{"id":540,"date":"2002-05-11T00:38:58","date_gmt":"2002-05-11T08:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2002\/05\/11\/spider-man\/"},"modified":"2019-11-27T08:37:38","modified_gmt":"2019-11-27T16:37:38","slug":"spider-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2002\/05\/11\/spider-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Spider-Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

I told<\/em> you I’d get around to this. ;)<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, Batman<\/a>, and X-Men<\/a> — all IMHO, of course), and Spider-Man<\/a> just rocketed straight to the top of that list.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> kicks much booty.<\/p>\n


\nI was so<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Tobey Maguire<\/a> pulled off Peter Parker\/Spider-Man perfectly, Kirsten Dunst<\/a> was oh-so-yummylicious as MJ, and Willem Dafoe<\/a> 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<\/a>, Ian McKellen<\/a> and Hugh Jackman<\/a> turned up in X-Men.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> real still looked pretty good…the effects company for Blade II<\/a> should take some lessons from these guys).<\/p>\n

Finally — this was so<\/em> Sam Raimi’s film. While he’s been doing quite well with his films recently (both The Gift<\/a> and A Simple Plan<\/a> 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<\/a> — 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<\/a>).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

All in all, a perfect summertime blockbuster film, a lot of fun, and a wonderfully faithful translation from comic page to big screen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, and Spider-Man just rocketed straight to the top of that list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2037],"tags":[464,2152,23,747,2181,2178,1912,1884,1952,1559],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}