10 Stars. The best action movie since The Matrix!

Rating: 10/10 (4 May 2002)

I gave this movie ten stars because it is as good as movies like Crouching Tiger or Traffic, in that it captures what it intends to capture. Those stories were brilliantly acted pieces dealing with simple peoples lives and the movies showed those stories extremely well within the style of their own genre. Likewise, this movie captures what the action movie genre is supposed to capture(the audience's attention from start to finish). There is continuous action, but never at the expense of developed characters and good storytelling. These character's depth can be attributed to the script which clearly wants to make this movie have mass appeal, (which, for once is a good thing). What I mean by this, is that the script includes background and important facts about each person (much better than x-men for example), so this isn't just a movie that appeals to the die hard Spiderman fan. Once the characters have depth and are continually forced to deal with tragic situations they become easy to care about in this VERY WELL acted film. It separates itself from most other action movies (which I generally dislike) because it is more than a medium to feed an audience special effects. "Spiderman" is actual storytelling, was incredibly humorous (in keeping with the comic book's style of storytelling), and refreshing. There is no need to be a 16 year old comic book collector to enjoy this film. The whole audience was clapping and cheering by the films credits. It exceeded all my expectations!! P.S.- My wife, who knew nothing Spiderman's history, was very impressed by the character development and solid acting because both made her care about the lives of these people.