I told you I’d get around to this. ;)
In brief — it rocked. There are a select few movies that were a successful translation from the comic book medium to the silver screen (Superman, Batman, and X-Men — all IMHO, of course), and Spider-Man just rocketed straight to the top of that list.
Plot — well, okay, it’s a summertime comic book movie, but for what it was, it worked quite well. Cast — spot-on. Effects — a bit shakey here and there, but overall quite impressive. Directing — Sam Raimi kicks much booty.
I was so jazzed about seeing this one. Ever since I heard that Sam Raimi was attached to the project I figured it might actually turn out to be worth seeing. Then the previews started coming out, and I got even more excited. Well, I finally got to see it this last Tuesday (Candice bought the tickets as a birthday present), and it definitely managed to live up to my expectations — a rare and wonderful thing with today’s movies.
Tobey Maguire pulled off Peter Parker/Spider-Man perfectly, Kirsten Dunst was oh-so-yummylicious as MJ, and Willem Dafoe looked like he was having a blast chewing up the scenery (and not at all in a bad way) as The Green Goblin. All in all, I think this movie probably had the best casting since Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Hugh Jackman turned up in X-Men.
Aside from a couple spots where it was fairly obvious that they went with an all-CGI Spidey, the effects were really impressive throughout the film. I’d been afraid they might over-use CGI in order to get all the shots, but in the end, I think it was pulled off quite well (and even the shots that didn’t look quite real still looked pretty good…the effects company for Blade II should take some lessons from these guys).
Finally — this was so Sam Raimi’s film. While he’s been doing quite well with his films recently (both The Gift and A Simple Plan are excellent films), it was great to see him return to his inimitable style of action directing that he first started honing back in the days of The Evil Dead — he’s one of the few directors who can be hyperkinetic without being over-the-top to the point of being annoying (unlike, say, Michael Bay).
My few hesitations in giving a perfect score are that some of the scenes between Peter and MJ just seemed to drag on a bit long. They were fairly well played, but they ended up dragging things down just a bit too far in the middle of the film — during the scene where Peter rhapsodizes to MJ in the hospital, the audience kept snickering more and more until someone yelled out, “Oh, just STOP already!” A little more judicious editing might have helped here — but that’s about it.
All in all, a perfect summertime blockbuster film, a lot of fun, and a wonderfully faithful translation from comic page to big screen.