Spider-Man (2002) and the Lost Language of the Superhero Movie

I recently rewatched Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), starring Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, because my children wanted to see the older Spider-Man films. I had not watched it in more than twenty years and remembered surprisingly little beyond the broadest pieces: the Green Goblin, the upside-down kiss and Spider-Man swinging between the buildings of New York.

What surprised me was not how old the film looked, but how old its storytelling felt. The visual effects have obviously aged, yet that hardly bothered me. Stranger was the melodrama, the broad characters, the casual comic-book science and a film almost completely unembarrassed to treat all of it seriously. After two decades of superhero films becoming increasingly skilled at making absurdity feel normal, Raimi’s Spider-Man now seems to belong to an adjacent genre.

I am not sure that makes it worse. But it does help explain why a film that was enormously successful in 2002 now feels so peculiar to me.

Official poster/DVD artwork for Spider-Man (2002). Used for purposes of review and commentary.

The best part is becoming Spider-Man

The basic story hardly needs much explanation. Peter Parker is an intelligent but painfully awkward teenager living with his aunt and uncle in Queens. He is bullied at school, in love with his neighbour Mary Jane Watson and generally more comfortable observing life than participating in it.

During a school visit to a scientific laboratory, Peter is bitten by a genetically engineered spider. He becomes ill, goes to sleep and wakes up transformed. His eyesight has corrected itself. His body has changed. He can climb walls, sense danger and produce webs. At roughly the same time, scientist and industrialist Norman Osborn, played by Willem Dafoe, is pushing an experimental enhancement technology further than he should, with rather more destructive consequences.

For me, the strongest part of the film is the period before those two stories properly collide, when Peter is simply discovering what has happened to him. He notices changes one at a time, accidentally produces webs, learns to climb walls and experiments with jumping between buildings. For a while there is no villain to defeat and no larger mythology to service. There is only the question that probably sits underneath most superhero fantasies: what would you actually do if you woke up tomorrow with powers?

Peter’s response is recognisably teenage. He is confused, excited and increasingly fascinated by himself. It was also here that my children began interrogating the plot more aggressively than I remembered doing when I first saw it. Their most obvious question was also the most mundane: why does Peter not go to a doctor?

He has been bitten by a genetically modified spider, becomes seriously ill, loses consciousness and wakes up with his body visibly altered and his eyesight spontaneously corrected. Peter’s response is essentially to investigate the changes himself and then go back to school.

Of course, there is no Spider-Man if Peter immediately checks himself into a hospital and spends the next several months surrounded by infectious-disease specialists and geneticists. But the question exposes something more interesting than a simple plot hole. Raimi’s film does not really ask us to imagine what such an event would look like in the real world. The genetically engineered spider functions more like an enchanted object in a fairy tale: Peter is bitten; Peter is transformed. The scientific vocabulary is modern, but the causality is mythological.

The same applies elsewhere. Norman’s experimental technology advances at whatever speed the story requires. Biological transformation happens almost instantly. Technical explanations exist mainly to move characters into their new roles. Superhero films never escaped this problem; later films simply became much better at surrounding implausibility with enough fictional machinery that audiences stopped noticing the joins.

A world drawn with thick lines

The larger obstacle for me is not the science but the people. Almost every character in Spider-Man seems drawn with unusually thick lines. Peter is not merely socially uncertain; his awkwardness is pushed almost into physical comedy. Flash Thompson is the archetypal American high-school bully. J. Jonah Jameson is a newspaper editor converted into pure volume. Norman Osborn eventually conducts conversations with his own reflection with the intensity of stage melodrama.

Mary Jane and Harry Osborn have more going on beneath the surface than those descriptions suggest. Mary Jane’s home life is unhappy, and Harry’s relationship with his father gives him his own mixture of insecurity and resentment. The problem is less that the characters have no psychology than that the film expresses that psychology through deliberately broad archetypes.

Sometimes it works brilliantly. J.K. Simmons’ Jameson is so exaggerated that the exaggeration becomes the point; his scenes have an energy that a more naturalistic performance might actually have destroyed. Elsewhere, I find the theatricality distancing.

This is especially noticeable in Peter himself. As Peter Parker, he can barely sustain a normal conversation with Mary Jane. Put on the Spider-Man mask and he quickly becomes confident enough to joke while fighting criminals. There is a perfectly plausible idea underneath this. Anonymity changes behaviour. The mask removes Peter from the social hierarchy in which he has spent years being ignored or humiliated. Spider-Man can say things Peter Parker cannot because Spider-Man does not have to face rejection afterwards.

But the film compresses that transformation so aggressively that we see the result more clearly than the process. His physical powers arrive overnight, which the premise can explain. His confidence sometimes seems to arrive almost as quickly. Spider-Man and Peter Parker therefore occasionally feel less like two sides of the same developing personality than two performances the film has not yet fully reconciled.

The villain is psychologically stranger than the hero

Norman Osborn is more interesting because his transformation works in the opposite direction. He is not introduced as an innocent man suddenly turned evil. He is already ambitious, impatient and willing to take dangerous shortcuts when his work is threatened. The experiment does not create those qualities so much as release them from restraint and give them another voice.

A similar tragic structure appears in several of Raimi’s Spider-Man villains. Ambition, grief, resentment or professional obsession pushes recognisable people into increasingly destructive behaviour. The villain may be someone who could have remained ordinary under slightly different circumstances.

That is psychologically more convincing than the abstract supervillain who simply wants power or destruction. People rarely decide one morning that they would like to become evil. They rationalise. They respond to humiliation or fear. They convince themselves that one compromise is necessary and discover that the next is easier.

