Spider-Man
December 2002 Reviewed by: Anthony Di Marco Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Adapting a comic book superhero for the big screen is a risky endeavor. Either the hero is made to look like a caricature that lacks any connection to reality, as in Batman Returns and Batman Forever, or an individual devoid of any human qualities, like The Phantom or The Shadow. Up until now Richard Donner’s Superman and Bryan Singer’s X-Men have stood as examples of the right way to do it. In each, characters that are not only sympathetic and human but also grounded in the realities of everyday life anchor the supernatural elements.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man follows in the footsteps of those two great comic-book adaptations. And although it does appear a bit thin at times, it succeeds in delivering some outstanding performances amid consistent action.

Leading the cast is highly affable Tobey Maguire -- an actor whose facial expressions can make even the weakest dialogue effective. The recent DVD release of the boring, low-budget 1996 film Joyride displays these abilities. Although the script is poor and its characters are wooden, Maguire’s capacity to present a likeable character, even one that exhibits deviant behavior, allowed me to sit through this piece of pap. How does he do it? It is all in his eyes and face.

Every emotion, whether it is joy, disappointment, sadness, or jovial glee, is conveyed through the expressive eyes and musculature of Tobey Maguire’s face. When Peter Parker learns that he can scale walls and leap from building from building, we not only hear shouts of joy on the soundtrack, but we see it in Parker’s expanding smile and sparkling eyes. When Peter learns of his uncle’s fate we see both pain and determination. When we see Peter struggling to approach his love, Mary Jane Watson, from afar, his expression registers both apprehension and desire. Maguire thinks, feels, and acts with very few words.

Unlike in Joyride, Maguire is not playing opposite wood in Spider-Man. Willem Dafoe plays Spidey’s split-personality archenemy, Green Goblin/Norman Osborn, with juicy flamboyance and disturbing schizophrenia. The mirror scene, where Dafoe plays opposite himself as both Goblin and Norman, is a knockout. That said, I wonder why someone thought concealing Dafoe’s naturally goblin-like facial features behind an unexpressive mask was a good idea.

Director Sam Raimi does a nice job of balancing the story’s action and character development, as well as successfully updating a few details from the original Spider-Man comic. Raimi does well to modernize Spider-Man’s origins from radioactive mutation to genetic aberration, as well as to replace the comic’s mechanical web shooters with more genetically accurate organic versions. I also enjoyed the way in which Raimi and his crew handled Parker’s "spidey sense." The scene involving a fight with the bully Flash Thompson is beautifully done.

Video and sound on both the widescreen and full-screen DVDs are very good. Like many newer transfers, Spider-Man’s images leave a little to be desired. Skin tones are excellent and colors exhibit nice saturation and clean edges, but I do see MPEG artifacts in some background elements, though these are not at a level that would suggest poor judgment on the compressionist’s part.

The audio was somewhat disappointing. Though dialogue and foley are very crisp and clear, I found the Dolby Digital mix doesn’t have the impact I’ve come to expect from a big-screen, superhero film. The X-Men soundtrack, for example, stands out as one of the best Dolby Digital mixes I have heard, conveying great dynamic range and impact. I also found composer Danny Elfman’s Batmanesque action cues for Spider-Man a little too derivative despite a strong start.

The majority of extras on this disc are good. My favorites deal with the history of the Spider-Man comics and several generations of artists, starting with the indelible Stan Lee. The commentary with Sam Raimi, Kirsten Dunst, and the film’s producers is good, despite having too much dead space between interesting tidbits. By comparison, the commentary with John Dykstra and his special-effects crew is very thorough, touching upon everything from various web designs to considerations of the difficulties they had replicating the random elements of real life in the digital domain. What I like less is some of the redundant information that spreads across one feature to another. For instance, I do not need to hear Stan Lee recounting how he came up with the idea for Spider-Man in three different extra features.

Spider-Man is not about deep thinking. Like Superman and X-Men, it is about sitting back and being sucked into fantasy elements that make comics so enjoyable. Believing that a man can leap tall buildings in a single bound or that a teenager can take on the attributes of a spider requires that the audience sympathize with the character. Thanks to the considerable talents of Tobey Maguire I was able to do just that.

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