SPIDER-MAN: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Spider-Man (2002) – Directed by Sam Raimi – Starring Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Cliff Robertson, Rosemary Harris, J.K. Simmons, Elizabeth Banks, Macho Man Randy Savage, Joe Manganiello, Bill Nunn, Bruce Campbell, and Stan Lee.

There is not a better made superhero movie that I enjoy watching less than Sam Raimi’s wonderful SPIDER-MAN. I would almost go so far as to say that there is nothing I would change about the film, except of course, there’s that awful (minus the mask) Green Goblin costume. Beyond that, however, SPIDER-MAN is an earnest, honest, well-meaning superhero film about good people put into extraordinary circumstances. When it came out in 2002, I broke my rule about seeing movies on opening weekend to sneak out for the 11 AM showing and absolutely loved it. As I told anyone who would listen at the time, SPIDER-MAN thrilled the kid in me without offending the adult. Even now, when Peter walks away from MJ at the end of the movie and we hear him say in narration, “With great power comes great responsibility,” I get choked up.

So why don’t I enjoy watching it more?

In large part, it’s because SPIDER-MAN did it’s job so well that superhero films have grown beyond it’s two hours of cinematic goodness. For me, Spider-Man has the single greatest origin in all of supeherodom and Raimi’s film wonderfully lays it out for us in live action. The problem is that I’ve read and re-read and re-read Spidey’s origin so many times that tuning in to a movie to watch it all again …

I don’t get a whole lot out of it anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled it exists, and if I ever have kids, I’ll gladly pop them down in front of the big screen TV top watch it over and over again. But for now, watching the film once every five years or so is enough.

Raimi’s film is the perfect superhero movie to transition the genre out of Batman’s darkness and into the light. The influence of Burton and Schumacher’s franchise is all over Raimi’s film, of course, and if there’s one quibble I have with Raimi’s direction is that Raimi chameleons himself inside the Schumacher mold to such a degree that he loses himself. Raimi delivers a very professional directing job in SPIDER-MAN, but like Chris Colombus in the first Harry Potter film, Raimi’s approach has seemingly been designed to not mess things up more than deliver a unique, powerful vision.

More Schumacher than Burton though it may be, Raimi’s approach absolutely works. SPIDER-MAN raked in over $800 mil at the international box office back in 2002, and it’s completely deserving of every dollar. You can see strains of where Raimi overplays his hand – he sometimes mistakes melodrama for real emotion, and most damningly, he just won’t let Peter have a moment’s rest, won’t let life give him a break. I understand that bad luck and hard times are part of the Peter Parker stock and trade, but Spidey is a jokester, too, always ready with the quip while inside his suit, but there’s not a whole lot of that in SPIDER-MAN.

A pre-9/11 SPIDER-MAN teaser poster featuring the Twin Towers reflected on Spidey’s goggles.

In fact, the best one-liners come during his wrestling match with Bonesaw McGraw (Macho Man Randy Savage Oooh Yeah), because in the rest of the film there’s not a whole lot of room to joke around. Post-wrestling match, of course, after Peter gets stiffed on his payment, he lets a burglar run past him that ends up killing Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson).

Cliff Robertson’s Uncle Ben and Rosemary Harris’ Aunt May are the emotional backbone of the film, and both veteran actors deliver pitch-perfect performances. Robertson has one of the toughest jobs in all of superhero films; he’s got to deliver an absolutely spot-on performance in limited screen time and he hits every single scene with the right mix of fight and emotion. When he’s worried enough about what’s going on in Peter’s life that he forces Pete to ride with him into the city, he gives May a little flash of victory behind Peter’s back. Then when they get to the library, he tries to have a heart-to-heart with Peter about what he’s going through and Pete rejects him, tells him to back off, and slams Ben for not being his father. It’s a brutal scene, totally undeserved, and Maguire and Robertson deliver it as well as any scene in any superhero film.

As for the structure of the film, the first half concentrates on the origin story and the second half delivers the Spidey vs. Goblin. SPIDER-MAN does a very solid job weaving all of its characters through both halves of the film and making each of them feel like real people. Whenever Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) comes back into the narrative, there’s a genuine sense of the life she’s lived in between these moments. I’m not a huge fan of Dunst, but she’s really good here at playing the suburban version of white trash. She’s had a hard childhood and can’t wait to get out of her house and into the city post-high school graduation. It’s not an easy life as she tries to make it as an actress, but she’s not afraid to work menial jobs to make ends meet.

There’s a tragic feeling to everything MJ does; life has been hard on her and that sadness comes through around Peter, who gets to see the private MJ (and not just when he’s peeping into her bedroom window) while others get the public, happy-go-lucky Mary Jane. The famous “upside down Spidey” kissing scene, when paired with the funeral kissing scene, brings these two halves of both Mary and Peter’s personas together in a really touching way.

Tobey Maguire is very good at playing the sheepish Peter Parker, even if he does go the wide-eyed, stand and stare dumbly route a bit too often, just as Willem Dafoe is very good at playing the mentally unhinged Norman Osborn, even if he does go the bug-eyed, cackle maniacally route a bit too often. James Franco is solid as Harry Osborn, J.K. Simmons is outstanding as J. Jonah Jameson (even drawn incredibly cartoonishly), and Elizabeth Banks has a “is that who I think it is?” cameo as Betty Brant.

