Spider-Man

Everything feels more real and urgent, it actually feels more human than some live-action films we get to see.

To me the only marvel about this Marvel Comics cinema hero is that Americans should be going to see him in such large numbers.

It's the unexpectedness of finding a genuine couple of young lovers caught in its web that turns spectacle into sympathy and restores life-size emotion to outside imagination.

Spider-Man is an almost-perfect extension of the experience of reading comic-book adventures.

With earnest, unpretentious delivery, Maguire is an eminently likable hero audiences will root for from his earliest moments as the class wimp.

At its best, Spider-Man takes the adolescent yearning at the heart of most superhero sagas and gives it a lovely swing.

From Willem Dafoe’s menacing Green Goblin to the absolutely iconic Spider-Man/Mary Jane upside-down kiss, this film really did set the standard for what Marvel films should be.



Amiably impersonal, painless yet fundamentally forgettable.

The first Spider-Man isnt the best of Raimis three Spidey films, but it's a very important film, one that set the template for how Marvel superhero movies would look for the next 20 years. (20th anniversary)

The 2002 Spider-Man film is crucial for how it changed both blockbusters and the superhero genre for generations to come.