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Spider-Man 2, 2004
Peter Parker/Spiderman (Tobey Maguire) is having a rough go of things. Fired from his job as a pizza delivery driver, on the rocks with newspaper owner J Jameson (JK Simmons), watching his Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) slide into financial problems, coping with his estrangement from troubled friend Harry Osborn (James Franco), and maybe worse of all, watching the woman he loves, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) in a relationship with a new guy (Daniel Gillies). As the pressure mounts on Peter from all sides, he questions whether or not he even wants to continue in his role as a hero. Unfortunately, scientist Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) is on the brink of a major discovery and has been taken over by a nefarious artificial intelligence. No matter what Peter does, his personal and "professional" lives seemed doomed to bleed into one another.
I saw the first Spiderman film in the theater when it first came out. While it was . . . fine . . . it did not inspire me to check out the sequels. This film made our best of the 2000s list, and I know that it has pretty good word of mouth. Honestly, I thought it was a very pleasant surprise.
A stand-up comedian described her experience with Marvel movies as "a bunch of happy meal toys punching each other on a big rock for three hours." While I have enjoyed some of the superhero films of the last 20 years, I definitely think that many of them get the balance between character and spectacle totally wrong, stranding half-baked relationship dynamics in a flood of overlong, consequence-less CGI slugfests.
The depth of character development in this film--elevated by some really strong performances--is really the best part of it. Every action sequence in the film has a consequence, either for Spiderman, for Peter, or for both. Peter grows increasingly anxious about the impact that his heroism may have on his loved ones. Octavius is a personal friend, Harry is going off the rails, and both Mary Jane and Aunt May frequently find themselves in the path of various flying debris. Peter keeps his double life a secret from everyone, but this means that through the whole film, everyone expresses disappointment in his lack of reliability. (I loved a recurring joke that Mary Jane has landed a beauty campaign, and so Peter is constantly haunted by her image, including one sequence where a hundred Mary Janes judge him as he walks down the street).
And while Molina's Octavius doesn't get quite the same amount of time, Molina and the writers wring everything they can out of those moments of quiet character development, giving us a tragic villain with dimension and understandable motivations. The toxic mix of pride and guilt that Octavius feels after his first failed experiment makes him vulnerable to the whispers of his AI tentacles.
Overall the action sequences and the CGI look pretty good. The whole film has a very "animated" comic feel to them, and the look of the effects fits pretty well into the overall vibe of the film. The action sequences are easy to follow, and they get some heft because there is always a consequence tied to each one.
There's a great wealth of fun bit parts, from Aasif Mandvi as Peter's disappointed pizza place boss to Bruce Campbell as an unfuriatingly snobby usher.
My only real complaint is that some of the characters are just present enough that it feels like they should be developed more. Harry is obviously here just to be a through-line between the first and third films. But Mary Jane and Aunt May (and actually all of the female characters) mainly seem to be there to be confused and land in mortal danger. I wish that the proportion of time that was spent with both of them knowing Peter's identity had been greater. Mary Jane get a lot of screen time, but she's mostly saying the same thing over and over again. Dunst is able to make this baffled injury work because she's so good, but it feels as if more could have been done with her character. A relationship has two sides, and so Mary Jane can't really make a decision about her relationship with Peter until she has the facts.
Overall, though, I really liked this film. It had the intelligence to know when to let there be a quiet moment, and the strength in its actors to make those moments work. I really can't say enough about Molina, whose portrayal of Doc Ock might be my favorite portrayal of a superhero villain.
Spider-Man 2, 2004
Peter Parker/Spiderman (Tobey Maguire) is having a rough go of things. Fired from his job as a pizza delivery driver, on the rocks with newspaper owner J Jameson (JK Simmons), watching his Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) slide into financial problems, coping with his estrangement from troubled friend Harry Osborn (James Franco), and maybe worse of all, watching the woman he loves, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) in a relationship with a new guy (Daniel Gillies). As the pressure mounts on Peter from all sides, he questions whether or not he even wants to continue in his role as a hero. Unfortunately, scientist Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) is on the brink of a major discovery and has been taken over by a nefarious artificial intelligence. No matter what Peter does, his personal and "professional" lives seemed doomed to bleed into one another.
I saw the first Spiderman film in the theater when it first came out. While it was . . . fine . . . it did not inspire me to check out the sequels. This film made our best of the 2000s list, and I know that it has pretty good word of mouth. Honestly, I thought it was a very pleasant surprise.
A stand-up comedian described her experience with Marvel movies as "a bunch of happy meal toys punching each other on a big rock for three hours." While I have enjoyed some of the superhero films of the last 20 years, I definitely think that many of them get the balance between character and spectacle totally wrong, stranding half-baked relationship dynamics in a flood of overlong, consequence-less CGI slugfests.
The depth of character development in this film--elevated by some really strong performances--is really the best part of it. Every action sequence in the film has a consequence, either for Spiderman, for Peter, or for both. Peter grows increasingly anxious about the impact that his heroism may have on his loved ones. Octavius is a personal friend, Harry is going off the rails, and both Mary Jane and Aunt May frequently find themselves in the path of various flying debris. Peter keeps his double life a secret from everyone, but this means that through the whole film, everyone expresses disappointment in his lack of reliability. (I loved a recurring joke that Mary Jane has landed a beauty campaign, and so Peter is constantly haunted by her image, including one sequence where a hundred Mary Janes judge him as he walks down the street).
And while Molina's Octavius doesn't get quite the same amount of time, Molina and the writers wring everything they can out of those moments of quiet character development, giving us a tragic villain with dimension and understandable motivations. The toxic mix of pride and guilt that Octavius feels after his first failed experiment makes him vulnerable to the whispers of his AI tentacles.
Overall the action sequences and the CGI look pretty good. The whole film has a very "animated" comic feel to them, and the look of the effects fits pretty well into the overall vibe of the film. The action sequences are easy to follow, and they get some heft because there is always a consequence tied to each one.
There's a great wealth of fun bit parts, from Aasif Mandvi as Peter's disappointed pizza place boss to Bruce Campbell as an unfuriatingly snobby usher.
My only real complaint is that some of the characters are just present enough that it feels like they should be developed more. Harry is obviously here just to be a through-line between the first and third films. But Mary Jane and Aunt May (and actually all of the female characters) mainly seem to be there to be confused and land in mortal danger. I wish that the proportion of time that was spent with both of them knowing Peter's identity had been greater. Mary Jane get a lot of screen time, but she's mostly saying the same thing over and over again. Dunst is able to make this baffled injury work because she's so good, but it feels as if more could have been done with her character. A relationship has two sides, and so Mary Jane can't really make a decision about her relationship with Peter until she has the facts.
Overall, though, I really liked this film. It had the intelligence to know when to let there be a quiet moment, and the strength in its actors to make those moments work. I really can't say enough about Molina, whose portrayal of Doc Ock might be my favorite portrayal of a superhero villain.