Tangled Web
Went and saw Spider-Man 2 yesterday. It was a much better movie than I was expecting, and also less enjoyable. Once again, the creators managed to capture the essence of the Spider-Man comic book: the claustrophobic, coincidence-driven plots that are as incestuous in their character relationships as the cheesiest Dickens novel; the strength of the characterizations, even of the villains; and, of course, the melodrama. This last is ladled generously over the script like maple syrup over a stack of pancakes, creating a kind of sticky-sweet human intensity to match the obligatory action and effects.
To be honest, Spider-Man was never my favorite comic book character, precisely because the human stories intruded too insistently into an otherwise-farfetched fantasy world. I could sympathize with Peter Parker in his endlessly-troubled personal life, or I could root for Spidey to take out the Vulture or the Green Goblin before they detonated the bomb in the subway station, but it was hard to take both problems equally seriously. Some people got into the “realism”; in my view, you either suspend disbelief or you don’t.
Both Spider-Man movies are incredibly faithful to their source material, which I generally support in comic-book movies, but in this case, they also faithfully reproduce the things I don’t like as much. That said, much of the movie was excellent, particularly the villain of the piece, Dr. Octopus. Doc Ock is much more imposing of a threat than the Green Goblin, who appeared in the first film, and his character is handled extremely well by the writers, director and actor. According to the comic-book scripture, the Green Goblin is much more central to the master Spider-Man narrative than Ock, but the latter is definitely more spectacular.
The glue that holds both Spider-Man films together is Toby Maguire’s great performance as Peter Parker. Not only does he portray the character well, he really looks the part. Specifically, he appears to have jumped off the pages of the original, classic series drawn by Steve Ditko, whose artwork alone made the 1960s run indispensable in the cannon of American comics. While later artists drew Parker as an average-to-handsome young man, Ditko portrayed a helpless nerd. You could almost see the smudges on his filthy glasses and smell the BO from his slept-in sweater and four-day-old socks. Maguire has that aspect dialed in, but he adds a layer of charm and likeability.
The presence of a good hero you can cheer for and a really dangerous villain are by far the most important aspects of a movie like this, and Spider-Man 2 has both in spades. How you like the rest of it depends on your tolerance for overheated melodrama (two of the writers work on the equally soap-operatic Superboy TV series, Smallville, and the third is Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon), coincidence and what comic-folks like to call “continuity,” or deep plotting. And, oh yeah, the special effects are really cheesy-looking. Didn’t they have enough money to do them right this time?
12:13:59 PM 
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