Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

As I noted a few days ago, my inauguration into the DVD era came via the film Spiderman.

My take on Spiderman is this: they made three-fourths of a great movie, but the ending doesn't work. The problem, for me, was mythology. (Full disclosure here: of all the superhero comics I used to read, the Spiderman titles were my favorite. He has always been my favorite superhero.)

The problem faced by filmmakers who are creating silver-screen versions of classic comic books is that since they only have two hours or so to tell a single story, they need to make it fairly self-contained but also establish all of the mythology -- or as much as they can -- that the comic book has had years to develop. Inevitably, things are left out. Normally, this is all well and good. Superman didn't suffer, as a film, by the fact that Clark Kent's teen love Lana Lang appears in a single scene; X-Men likewise did not have me squirming and wondering where the original X-Men (Angel, Beast, et cetera) were. (Of course, the X-Men have been such a revolving door over the years that they could have selected mutant heroes at random from the comic's entire run and had a good movie -- as long as they included Wolverine, who is probably the only essential X-Man.)

So, starting off in Spiderman, the film gets almost all of the mythology right. We have Peter Parker as a teen weakling, Mary Jane Watson in her abusive household, Peter's jock rival Flash Thompson, best friend Harry Osborne (and, in turn, rich father Norman), and of course there are Uncle Ben and Aunt May. In truth, the entire first half of the film is a delight, with only a couple of problems. The key to any superhero film lies in the casting, and the cast assembled here does very well, although they might have been better served having the characters in college rather than in high school. All of the actors looked slightly too old to me for high school -- but that's not a fatal complaint. If I have any quibble at all with the film's "origin" scenes, it would be that I think Peter's emergent spider powers are a bit over-the-top. I can see him catching Mary Jane when she slips in the cafeteria, but the way he catches everything on the tray was a bit freakish, and I didn't really buy the whole confrontation with Flash in the hallway. I think these scenes could have used a little more subtlety and more of a sense of fear and fascination from Peter. For the most part, though, it all works. I liked how the spider-bite was updated (genetic engineering instead of radioactivity, the fear of the 2000's as opposed to that of the 1960s), and I also enjoyed Peter's scheme to get money fast. Of course he'd try pro wrestling! That got a laugh, but then a sense of dread when I released what was unfolding.

It's no secret that the seminal event of Peter Parker's life is the death of Uncle Ben. The whole tagline, "With great power comes great responsibility", has to be hammered home. In the original comic, I believe it was a home-burglary; here it is a carjacking, but the result is the same: a criminal whom Peter could have stopped earlier later kills Uncle Ben. (A nice touch, absent from the original comic, is the way Peter initially thinks that allowing the crook to get away is comeuppance for the unscrupulous wrestling promoter. This was a nice bit of subtext, Peter's first example of he should defend even those who don't give a rip about him in return.) I didn't care for the "teen rebel" angle the filmmakers added to Ben's demise, so that Peter's last words to him were spoken in anger, but I can see why they did this. Central to the Peter Parker character, in the comic, was his ever-present sense of self-loathing and inadequacy.

Willem Dafoe as Norman Osborne is terrific, and I loved the scene where his dual personalities converse with one another via a mirror. I didn't care for the Green Goblin costume, though. With its aerodynamic plastic helmet, it just didn't look right to me. The glider, though, looked perfect. I found the film's visual effects occasionally disappointing, but the Goblin on the glider worked well.

So, what to say about the ending? Well, first of all, the visuals. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert complained that the visuals are too obviously CGI, giving little sense of the momentums involved in webslinging and in the last scene of the tremendous weights involved. I have to agree here. The webs themselves appear to have the consistency of Silly String. I was able to suspend my disbelief enough to believe Peter Parker swinging around on them, but I couldn't believe him hanging by one of them with one hand while using another web, in his other hand, to hold a fully-laden cable car above the East River. I know Spiderman has a great deal of strength, but this strained credibility. Spiderman's key ability, to me, was never his strength as much as it was his incredible agility and speed. The scene did not convey to me the sense that Peter was about to be pulled apart, or that he would drop the cable car, or anything like that. The film tried to convey this, but it didn't succeed, at least for me. In the comic, Spiderman occasionally had to pull off a feat of superhuman strength -- really superhuman strength -- and when he did, the comic conveyed tremendous strain and agony, with Spiderman nearly blacking out and finally succeeding through sheer force of will. It's not that I don't think Spidey could have done the things the film depicts in this scene; it's that as they present it, it doesn't look to me like a Spiderman feat. It looks more like a Superman feat.

