The best superhero movie yet made.

Rating: 10/10 (3 May 2002)

The trailers for Spider-Man looked impressive. In keeping with some prior disappointments, I tried to keep my expectations low -- telling myself cynically "they always choose the three good minutes for the trailers", and other similar things.
I could not have been more wrong. This IS Spider-Man. Finally, after all these years, the technology is available to do the effects and has met with a director, scriptwriter, and team of actors capable of doing the entire thing justice. The original Superman was good (and Christopher Reeve will always be Superman to me); the Batman movie touched on the essence of the Dark Knight; and the more recent X-Men (to use modern vernacular) kicked ass.
But none of them even APPROACH Spider- Man in terms of making a comic book LIVE -- making it acceptable on the big screen, without sacrificing one iota of what made that comic a classic. Peter Parker -- stammering, graceless geek -- appears onscreen in the first few minutes. And he's exactly what we knew he used to be. True, the radioactive spider which gave the original Spider-Man his powers is switched for an updated, genetically-engineered spider. But everything else is perfect.
The movie takes us through ALL the essentials of what made Peter the hero he is, and somehow does it WITHOUT feeling rushed. The tragedy of his Uncle Ben's death, the angst surrounding his failure to act at a critical moment, his inability to act in private life while almost indecently extroverted as Spider-Man, the origin of the Green Goblin, the conflict of superheroic power with protecting those you love... it's all there, and not one bit of it skimped.
The Green Goblin's updated look is excellent -- frightening and creepy. One of the true triumphs of the movie is the movement and combat; no prior attempt at Spider-Man, even the animated ones, has managed to capture the smooth, impossible, sometimes alien movements of the Web-Slinger, but here they're not just attempted, but pulled off with a virtuoso flair that makes it look easy. The fight scenes work -- and this is no small thing, when you're dealing with people who are doing impossible things to begin with. Finally, they somehow manage to make the classic Spider-Man costume look GOOD on-screen, even though one would have thought that there's no way it could avoid looking hokey.
Laying aside the effects (and that's hard to do, when they're as amazing as the ones here), the other critical part of Spider-Man is the people. We have to believe in these people as being real, no matter how ludicrous the situations are... and we do. Tobey Maguire and William Dafoe put on stellar performances, Maguire as Parker and Dafoe as the tormented Norman Osborne. The rest of the cast don't fail the main actors -- it's hard to tell whether they measure up to the standard the other two set simply because no one else, even Kirsten Dunst as Mary-Jane Watson, is really given a role that challenges their abilities as much. It's not easy to make a raving lunatic supervillain convincing, but Dafoe manages that difficult feat, just as Maguire makes us believe both sides of Peter Parker.
If you've EVER enjoyed superheroes at all, do NOT miss this movie.