I'm doing a marathon of the Raimi, Webb, and Watts films. I watched the first Raimi last night (for the first time since its initial release) and...well, let's just say my enjoyment of it has decidedly
not improved. Only enjoyable because of Simmons and Dafoe chewing up the scenery...and Octavia Spencer's pre-fame cameo!
I'm doing the same, and watched the first Raimi film this evening, which I don't believe I'd seen since the opening night in 2002. I was surprised to find my DVD case had an EB Games pre-owned barcode sticker; I didn't even buy it new, I must've bought it at work (I managed an EB Games store in Cary, North Carolina at the time the DVD came out).
I'm sure sure if Peter Parker was written as unsympathetic or if I was reading Tobey Maguire's documented dickishness into the role, but I really didn't like Peter here. I found him self-pitying and generally unpleasant. Maguire was playing a 17-18-year-old kid, close to a decade younger than he was, and maybe he was pitching his performance at being the "nice guy" high school kid who can't see that he's really the asshole, because that's how Peter Parker came across to me. If he hadn't been bitten by a genetically engineered Spider, it wasn't hard to imagine that this Peter would grow up to become a MAGA-hat wearing incel.
I didn't remember much about the film except the first half hour in broad strokes. I am struggling to articulate anything about the plot, because very little of it made any sense. I don't understand the motivations of Norman or the Green Goblin (who are effectively different characters), what they want, and how what they do will accomplish any conceivable end. I was struck by how reactive Peter was as a hero; he doesn't do anything to propel the plot forward, and he only defeats the Green Goblin because the Green Goblin keeps drawing him out and attacking him.
The fight scenes at the end -- the bridge and the park -- were visually incomprehensible to me, and the CGI of Spider-Man and the Green Goblin didn't convince at all.
In light of today's student debt crisis due to high school guidance counselors pushing Generation X onwards into college as the road to the middle class, a movie apparently set in 2002 having high school students talk about their futures
without college (as Peter and MJ do at the trash cans) was a WTF moment for me.
Next up for me,
Spider-Man 2.1, the extended cut to
Spider-Man 2, which I have not previously seen. (
Spider-Man 2 I've seen three times.)