A mostly successful throwback

Rating: Null/10 (12 November 2002)

At first it looks as though the title sequence lets us know what we're in for: the kind of hyperkinetic visual display you'd expect from a fourteen-year-old boy who'd just been handed a cheap (but nonetheless overpriced) computer animation program and who was determined to use every misbegotten one of its features at once. I thought I was watching the end result of an arms race in which studios vied to combine maximum glossiness with minimum creativity.
Not at all, as it turns out. "Spider-Man" is the kind of fantasy we haven't seen since the 1980s: sweet, sincere, straightforward, and thrilling  or at least, if and when it fails to be thrilling, it at least makes an honest attempt.
The movie works even though Raimi gets more wrong than he gets right. The main problem is that there's little real zing. But in addition: the dialogue is often awful, too many characters (the aunt in particular) are under-written, under-described clichés, and the montage Raimi throws at us as Peter Parker comes up with his spider suit design is just too goofy for words. What's more, when we get within fifteen minutes of the end it becomes clear that everyone stopped paying attention to the movie they were making and started thinking about the money to be made from a sequel. I won't say what happens Okay, I WILL say what happens, so stop reading if you must. Peter gives up Mary Jane  fails to tell her identity even though the entire narrative is structured around, is crying out for the moment in which she finds out - for no better reason than to facilitate a sequel. (Thus the most likable character in the film, on whom so much time had been spent, is given nothing to do, no real role to play in the story.) The misunderstanding over the identity of Norman Osborn's killer has been crudely pasted into the film for much the same reason. Is there any reason why Harry had to happen to see Spider-Man standing over his father's body, and then jump to an obviously wrong conclusion? None whatever, but it DOES provide him with a sudden overpowering "motivation" which will, alas, result in all manner of tedious plot complications in the sequel, perhaps even  who knows?  the sequel's sequel.
The final image, by the way, is every bit as bad as the opening ones. It just goes to show that nobody has ever made a movie better by including a shot of the American flag, in any context whatever.
But don't forget what I said earlier, about this being a sweet, sincere, simple  and for the most part competent  fantasy. Kirsten Dunst is charming.