The Millennium in Frames: The Forgotten Trailblazing of Spider-Man
The premise of Spider-Man as a studio production sounds rather absurd through the lens of today’s Hollywood model. Put a classic and beloved character in the hands of a distinctive and idealistic director, and then just let the guy do whatever the eff he wants with it. Today, studios want control and authority and final say, but back in 2002, Spider-Man was delightfully free from this dynamic, and it’s that simple context that makes it still one of the greatest comic book movies ever made.
Hindsight has been unfair to Spider-Man. Tom Holland’s youth and the ease Andrew Garfield had with his costars have both diminished Tobey Maguire’s goofy, button-up take on the hero. He’s pretty darn good in these movies, and yeah, while he’s an ugly and weird crier, his smile brings the right amount of boyishness and director Sam Raimi was able to draw more quips and gee-whiz wonder out of Tobey than you remember. We all praise Holland because he “finally” made the wall-crawler feel fun, but go back and watch the first 40 minutes of the original Spider-Man. Tobey swings around, sprays his webs, beats up bullies, and utters plenty of “woah, cool!” lines while he does it. He wasn’t miscast, he was unexpected, and that doesn’t mean he was wrong for the part.
The original Spider-Man bucked traditional comic-book expectations across the board, though. Most Marvel purists seem to look back on the Raimi trilogy as derivative and irreverent toward the superhero traditions they hold dear, but ironically, it’s the movie’s flippancy toward those traditions that ultimately makes it great (and as we’ll discuss, extra impactful, too). The comcis version of Spider-Man sees him employ mechanical web shooters and a nearly non-stop motormouth during his Queens-centric crimefighting, but in the first Raimi movie, his webs shoot out of his wrists organically, and his constant jabbering at New York’s bevy of crooks and criminals is dialed back quite a bit.
Lots of people thought it was to the movie’s detriment to make these changes, but those people could do to yank the massive stick out of their asses. Spider-Man’s organic powers in this movie are awesome, and the discovery of these powers over the movie’s first half is still the best holy-smokes-I’m-a-superhero-now sequence in all of comic-book movies. The first time Tobey wallcrawls is a thrill and a half. The first time he uses his Spidey Sense to beat up Flash Thompson (played by a super 2002-looking Joe Manganiello, by the way) is legit funny. The first time he tries to shoot his webs and we’re treated to that glorious montage of ‘Go web!’ catchprases—it’s an all-timer. None of these moments are possible without the weird interpretation Raimi and Co. brought to the source material. In hindsight, it makes the movie stand out from the now cookie-cutter Marvel and DC pack.
More movie treats courtesy of Spider-Man: Willem Dafoe in a lip-lickingly great turn as Green Goblin (lots of depth here that went underappreciated), an all-time movie kiss with Kirsten “I forgot how sneaky-hot she was in this movie” Dunst, J.K. Simmons pulling off the biggest scene-stealing heist of the genre, a character called Bonesaw, James Franco in a part that makes you realize he’s only grown more handsome since his 20s, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Elizabeth Banks role (not cameo, role), and of course, one of the most quoted lines in the history of movies: “With great power, comes great responsibility.” Not a minute of the two hours is wasted. It’s all excellent. It’s all terrific fun.
But the biggest treat Spider-Man has in store, at the end of the day, is consequence. Marvel movies now are consistently good, but they’re also consistently unimportant. Nobody we care about dies or changes, and the dynamics between the characters take years and years of franchise-building to evolve. Spider-Man, on the other hand, has a godforsaken mission to accomplish, and it’s not gonna putter around collecting shiny rocks or stopping the latest meaningless and ineffective and curiously-easy-to-topple Armageddon beam. By the end of Spider-Man, Peter has completed his journey from self-focused goober to city-saving hero, but he’s also destroyed his relationship with his best friend and rejected the love of his life. As series veterans well know, these are ripple effects that see their payoff in the very next movie. This flick was made with a trilogy in mind, and that broad, ambitious vision gives the story here direct impact and broad importance. It’s something that the Dr. Stranges, Age of Ultrons, and Guardians of the Galaxy movies lack. They might be remembered for some stylistic flourishes, but not at all for their character accomplishments or storytelling.
All that is to say, Spider-Man has endured because it had a clear vision for the superhero story it wanted to tell and it pursued that in a singular and focused fashion. And that vision didn’t belong to a studio or a corporation, it belonged to a filmmaker. Sam Raimi interpreted and adapted the Spider-Man story to provide audiences and fans with something uniquely excellent. It’s an approach that nowadays is rarely duplicated, and that’s a travesty.
(It should be acknowledged that Spider-Man 3 did in fact see a lot of studio meddling apart from Raimi, and that conflict contributed to a movie that is probably one of the single biggest disappointments of the new millennium. It’s really bad. There’s so much nonsense in it, and its faults are honestly because there was too much clashing of ideas behind the scenes. People compromised, some hands were forced, and the movie stunk. But that’s something we can explore in depth at a later date.)
The one superhero series that owes the most to Spider-Man, ironically, is a DC Comics property. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy follows the Raimi/Spider-Man blueprint almost to a tee. Alternative characterizations, manipulated settings, stories that are about ideas rather than people. These days, those Batman movies are considered the genre’s pinnacle. We’ve forgotten how Spider-Man carved the path up the mountain, even if it slipped a few times near the top of its ascent.
It’s a shame, though, that Batman was the only hero to learn anything from Spider-Man. Comic-book movies today follow a formula: bankable star, world-saving mission, leave the door open for sequels. There’s no studio demand for anything deeper than that, and that’s why we see two or three of these just-fine movies every year. In an alternate universe, we have tons of artistic superhero interpretations to go alongside Raimi’s Spider-Man and Nolan’s Batman. I’d sign up for James Wan’s Punisher, Edgar Wright’s Iron Man, or Jordan Peele’s Deadpool. The closest person we have to a comic-book movie artiste now is Joss Whedon, but he doesn’t so much write the cookbook as he does just follow the recipe, perhaps with some extra spice here or there.
All the same, the 2002 Spider-Man holds up today as a triumph of vision, even though that vision failed to reach past its own sequels. Among fans, it’s remembered as the first fun superhero flick among many, and among studio executives, it’s remembered as a movie that signified masked heroes as the most bankable thing in Hollywood. Spider-Man persists because it’s better than the rest, not because the rest were derived from its originality, freedom, and considered character work. For all of Spider-Man’s power, he was responsible for almost nothing.