keep the result from looking either too stiff or too baggy when worn. The Spider-Man suit fits Tobey Maguire like the proverbial second skin, and he (and key stuntman Zach Hudson) wear the right attitude to match. Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin get-up is appropriately scary, suggesting one of H.P. Lovecraft’s pulp-fiction monstrosities or even H.R. Giger’s conceptual sketches for 1979’s Alien. Call it Lovecraft on a hovercraft, and you won’t be far from wrong. Dafoe plays Osborne as a bewildered good man, struggling against an alter-ego that taunts him like some evil anti-conscience.
Raimi and screenwriter David Koepp honor, as well, the soap-operatic sub-plotting that distinguished Stan Lee’s earlier comic-book scripts from the fun-and-games super-hero yarns of the wealthier publishers. It was here that Lee’s company earned the right to call itself Marvel Comics. Fans of the early ’60s responded as favorably to the overbearing kind-heartedness of Peter Parker’s doting aunt and uncle (played here by Rosemary Harris and Cliff Robertson) as they did to Spider-Man’s clashes with one costumed miscreant after another.
Parker’s various dodgy infatuations have been telescoped for the movie into one vivacious leading lady, played with gumption and tenderness by Kirsten Dunst. Spider-Man’s chief annoyance, a crusading blowhard of a newspaper publisher, is played with blustery gusto by J.K. Simmons, another Cider House alumnus. The New York setting allows for a moving allegorical reference to the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.
Such caricatured but identifiably soulful elements justify a two-hour running time by building within the audience a patient anticipation for the dazzling action scenes. What makes special effects genuinely special in an age of computer-generated visual overkill is a film’s willingness to deploy the gee-whiz business sparingly.
Sam Raimi has committed more than his share of generous overkill, most notably in the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness trilogy of 1983-1993. But he also has demonstrated an understanding of commonplace loyalties and fallibilities in such gems as A Simple Plan and For Love of the Game (1998-1999), and his technical expertise has grown with each new assignment. These gifts combine to memorable effect in Spider-Man, which works as well on an emotional scale as on a measurement of thrills — and stands with the 1978 Superman and 1991’s The Rocketeer as an exemplary comics-into-film adaptation.