Gone to America

Spiderman was always my favourite super hero – or at least, the one to whom I related most (the 1960s Batman will always have a special place in my heart). He was drenched more in irony than in tragedy. He was the superhero nerd. He wasn’t rich – he needed to sell photographs of himself in action to a newspaper that villified him to pay for his aunt’s medicine; he was constantly bullied, but couldn’t defend himself without revealing his secret; he couldn’t get the girl.
A very dramatic character. And the triumph of the first Spiderman movie was that it recognised this, and didn’t betray it. It acknowledged that Peter Parker was the interesting part – not the webslinger. But it was saddled with the burden of having to be a summer blockbuster of broad appeal – it needed to be an origin story, needed lots of explosions, needed not to be too ugly.
But it succeeded – wildly – and now they can push it a little. This film tells essentially the same story as the first one, but more so. Can Peter really sacrifice everything he wants in order to fulfil his perceived responsibilities? They can do it more dramatically this time around – in the previous movie, they had to spend quite a lot of time defining what his perceived responsibilities were before he could go around making choices about them, and here he just has them as the film begins. We can get going straight away. And boy, do we.
More swings, more roundabouts – Peter flirts perilously with happiness, and has a really, really bad day. He’s tested.
Other characters get their chance to shine, too. Harry Osborne is too mired in pain to even see straight. JJ Jameson is hilarious when he realises that he might be the one ultimately responsible for his son’s fiancee’s peril. And Doctor Octopus – well, Alfred Molina is almost always the best thing by far anywhere he appears, and he doesn’t disappoint. But the real miracle of the character is the way the CGI and other special effects relating to his flailing arms (they sound bloody amazing) complement and enhance his performance, to create a whole greater than the sum of it’s parts. It’s a real triumph of… well, of something really cool.
And it was great to watch it while here in NYC, a pleasure to be soon denied me. Although it does lead me to ask questions like “does the R train ever really go above ground in Manhattan?” (it doesn’t).
But that doesn’t matter. With a great story, a great villain, and Sam Raimi revisiting his distinctive visual style very effectively in certain sequences (the operating room, particularly), it’s hard to imagine how this could be better. I am a little worried about Spiderman 3, though. Have they blown it? Where can they go? I look forward to finding out.