Web 1.0: "Spider-Man"

To revisit Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films two decades later, as the release schedule now permits, is not just to pit Comic-Book Movies Now against Comic-Book Movies Then, but also to try and pin down what Raimi got so right here and so wrong on his Dr. Strange sequel. For starters, 2002's Spider-Man arrived at a moment before Comic-Book Movies were a formula, when - even within the framework of a megabudget Sony adaptation of a longstanding Marvel favourite - a director could still impose themselves on the material, whether by dashes of horror or a sunny, boyish outlook. Upon release, the movie was claimed by the poptimists among us as a counterblast to events in New York the previous September; it came with some extratextual baggage, then, but otherwise now seems refreshingly uncluttered with backstory, sidebars and cameos. (You had to wait until 2007's Spider-Man 3, returning in a fortnight, for that: perhaps these things are just destined to swell up like spider bites.) The essence of Raimi's version is right there in Peter Parker's opening narration: "This, like any story worth telling, is about a girl". Already, we are being gathered to heed the call of something simple and relatable, a story worth telling, even if it is one we've all heard before, and several times since with variations.

So, yes, there it is: the spider bite; the dead uncle; the sticky wrists that confirm this as a tale of dawning adolescent potency (and - boy - does Raimi know it, having Aunt May interrupt our boy as he's in the middle of his bodily R&D). In the craftsmanlike hands of writer David Koepp, a decade on from adapting Jurassic Park, these basic story elements are connected with a tersely spun web of cause and effect, consequence and (yes) responsibility. The guileless Parker (Tobey Maguire) lets a petty crim go out of spite, only to later find out this nogoodnik did for his beloved Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson); he bests overreaching technocrat Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), only for the latter's brooding son Harry (James Franco) to vow revenge. With such a story in place, Raimi is freed to doodle around the edges, to personalise, as Tim Burton had done in his Batman blockbusters a decade before. Yes, there are the obligatory tentpole action sequences - but set against the choppiness that was to follow, these now have the advantage of relative simplicity, Raimi electing to swing his camera around in largely unbroken takes, as he'd done on the Evil Dead movies, rather than resorting to excessively convoluted edit-suite trickery. (Lest we forget, this was the summer of The Bourne Identity: the movies were starting to learn how to move again.)

Crucially, for our purposes, the film keeps finding ways to shuck off its costumes and chicanery, and to return its focus to a cherished group of performers. Raimi visibly has time on set to work with his actors, and thereby inject wit and feeling into a scene, in a way directors most likely don't now Marvel have locked themselves into delivering four films a year between now and 2525. As a result, Spider-Man remains sweet and funny - or sweeter and funnier than comparably corporate endeavours have presented as in the years since. It's Dafoe, setting a remarkably high bar for supervillainy, muttering "ooh, cold" as he's strapped into some vast metal transformation machine, and subsequently cracking up while talking to himself in the mirror - a blockbuster effect founded on simple, appreciable B-movie shooting and cutting. (He also gets one of the film's best, subtlest jokes, arriving at Aunt May's Thanksgiving dinner with the line "I've picked up a fruitcake", before eyeing up his spider-quarry over the carving knife.) It's Maguire going affectingly saucer-eyed in the presence of Kirsten Dunst - well on the way to becoming the great American actress of the 21st century - and doing a better job of making us forget his spell in the Pussy Posse than Leo DiCaprio ever has. 

This Spidey and MJ deserved all the MTV Awards going, not least for alighting on a tentative, touching chemistry, founded on these kids' mutual awareness this world hasn't exactly been optimised for them to be happy, whether together or apart. (For perhaps the first and last time, a Marvel movie predicts the way the century would go - though media types will also chuckle wryly when JK Simmons' Jonah Jameson tells Parker freelancing is "the best thing in the world for a kid".) Their upside-down kiss, however, encapsulates in one image everything this Spider-Man gets right: here is a reinvigorating spin on a perilously square and dusty storybeat. There would be comparable pleasures in the Andrew Garfield/Emma Stone Spider-Men and in Jon Watts's Tom Holland/Zendaya reboots, but they were scattered and forever secondary to positioning, how these films related to a wider corporate superstructure. In 2024, returning to Raimi's Spider-Man means forgiving occasionally clunky green-screen work, one faintly homophobic joke in the wrestling sequence that unites Bruce Campbell with "Macho Man" Randy Savage, and, well, James Franco. Yet this is still the version of this story that feels like the complete package: a brisk two hours of spectacle, fun, romance and jeopardy, with a Macy Gray song plumb in the middle (such that we might wonder whether Gray might actually be the ingredient missing from later Marvel items), and a stirring Chad Kroeger duet amid the closing credits that makes it impossible for me to pour the scorn on Nickelback some folks do.

Spider-Man is now playing in cinemas nationwide; Spider-Man 2 returns to cinemas nationwide tomorrow.