Spider-Man

A superhero film set in New York. Peter is at school. He takes photographs, nobody pays him attention, and he cannot say anything to the girl next door. On a school trip a spider bites him in a laboratory. The next morning he no longer needs glasses, he sticks to walls, and web comes out of his wrists. His first decision is to make money. He enters a wrestling bout, and that night his uncle is killed; he learns the killer is someone he could have stopped earlier. From there the film is a story about responsibility. Peter wears the mask not to make a living but because of that guilt. There is a father on the other side. Norman Osborn tests his own company's experiment on himself and splits in two; his son is Peter's closest friend. What the narrative is interested in is not power but identity: Peter cannot say who he is, and all the pain in the film comes from that. The upside-down kiss in the rain is its most remembered moment. One change was made in the adaptation. In the comics Peter invents the web shooter; in the film the web comes directly out of his body, and readers argued about it for a long time. The Green Goblin suit was made as real armour rather than by computer, and the actor wore it. The first teaser was withdrawn. It showed a web strung between the Twin Towers and was taken out of circulation after September 2001. It became the first film to pass a hundred million dollars in a single North American weekend. Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Willem Dafoe, James Franco and J. K. Simmons are in the cast. Sam Raimi directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants the warm, modest period of superhero films. Who it is not for: anyone expecting effects at today's level; the swinging sequences show their age.