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film review: Spiderman 2


Review by Fiona Prior, e: mccommissions@hotmail.com

Introduction
Spider Man ? … typical male ...

Director: Sam Raimi (Evil Dead)
Screenwriter: Alvin Sargent (Ordinary People, Paper Moon)
Based on the Marvel comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko

Peter Parker/Spiderman (Tobey Maguire) is a demi-Einstein, and he’s pretty good at scaling skyscrapers. Unfortunately he’s got the emotional IQ of a baked-potato. Therein lies the very-male ‘normality’ of Spider-Man 2.

I say this because the retarded personal-communication gene is not necessarily a superhero thing. Buffy and Angel (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel fame) share the burden of their unconsummatable/cross-species love - they know Angel will zap back into a blood-crazed vampire if allowed to express his unbridled passion. Spiderman’s just got run-of-the-mill boy problems. He needs to grow up.

Peter Parker/Spiderman has this horribly last century hangover that ‘nobody’, particularly the love of his life Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), could understand the conflict of loyalties his double life causes. And showing worse judgement still, he believes that the threat this knowledge would place on his beloved is of higher importance than telling her what’s actually happening. Big gong Spiderman. You are *so totally wrong. Not kissing her when she’s giving you every green light in the manual is unacceptable. Not turning up for her big time break on Broadway without a genuine excuse is unacceptable; and mumbling some lame excuse about ‘not noticing the time’ instead of just blurting out the truth is plain pathetic.

Any reasonable woman is far more likely to understand that you had to save 20 lives, rescue small and excruciatingly cute children from a burning tenement and stop police cars hurtling into large masses of innocent bystanders. And then if you’d mentioned the ‘no late entry policy’ on the theatre door when you arrived 15 minutes tardy, she’d have been purring. Everyone girl prefers the truth even if it is sometimes hurts a little.

And anyway, how do you know what she considers to be an acceptable domestic situation … Saying ‘go tiger’ as she pushes you out the window to rescue Manhattan from any number of deranged evil misfits might be her idea of marital bliss. Never presume Spiderman. There are occupational hazards attached to every profession …

Another glorious thing about this A-Grade Marvel of a movie is Alfred Molina (Diego Rivera of Frida fame) playing Doctor Otto Octavius/Doctor Octopus. Molina’s Doc Ock-bad guy is of Shakespearean proportion. Like Peter Parker he is a brilliant and tormented soul whose life has been devastated by a freak accident. Four nano-manufactured tentacles of undreamed of intelligence have been fused to his body. Worse, the over-ride microchip inserted at the top of our good scientist’s spine to ensure his control over these artificial appendages has been short circuited. In short, Doc Ock is just a regular kind of genius whose fate has morphed him into an eight tentacle-driven psychopath. It could have happened to anyone into extreme energy fusion experimentation on the end of an untimely energy surge. We all understand the capacity of an unexpected technical glitch to bring out the demons that lurk within.

If you’ve seen Harry and Shrek, go and see Spider-Man 2. Borrow a teenager if you must. Extreme good fun with some surprisingly tender moments.

As one critic mused: “It has some brutally violent scenes, and kissing”

Spiderman 2 website: http://spiderman.sonypictures.com
About CG | Editor: Kirsten Lowe | PO Box 559, Broadway 2007, Sydney, Australia
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