In the Flesh: Spider Man (2002)

After two decades of Disney’s formulaic corporate superhero sludge, going back to the movie you could argue started it all is an almost surreal experience. Sam Raimi’s Spider Man bears little resemblance to the movies it inspired, its gee-whiz earnestness and enthusiastic embrace of its comic book origins via double exposure, split diopter, and other panel-reminiscent filming techniques a far cry from today’s studiously indifferent visual blandness. Even without the flattering comparison, though, Raimi’s flick stands on its own as a loud, exciting, colorful banger of a summer blockbuster. It’s not a deep movie by any means, but what elevates it more than anything else is its class consciousness, the struggling working class Peter Parker (Toby McGuire) both entangled and juxtaposed with rapacious scientist-capitalist Norman Osborne (Willem Dafoe), its earliest scenes concerned with economic jealousy and inequality along with uncle Ben’s (Cliff Parker) unemployment and its ramifications for the Parker household.

Raimi’s boyish love of moving his camera around at ridiculous speeds serves him well here. Scenes of Spider Man hurtling down the steel and concrete canyons of New York feel like something out of the Mugar Omni Theater, yanking the bottom out of your stomach and slowing only for perilous scenes of momentum-building. Even the shaky CGI gets mostly smoothed out by the sheer velocity of the film’s effects shots, and Raimi makes heavy use of traditional practical effects as well. Combined with the film’s relatively small dramatic stakes, it fosters a sense of realism and precarity that meshes well with the class overtones that form its backdrop. Spider Man is a citizen with the love of the people, the Green Goblin is Elon Musk piloting an attack helicopter on PCP. Classic ‘cause it works!

The rest of the casting is pretty much immaculate, too. James Franco was born to play an arrogant, slightly dimwitted failson, Kirsten Dunst exudes the most powerful Girl Next Door energy imaginable, and Rosemary Harris gives kindly Aunt May a backbone of working-class steel. It hardly needs to be said that J. K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson is probably the single best-cast actor in any superhero movie, his hard-voiced bluster so effective a smokescreen that when push comes to shove and he puts his literal life on the line to protect a source it comes as a genuine surprise. With Danny Elfman’s lively, fantastical scoring and a final fight sequence that reads as cape comics via Evil Dead 2, Raimi’s Spider Man more than justifies its existence as a big, loud, hammy, dramatic good time, which is more than you can say for almost every superhero movie since.