Blyss's Movie Review for:

Cast of Characters:

Tobey Maguire.........Peter Parker/Spiderman

Kirsten Dunst..........M.J. Watson

Willem Dafoe.........Norman Osborn/Green Goblin

James Franco.........Harry Osborn

Cliff Robertson..........Ben Parker

Rosemary Harris.........Aunt May

J.K. Simmons.........J. Jonah Jameson

2002. Rated: PG-13. Genre: Action/Sci-Fi; 121 minutes

It's been a few weeks since I went to see this film. But I must talk about it because I feel so strongly about it. The story is of teenager Peter Parker who is an expert photographer. He never gets a break and gets picked on a lot in school. Then on a high school outing, he is bitten by a spider. The venom emitted from this strange spider does not kill him, but seems to give him special powers. Now he can walk on walls and swing on spider webs! At first Peter abuses his power, participating in a local wrestling man with steriod freak, Macho Man Randy Savage (I don't remember what his name was in the movie) so that he can buy a car to impress a girl (M.J., his one true love who already has a boyfriend). No one has ever beaten Savage, yet Peter does. But after his uncle dies because of Peter's abuse of power, he vows to only use his powers for good and not for personal reasons. Peter is best friends with the man that will become the Green Goblin's son. So it makes it twice as hard for him as he discovers arch villian Green Goblin's true identity.

There are a lot of scenes that I thought would disturb people in this film. Many catastrophes happened in New York in this movie. Yet even after the events of September 11th, people thought this film was great yet put down on movies about nuclear disaster like "The Sum of All Fears" even after the Green Goblin was going to use a nuclear-like device in the movie. I cannot seem to undestand the logic in this. Kirsten Dunst was a perfect pick for the character of M.J. However, when I think of Spider Man in the abstract, Tobey Maguire was not what I think of. I find him rather skinny and short to play Spider Man. Even after he "buffed" up for the role, he still did not seem good enough to me to be Spider Man. Not to mention that he had this tiny boyish sounding voice that was a little annoying. Don't get me wrong. He did play the drama in the role well, but to hear him talk to the Green Goblin, I thought he was lacking. It sounded like a little boy trying to stand up to a bully (Big Bad Green Goblin! :))

There were some awesome computer generated scenes in this film that did not seem to be computer generated. I only noticed two instances where you could tell it was a computer or something else artificial going on in the scene. There is one scene where a broken cable car is dangling. It looks like someone is dangling a toy. There is another scene where Spider Man jumps down on top of something and the motion is much too slow. The only thing that seemed to save this film to me was Dunst and Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin! Dafoe gave an outrageous performance! However, this seemed to be the greatest film since sliced bread to everyone....except to me. There were too many downfalls to make this film great to me. That is why I gave it the rating I did:

I rate this movie: 2!

Blyss