Spider-Man

Spider-Man is out on video and DVD. I had not seen it when it first came out because I was overseas and simply missed it in the couple of days it played at the local theater where I was living. Still, everyone I knew had enjoyed it, so I decided to rent it.

Spider-Man begins as a pretty ordinary story. The school science geek, Peter Parker (Tobey MacGuire), is in his senior year. He is also in love/lust/infatuation with the red-headed girl next door, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). Of course, he is too shy to say anything about his feelings. The result is that everyone but his love interest knows exactly how he feels.

A group from the school goes to Columbia University's science center where they check out electron microscopes and spiders. There are 15 spiders that are being experimented on, but one appears to be missing. The tour guide assures the students that it's probably just being examined by one of the scientists. Shortly thereafter, the missing spider lands on Peter Parker and bites him.

After a bad night upstairs, Parker awakens refreshed and buff. He has muscles. At school, he finds that he is able to duck the punches being thrown by the school bully and to rescue the lunch and the neck of a girl who slips on a puddle in the cafeteria. When he leaves school, he finds that he can now climb walls, leap huge distances and shoot webs from his wrists. Unlike Superman who hides his abilities, Parker does what any normal teen would do and starts jumping all over the city.

If this was all that was going on, however, it would be a pretty dull movie. There is a need for a villain, too. The father of Parker's best friend is Mr. Osbourne (Willem DeFoe). He is a major industrialist whose company is working on a physical enhancement project for the government. He becomes a human test subject in the experiment and ends up losing it. In a performance that mixes elements of Jim Carrey's The Mask with Schwartzenagger's Terminator and a touch of Hitchcock's Psycho, DeFoe takes an on the edge character and pushes it past reasonable limits. He vacilates between Mr. Osborne and the Green Goblin. Mr. Osborne is an industrialist out to make a living, but not at any cost. The Green Goblin is out to achieve his ends at any cost. Mr. Osborne does not know about his alternate identity.

Of course, Spider-Man and the Green Goblin become mortal enemies though neither starts out knowing who the other is.
The look of both of these characters is pretty well spelled out in the comic books. The Spider-Man outfit, however, allows for freedom of movement and even a certain expressiveness. The Green Goblin's face mask, however, entirely hides the actor. Granted, this is a pretty one-dimensional character, but having his face have absolutely no movement was annoying.

There is some real nice chemistry going on between Peter and Mary. These two are both extraordinary actors and I really liked the way they worked together.

If there is one part of the movie I didn't care for, it had to be the use of computer graphics. Most of the time I have seen CGI used, it was not noticeable. Here, it was clearly noticeable at times. In scenes where Peter climbs up walls in his Spider-Man suit, rather than having MacGuire climb a horizontal wall shot to look vertical, it's done with CGI. This may give a smoothness of motion, but it looked fake. There were other occasions where I had the feeling it was just too fake. There were times where there was so much swinging about that I lost sense of which way was supposed to be up. I also found the constant changing of angles when he swings to be jarring and to make things difficult to follow at times.

Overall, if you're a fan of the television series or the comic book, I would suggest renting the DVD as opposed to the VHS. It comes with two discs and includes screen tests, costume tests, information on CGI, and a gag reel among other items. I would also suggest this for teens who are looking for rollicking fun. For an adult, I am less likely to recommend this. DeFoe is too over the top and the rest is just not intriguing enough to have me recommend it.