Spider Man 2

Completely on a whim tonight after getting home from work, I decided to head down to see if I could get into an opening-night showing of Spider Man 2. Grabbed a book for the pre-show wait, wandered down to the theater…and apparently the 11pm show that I picked wasn’t the most popular show around, as there were only three people already waiting when I showed up around 10:30pm, and by the time the show started, the theater was only about half full.

Not that that’s really anything to complain about, of course, since it got me choice seating.

Overall, Spider Man 2 is a lot of fun. Walking home and turning it over in my head, I kept coming back to the same basic thoughts I had about Spider Man, to the point where I was starting to wonder if I could simply re-post my thoughts about the first film. Obviously, I’m not doing that — not least because after re-reading my Spider Man post, I’m not quite as wild about Spider Man 2 as I was about the first — but there are some definite similarities.

In both films, the action is in many ways the true star of the film. Tobey Maguire is still perfect as Peter Parker/Spider Man, Kirsten Dunst is still oh-so-yummy as Mary Jane, and Alfred Molina absolutely steals the show as Doc Ock. Once again, though, it’s Sam Raimi’s direction that shines through, and I really don’t think these films would be anywhere near as enjoyable with anyone else at the helm.

Doctor Otto Octavius is every bit as cool as I was hoping he’d be. The effects work on his cybernetic tentacles was incredibly done, and a character that stood a very good chance of ending up little more than laughable in being transitioned from the printed page to the screen instead became a very credible villain. In updating the good doctor to today’s world, the filmmakers dropped the idea of his controlling his extra arms telepathically (which I believe was the original idea) and instead have the arms controlled via a cybernetic link directly into the doctor’s spinal column. One of the tweaks I liked a lot was the addition of video cameras in the center of each arm’s ‘hand’, giving Doc Ock the ability to see anything one of his arms was pointing at. Nicely done, and it very much helps explain his ability to keep track of events going on around him during some of the melees that he and Spidey get into.

While the action sequences in general are certainly the high points of the movie — each of the battles between Spidey and Doc Ock are a blast to watch — there was one sequence that was by far my favorite. Just after the accident that permanently fuses the tentacles to Doc Ock’s body, he is taken to a hospital where surgeons plan to amputate the cybernetic apparatus in an attempt to save his life. The tentacles suddenly spring to life, and we’re thrust in to Sam Raimi at his lunatic best in a sequence that in many ways could be cut directly into The Evil Dead. With no music, the soundtrack filled with nothing but the screams, crashes, and general mayhem as the tentacles wreak havoc in the operating theater, Raimi pulls out all the stops and gives us all the crazy camera angles, whip-pans, zooms, and visual insanity that made the action sequences in The Evil Dead so much fun, and this fanboy ate up every single second of it.

As with the first film, though, Spider Man 2 is certainly not without its flaws. The abortive romance between Peter Parker and MJ often seems to just drag the film to a sudden halt whenever we switch back to their relationship — where Spider Man had a tendency to get overly-sappy, Spider Man 2 fails to give us any real reason why MJ would have any interest in Peter Parker at all. While the subplot is a necessity, both in motivating the characters to take some of their actions and in staying true to the original comic, it consistently fails to ever really engage the audience, and we’re left waiting for the villain to show up just to make things interesting again.

However, the biggest flaw for me was that the last ten minutes or so of the film didn’t feel like they were wrapping up the events at all — rather, it comes across as an extended trailer for the inevitable Spider Man 3. A pity, really, as even with its flaws, I’d definitely enjoyed the movie itself, and I ended up leaving the theater with a slightly sour feeling, as if the only thing missing before the credits rolled was a big “TO BE CONTINUED…” message splashed across the screen. These days, we all know that there’s likely going to be another chapter in the saga. Do we really need to have it beaten into our heads? Ah, well.

iTunes: “Pump Up the Volume” by M/A/R/R/S from the album Pump Up the Volume (1987, 7:12).