Does not live up to hype

Rating: 4/10 (16 May 2002)

Rarely does a movie do so poorly and get the acclaim that Spiderman has gotten. I can point out obvious flaws which have gone seemingly unnoticed. First of all I'd like to say that I like the Spiderman comic series, but I'm not a purist, it doesn't bother me at all that the web-slinger is biological instead of mechanical like in the comicbook. The first flaw is that it's incredibly poorly directed, even by cult-classic Sam Raimi standards. I've only seen the movie once and I noticed several continuity errors and at least two shots of the boom mic. In addition, it seems like Raimi just chose camera angles at random from a preset list, the only exception being for the swooping scenes. The acting was a bit over the top, which is acceptable because they portray comic book characters, which are necessarily melodramatic. The plot however was exceedlingly fast, and for all the discussion that this movie does really good with the Peter Parker Mary-Jane Watson relationship, I felt it was simplistic to the extreme. One last point, this movie has a couple of scenes which should clearly reveal Spidey's true identity, such as the cafeteria scene. Yet for some reason no one in the school, including Mary Jane thinks he's spiderman, until the very end of the movie. My question here is why in the world the writers would craft scenes which deliberatley make otherwise intelligent people appear as morons. The answer I feel is that the makers of this movie just wanted to make a movie about spiderman because they thought it was a cool story. Their treatment of it, however, left much to be desired in the category of quality assurance. This movie suffers from bad writing, mediocre acting (the exception in my opinion is the stellar performance by Kirsten Dunst), horrible direction, and a general lack of quality.
Yet I still liked this movie, because as I said, I like the story of Spiderman, and this movie does relate the story very fast and fairly accurately.