The oddity is that this relatively sophisticated idea exists inside a film whose emotional world is otherwise so stylised. Norman’s deterioration contains more ambiguity than the exaggerated performance initially suggests, while much of the ordinary world around him behaves according to simpler comic-book rules. I can recognise that this theatricality is deliberate without finding it particularly effective. Fidelity to a comic-book sensibility explains a creative choice; it does not require the viewer to enjoy it.

Before superheroes learned to hide their absurdity

This is where comparing Spider-Man with later Marvel films becomes useful. The difference is not that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is more realistic. A franchise involving Norse gods, alien armies, magic stones, talking raccoons and multiple universes has little claim to realism. What Marvel became extraordinarily good at was naturalising absurdity.

Characters speak conversationally about impossible events. Governments create agencies to regulate superheroes. Scientists provide technical explanations for things that are fundamentally magic. Bureaucracies appear around the extraordinary. Most importantly, characters themselves are usually allowed to recognise when a situation is ridiculous.

Humour becomes part of the mechanism. A dramatic declaration is followed by a joke. A bizarre costume attracts comment. Someone responds to an impossible event with the kind of bewilderment the audience might feel. The film reassures us that its characters occupy something resembling our social reality even when its physics have completely departed from it.

Raimi’s Spider-Man mostly refuses that reassurance. It still comes from a world in which superpowers can look impossible because the setting around them has not yet normalised the impossible. People make speeches. Villains cackle. Newspaper editors shout. Romantic longing is accompanied by swelling music and extended looks. The New York of the film is less a simulation of an ordinary city into which superheroes have appeared than a comic-book New York translated into live action.

In retrospect, that makes the film look like a bridge between different traditions of superhero cinema. It arrived after the heightened worlds of Christopher Reeve’s Superman and Tim Burton’s Batman, but before the Marvel house style made superheroes feel like permanent residents of contemporary everyday life. Raimi still lets the comic book show through.

Did Spider-Man age badly, or did superhero movies change?

Calling an old film “dated” is suspiciously convenient because the viewer has aged too. I was roughly two decades younger when Spider-Man appeared. My tolerance for broad performances may have changed, and the storytelling conventions I have absorbed certainly have. Twenty-four years of films, television and games inevitably alter what feels natural on screen.

There is also a problem peculiar to influential works. A film can begin to look conventional precisely because later films adopted parts of its vocabulary. Spider-Man was one of the major commercial successes that helped establish the modern superhero blockbuster, years before Iron Man and The Avengers turned the interconnected superhero universe into Hollywood’s dominant franchise model.

Yet that historical importance does not mean the film now feels like the movies it helped make possible. Quite the opposite. The effects are not what date it most strongly for me, nor is the simple plot. It is the emotional register: the bullying, the romance, Norman’s madness and Peter’s awkwardness are all pushed towards melodrama, while the moral lessons arrive without much protective irony.

For a viewer accustomed to blockbusters that routinely acknowledge their own absurdity, that can feel awkward. But the same quality gives Spider-Man something increasingly unusual in large franchise films: it is almost completely unembarrassed by itself.

The virtue of being ridiculous

Many modern franchise blockbusters seem nervous about sustained sincerity. A character says something emotionally direct and somebody else makes a joke. A dramatic moment risks becoming too earnest and the script punctures it. The audience is repeatedly assured that the people making the film know perfectly well how ridiculous superheroes are.

Spider-Man offers much less protection. When it wants to be romantic, it is romantic. When it wants to deliver a moral lesson, it delivers one. When Willem Dafoe needs to stare into a mirror and argue with another version of himself, the film gives him the mirror and lets him go.

There is something admirable about that confidence, even when I dislike the result. It also creates a problem for my own criticism. I find many of the characters too broad and the emotional beats too heavily signposted, yet those are among the qualities that make the film recognisably Raimi’s. Calling it simply bland therefore misses something. The filmmaking is not bland at all; it is often bizarrely excessive.

What feels bland to me is the characterisation underneath that excess. The people frequently seem schematic even when the filmmaking around them is anything but. Perhaps that is why Peter discovering his powers still works best. For a brief period the archetype becomes specific: a teenager wakes up in a changed body and experiments with what it can do. The superhero mythology has not yet swallowed the person inside it.

A film that has aged visibly

I still do not particularly enjoy Spider-Man. Peter’s discovery of his abilities remains charming, Willem Dafoe commits completely to Norman Osborn, and J.K. Simmons turns caricature into one of the film’s strengths. The central idea of an insecure young man acquiring enormous power and discovering that power creates obligations rather than freedom remains an excellent basis for a story.

But much of the film leaves me strangely detached. The performances are too broad for my taste, the narrative logic is often paper-thin, and Peter’s transition from anxious teenager to confident masked hero happens more smoothly than his psychology quite supports.

After rewatching it, though, I am less convinced that Spider-Man has simply aged badly. It may be more accurate to say that it has aged visibly. Later superhero films became extremely good at concealing the absurdity of their premises beneath conversational dialogue, irony, pseudo-scientific explanations and increasingly elaborate fictional institutions. Raimi’s film leaves much of the machinery exposed. Its genetically engineered spider is barely less magical than a poisoned apple. Its villain belongs partly to psychological tragedy and partly to pantomime. Its romance is sincere enough to risk embarrassment.

I still do not particularly like the result. But after twenty-four years, what once looked like ordinary blockbuster filmmaking now looks unmistakably transitional: a superhero movie made before the genre learned to hide its comic-book machinery. The language has not vanished, but it is no longer the default—and that may be why Spider-Man feels stranger to me now than its ageing effects ever could.