My other problem with the climactic scene on the bridge can be summed up in two words: Gwen Stacy.

I conceded above that films of comic book stories have to make hard decisions about which things from the mythology to include and which ones to leave out. In the comics, while Peter did know Mary Jane for years, his first true love was Gwen Stacy, and it was Gwen whom the Green Goblin dangled off the Brooklyn Bridge. However, in the comic, Spiderman failed to save her. The Goblin drops her from the height, and Spiderman snags her with a web, breaking her fall, but she dies in the effort (if she was alive to begin with). This was Peter Parker's second great life lesson: not just that "With great power comes great responsibility", but that "Sometimes great power just isn't enough". The death of Gwen Stacy was just as important to the Spiderman character as the death of Uncle Ben, and as such to see the events of her death replayed in the film -- but with Mary Jane, this time, and with Spiderman saving the girl -- created in me a sort of "cognitive dissonance" that I just couldn't get around. I can understand why the filmmakers would omit Gwen Stacy from their story of Peter Parker's life, just as I can understand why the filmmakers of Superman would omit Lana Lang, but Gwen Stacy is far more important to Spiderman than Lana Lang is to Superman. I might have been able to accept a Spiderman who was never in love with Gwen Stacy, but in giving me Gwen's death without Gwen and without the death, the film basically kept reminding me of her. For me, it was the Big White Elephant in the room. Under some circumstances, I can be made to ignore it -- but not if you're going to point my chair at the elephant and have the beast nuzzle me with its trunk.

I also didn't care for the film's very last scene. Mary Jane's sudden profession of love was totally unconvincing, so Peter's "sacrifice" was robbed of whatever emotional value it might have had. I guess I just don't think that Peter Parker and Mary Jane have been though enough together for her to love him. Yet. (And I could have done without the Big! Obvious! Sequel! idea laid out when Harry Osborne swears to "make Spiderman pay".)

And rounding out my small set of complaints is the score by Danny Elfman, a composer who seems to be retrogressing faster and faster into the realm of "sonic wallpaper". Superhero scores need themes, and the score for Spiderman doesn't have one. The John Williams Superman theme is one of the most famous film music themes ever written, and Elfman himself wrote a very memorable theme for Batman in those movies, so why is it that I couldn't hum a single theme from Spiderman within minutes of watching the film? The score is all mood and no substance, and is one of the most disappointing film scores I have ever experienced.

I hope I'm not giving the idea that I disliked Spiderman, because I didn't. Not even close. In fact, I think it's probably the best superhero film made since the original Superman. I loved many of the webslinging scenes, and it was so nice to see a superhero film with action sequences that take place in daylight. (Thanks to the Batman films, I've seen enough fight-scenes-at-night-in-the-rain for a lifetime.) The film's feel is right, although I would have liked a little more of the Daily Bugle. I've also always had a weakness for women with red hair, so Kirsten Dunst was of particular pleasure here. Tobey Maguire's performance as Peter Parker is excellent. While I think he could have conveyed more of a "sense of wonder" when he discovers his new, buff physique, Maguire pulls off the film's most important acting task: he sells the idea of a guy in a spider-suit. (Anyone who remembers the old live-action Spiderman television series from the late 70s will know that this is no small thing.) I enjoyed the little touches, like Mary Jane calling Peter "Tiger" and his self-referent "You friendly neighborhood Spiderman". I can't wait for the sequel, and not just because I want to see Doctor Octopus. (Speaking of him, will any of these new Marvel comics-into-movies involve Doctor Doom?)