Real actors and sets vs. CGI...

Rating: 4/10 (2 July 2002)

I had kind of high expectations of this movie, and after I saw it, I couldn't stop being puzzled by the poor way computer graphics were used in the film. Yes, a lot of the scenes in the film required some kind of special effects-use (and some actually required the entire shot to be CGI), but to this degree? I don't think so. Just about ALL of the scenes including Spider-Man (as Spider-Man, not Peter Parker) were CGI. And that's OK, I guess, but ONLY if it looks real! By using some sort of mix between using the actor on a blue-screen and CGI, in stead of ONLY using CGI, I think the results would have been much better.
If I had brought a pen and some paper with me, I'm pretty sure I could have spotted at least 80-90% of the scenes\shots where computer graphics were used. In particular, I'd like to mention the scene (SMALL SPOILER AHEAD!!!) just after Peter Parker discovers his new "gift". He's running and jumping from roof to roof, and in that entire sequence, there's no Tobey Maguire on screen. It's all CGI, and it's all too visible. The point of CGI (in my opinion) is to help make a scene more interesting and dramatic to tell the story better, but in order to do so, the CGI-usage must be believable. There were a few times, as I watched the movie, where I thought that this should be in a computer game, not in a film. Altogether, the bad CGI in this movie ruined the experience for me. In a computer game, you can get away with it. But not on the big-screen.