Spider-Man – 2002
It has been a very long time since I have seen this movie, and I’m sorry to say, the effects don’t seem to hold up as well as I once thought they did. I think I have gotten used to modern super-hero movies that have much better effects, but it isn’t just that. I am comparing it to its peers, movies that came out around the same time or earlier, and the effects just weren’t as smooth. Were they terrible? No, of course they weren’t. But I saw better effects in earlier movies even from as far back as the mid-90s.
First, I’ll mention a few of the things I didn’t like, and then I’ll move on the good things. First off, I hated the way the movie’s villain was portrayed. Now, I know, this might have more to do with the costume design than the visual effects, but they are all kind of related. He was way too cartoonish. He looked like a stupid bad guy from the children’s TV show, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a style which was inspired by the old, low budget Japanese action show, Super Sentai. It looked ridiculous, in spite of Willem Dafoe’s very competent performance.
There were also several shots of Spiderman in action, where he looked too much like he was suspended on wires, just in the way that he moved. It was true that we had never seen anything quite like it before, but it looked too much like animation.
Still, I think those were the words offenders. They got a lot of stuff right. The shots of Spidey web-slinging his way between the buildings of New York were pretty cool. First, we had the wide shots that showed him swinging up and down between the buildings. These all had to be CGI shots, but they looked perfectly photo-realistic. But there were also the shots that were from Spiderman’s visual perspective, as if the audience was seeing through his eyes. Yes, I think the buildings speeding by were also CGI, but it was a very well-crafted effect!
The battle scenes were done pretty well, though nothing to rave about. There were two real scenes that stood out. There was the Green Goblin’s first attack, which had the ridiculously slow-falling balcony that waited until Spiderman could save Mary Jane, which reminds me. The effect in that scene of the Goblin’s pumpkin bomb that turned people into skeletons looked somehow cheesy, though I don’t think it was supposed to be. And there was the final battle at the end, in which The Goblin accidentally kills himself. Standard-fare action battle.
But a real cool scene that wasn’t really a battle was the one where Spiderman manages to save both MJ and a zip-line car full of screaming children from plummeting to their deaths. Of course, the scene wasn’t helped by the citizens of New York saving our hero by throwing debris and dumb one-liner zingers at the villain, but the action was pretty cool.