SPIDER-MAN

By: MICHAEL TUNISON
Date: Friday, May 03, 2002

For decades, Spider-Man fans have waited not-so-patiently to see a movie based on their beloved webhead's adventures waited through lawsuits, bankruptcy, endless script development and director switches, until it seemed the project was doomed never to happen. But all that is history now. Director Sam Raimi has accomplished what even the truest of true believers were starting to think they'd never see in their lifetimes: He's brought Spider-Man to the big screen in all his quirky, underdog glory.

Treating the material with loving respect and almost completely avoiding the kind of glib, self-spoofing humor that turned the latter part of the BATMAN film series into an extended codpiece joke, the onetime EVIL DEAD helmer Raimi not only delivers an exciting, enjoyable superhero action flick that works on its own terms, he delivers the Spidey readers have come to love in the 40 years since writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko dreamed him up for the pages of AMAZING FANTASY #15. The resulting film stands alongside Richard Donner's 1978 SUPERMAN and Tim Burton's two BATMAN installments as one of the few live-action screen efforts to fully capture the wonder and rousing power of the comic book costumed-crusader genre at its best.

While the cutting-edge visual wizardry that allows the wall-crawler to swing effortlessly across the Manhattan skyline and spring from place to place as dexterously as his namesake is clearly one of the film's major attractions indeed, not since Christopher Reeve first took flight in the blue and red have the movies provided us with such a fresh and exciting superpower fantasy Raimi's real triumph is that he also conveys so successfully, in a fruitful collaboration with the talented young actor Tobey Maguire, the eternally conflicted man behind the spider mask.

Filmmakers like to spout on about how all the groundbreaking effects in the world can only get you so far without memorable characters, but few actually figure out a way to make viewers connect to the human beings in FX-driven pictures in any kind of meaningful way. Raimi and company have done so here, and the results will delight audiences whether they've read every Spider-Man comic ever written or only remember the character from the catchy '60s animated series theme song.

The basic twists and turns of script, credited to genre top gun David Koepp (PANIC ROOM, JURASSIC PARK) but also bearing the handprints of other writers dating back to when James Cameron was attached to the project, will be familiar to Spidey fans the world over. Loosely adapted from Lee and Ditko's memorable origin story and the famous Gwen Stacy/Green Goblin arc that followed several years later, the film introduces us to science-geek high school senior Peter Parker (Maguire) and the object of his unrequited passion, the popular redhead Mary Jane Parker (Kirsten Dunst). Endlessly picked on by his schoolmates, Peter is already having a fairly hard time coming of age when an encounter with a genetically altered spider during a science class field trip forever changes his destiny. Soon after being bitten by the arachnid, he begins to exhibit the strange spider-like powers even the least comics-knowledgeable human being on the planet must associate with him by now the wall-crawling, the webs, the danger-anticipating "Spider-sense."

Meanwhile, a parallel story follows weapons developer Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), who, under enormous pressure to perfect a "performance enhancer" drug in time to meet a Pentagon deadline, opts to test the formula on himself. The drug seems to have the desired effect of increasing his physical abilities, but unfortunately it also drives Osborn mad, inspiring him to don a gizmo-packed suit of armor his company has recently designed, climb atop a rocket-propelled bat-wing glider and wreak havoc as the Green Goblin. Combine the fact that the newly superpowered Peter is probably the only guy in town who can stop him with the fact that Osborn's son Harry (James Franco) happens to be Peter's best friend, and you know Spider-Man and the Goblin are on the kind of collision course that can only be resolved by high-flying, CGI-animated action set pieces of the most complexly choreographed sort.

Between the origin tale that finds Peter struggling to learn how to use his new powers, the Osborn/Goblin saga, and the love triangle that develops between Peter, Mary Jane and Harry, SPIDER-MAN packs an awful lot of drama into a couple of hours, a fact that has both positive and negative effects in terms of storytelling. On the upside is the breathless pacing that makes the film seem to swoosh by as quickly as the web-swinging hero on his way to stop a crime. Expository information such as a quick refresher on the natural powers of spiders presented during the early science field trip sequence is wedged expertly between moments of character interaction, while a montage covering the newly costumed Spider-Man's rise to misunderstood infamy in New York shoots by in a couple of minutes of screen time.

At certain points, in fact, things move so fast the film starts to feel a bit hyperactive, especially when we get into the second half and it has hardly paused to catch its breath. Much of this probably has to do with the notorious difficulty of cramming an origin story and a satisfying hero-vs.-villain epic in the same film - especially when the villain, as in this case, isn't directly related to whatever makes the hero become a hero.

The lack of time for anything but the most essential points may also help Spider-fans to sympathize with a major departure from the standard comic mythology the decision to present Peter's wrist-fired webbing as a natural power as opposed to mechanical device he develops to fill out his set of powers. Aside from the implausibility of Peter quickly whipping up such a ground-breaking invention at home one evening always hard to swallow the film's already-packed plotline simply doesn't have time to spare for a sequence devoted to coming up with the web-shooter. Another example of the filmmakers' necessary springloading of the story is the fact that Norman Osborn happens to be conveniently readying the Goblin's miraculous battle armor for final testing as the film begins.

When SPIDER-MAN does

slow down to the equivalent of a brisk crawl up the side of a building, however, Raimi and his actors prove capable of moments with real dramatic punch, such as a couple of moving love scenes between Maguire and Dunst. Maguire's transformation from bespectacled nerd to fierce, resourceful hero is impressive even if a viewer is familiar with the similar arc he traveled in Ang Lee's underappreciated Civil War film RIDE WITH THE DEVIL, in many ways a kind of practice run for this role. The supporting cast is pretty terrific too from Dafoe's scenery-chewing schizo take on the Goblin/Osborn to Dunst's well-grounded, sympathetic Mary Jane and J.K. Simmons' memorable work as that amusingly sour, cigar-munching archetype of a newspaper publisher, J. Jonah Jameson.

Ultimately, it's the strong emotional investment the film invites us to make in Peter, Mary Jane and the rest of the characters, as well as Raimi's careful, non-preachy handling of the origin story's "With great power comes great responsibility" theme, that separates SPIDER-MAN from most effects-driven genre tent pole pictures, including the diverting but far less accomplished 2000 screen version of Marvel's X-MEN. If Marvel fans' reaction to X-MEN was, "Now we're getting somewhere," it's a pleasure to report that, with SPIDER-MAN, we're finally here.

The CG-heavy effects work, overseen by original STAR WARS effects master John Dykstra, effectively pulls off the daunting trick of painting a comic book world occupied by both living, breathing actors and a superhumanly fast spider-person who leaps, rolls in mid-air and weaves across the sky in a crazy dance from web to web. No, the digital version of Spidey isn't exactly realistic there's nothing real or human about what he does when exercising his powers to their fullest. But he sure is Spider-Man, in photo-like (or darn close to it) action on the big screen for the first time.

Hopefully Raimi's success here, coming so soon after Peter Jackson's almost universally acclaimed adaptation of THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, will demonstrate once and for all to Hollywood the importance of picking a director of strong, individualistic vision to cut through the countless distracting forces that tend to hopelessly water down films based on major franchise properties. Indeed, the similarities between the careers of Raimi and Jackson, filmmakers who made their names with low-budget, high-creativity horror films and spent years in independent-spirited cinema before making the jump to major studio work, point to a kind of model resume franchise handlers might want to keep in mind next time they go shopping for a director capable of ingesting a historic series like SPIDER-MAN or LOTR and spitting it back out as something personal enough to have heart, intelligence and a distinctive style.