The action is very good and very bright, which the film needs to balance of the dark emotion of Ben getting murdered and Peter being partly responsible, of the Goblin kidnapping both Aunt May and Mary Jane, and then accidentally killing himself.

It’s all professionally done and SPIDER-MAN was exactly the right film at the right time for the superhero genre. While Bryan Singer’s X-Men beat Spidey to the screen by two years and deserves credit for being the post-Burton/Schumacher Batman opening act, SPIDER-MAN’s $800 mil rake at the international box office (compared to X-Men‘s $300 mil), Sam Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN felt like the start of something new. Did they play it safe? Absolutely, but in playing it safe, Raimi and Maguire also didn’t screw it up and simply let Spidey and the Goblin go at it over the course of two hours. The film definitively put “with great power comes great responsibility” into the mainstream lexicon and it finally put the core of the Marvel Universe onto the big screens in a way that the X-Men could not, given the whole “hated and feared” thing. Spidey is Marvel’s most important and popular character and its box office performance broke new ground for superhero films (at the international box office, SPIDER-MAN bested Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman and Robin COMBINED).

SPIDER-MAN is an excellent movie, both for what it puts on the screen and how it helped to get the ball rolling on all sorts of superhero movies, but I don’t find it a highly re-watchable movie. I know that makes me a bit of a jerk because why wouldn’t you want to watch something done this well, but I’m kinda burned out on origin stories.

Once every five years or so, however, SPIDER-MAN can still bring me along for a heck of a ride.

THE EVIL DEAD: We’ll All Be Going Home Together

The Evil Dead (1981) – Directed by Sam Raimi – Starring Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker, Hal Delrich, and Sarah York.

Similar to El Mariachi, THE EVIL DEAD is one of those films that came out of nowhere and launched a major Hollywood career. Sam Raimi has had a slightly more varied career than Rodriguez in the years between their independent debuts and 2011 (Rodriguez has yet to make a gutwrenchingly awful and painfully melodramatic baseball movie, for instance), but both of them keep making films whose essence is laid bare back in the original films: Rodriguez is interested in telling stories with a focus on characters and Raimi is interested in stories with a focus on the audience.

There’s lots of overlap there, of course, but generally when I watch a Rodriguez film I feel that they’re built from the inside-out, that Rodriguez is interested in finding the best way to tell the story it’s presenting; when I watch a Raimi movie, I generally feel like they’re built from the outside-in, that what really interests Raimi isn’t the characters in his film but in getting a reaction out of the audience.

I first developed this theory a while back when I read an interview with Gene Hackman, where he said that Raimi’s direction on The Quick and the Dead was of the, “Stand exactly here, move your right hand exactly this way, and stop it exactly here” variety. Hackman’s take was that Raimi was just interested in getting his shot, not in letting his actors explore their roles.

That’s evident even in THE EVIL DEAD, a really good horror movie about five students from Michigan State who travel to a cabin deep in the woods and unleash demons who kill them. There’s not a whole lot of character work here. There’s two couples and a sister making the trip. Couple #1 is Ash and Linda (Bruce Campbell and Betsy Baker), Couple #2 is Scotty and Shelly (Hal Delrich and Theresa Tilly), and Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) is Ash’s sister. Scott and Ash find some tape recordings of spells or incantations or mumbo jumbo from the Necronomicon, which gets the demons to rise, take possession of our college kids, and then destroy them one at a time.

Cheryl freaks out when the tape recordings start playing and she’s the first victim. By “victim” I mean the unseen demons take possession of her, turn her skin all bluish-icky and then starts physically attacking the others. Before Cheryl is turned, the film does focus on the characters (including a nice scene where Cheryl demands her brother take her into town, and he agrees, only to have the road blocked), but once the freakshow starts, the focus shifts away from the characters and onto the audience as Raimi serves up fright after fright.

This isn’t to say Raimi totally forgets his characters because Scotty goes from a guy who thinks this is all a lark to a guy who just wants to cut bait and leave, and Ash is concerned about both his girlfriend and sister being turned, but the emphasis is on the shock and fright more than the effect on the characters finding a way out of this jam.

Horror movies often operate on this principal. Sidney Prescott’s dig in SCREAM that horror films are just about “some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act, who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door” speaks to this idea. If people act smart, it’s easier for them to have agency, and if characters have agency, it’s easier for the film to be more story-out than audience-in. In THE EVIL DEAD, once the kids start being possessed, all they can do is try to survive the night, and the enjoyment becomes not watching them get out of the situation, but merely is watching them endure the trials.

Even when we get to the end, and Ash walks out of the cabin as the only survivor, Raimi has one more shock in store as he pulls the traditional “bad guys aren’t defeated, yet!” routine, having one more invisible attack on Ash before the film cuts to black for the last time.

To be clear, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Raimi’s strategy to go audience-in rather than story-out; Hitchcock and Spielberg often employ this strategy to great effect, as Raimi does here. (Heck, Rear Window is about this storytelling strategy.) There’s precious little comedy here, which might surprise you if you’ve seen DEAD’s two sequels, but THE EVIL DEAD is a really good, straight-up horror movie from a director still learning his craft.