Spider-Man followed the dictum that Stan Lee demanded of all his superheroes – that they be superheroes that faced real world problems. Spider-Man’s world-shattering battles with the Green Goblin and Dr Octopus would be beset by a cold, Aunt May’s health problems or having to meet an essay deadline the next day at school. In the very first story we met Spider-Man, an episode faithfully recreated in the film here, he exhibits disinterest in helping apprehend a petty hood, only for the same hood to then kill his Uncle Ben.

Spider-Man has often been in the eye of the media, with at least three different animated tv series made at various points between the 1960s and 1990s. Spider-Man even appeared as a live-action character in the children’s educational tv series The Electric Company between 1974 and 1977, where he was played by Danny Seagren. The character was incarnated in a live-action tv series The Amazing Spiderman (1977-9), which only lasted for one season. The Amazing Spiderman series was clearly trying to capitalize on the popularity of various superhero tv series of the era – The Six Million Dollar Man (1973-8) and Wonder Woman/The New Adventures of Wonder Woman (1975-9). There Spider-Man was played by Nicholas Hammond in a series of drearily dull adventures fighting against various petty hoods – but never any super-villains – in routine crime dramas. Audiences outside the United States had the pilot episode served up to them in theatres as Spider-Man (1977) and then had to endure two further cinematic releases, Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) and Spiderman and the Dragon’s Challenge (1980), recut from episodes of the tv series.

Ever since the tv series, Spider-Man has been tossed around as a big-budget cinematic feature. It was taken up as a property by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, who had purchased Marvel Comics as a subsidiary. (Corman and New World also produced a low-budget version of Marvel’s The Fantastic Four (1994), which still remains officially unreleased because of legal complexities over the long-planned big-budget Fantastic Four [2005]). The rights passed back and forward between New World and Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus’s Cannon Films, producers of numerous Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson action films and one very cheap comic-book superhero adaptation Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987). Various directors had been attached to the project – everybody from Tobe Hooper of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) fame to Joseph Zito, director of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) and Stephen Herek, director of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). A longtime contender for the project was low-budget sf-action director Albert Pyun, director of Cyborg (1989) and Nemesis (1993) and the thoroughly miserable comic-book superhero adaptation of Captain America (1990). The most interesting name attached was that of James Cameron, director of The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009) who was a childhood fan of the comics and expressed a longtime desire to do the Spider-Man film for much of the 1990s but eventually found the project wound up in too much legal red tape between the various copyright holders to clear the rights. Apparently, the script for this version of the film here was directly based on James Cameron’s script but Cameron lost credit due to Writer’s Guild arbitration.

Come the new millennium and suddenly there was a slate of Marvel Comics films adaptations first with Blade (1998) and then Bryan Singer’s dynamic, highly successful adaptation of Marvel’s X-Men (2000). The success of X-Men brought interested parties out of the woodwork and willing to resolve their differences and suddenly the Spider-Man project was go. The twin successes of X-Men and Spider-Man was soon followed by a host of other Marvel Comics adaptations, including Daredevil (2003), Hulk (2003), The Punisher (2004), Elektra (2005), Fantastic Four (2005), Man-Thing (2005), Ghost Rider (2007), Iron Man (2008), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Thor (2011) (2011), The Avengers (2012), as well as a good many sequels and other Marvel projects waiting in the wings.

Enter Sam Raimi, a genre director who first emerged as an unknown two decades earlier with the full tilt, high-energy horror film The Evil Dead (1982) and its hilariously over-the-top sequel The Evil Dead II (1987). Sam Raimi is clearly a comic-book fan and had previously made the superhero movie Darkman (1990), which consciously drew upon the broodingly Gothic stylistic influences of the modern graphic novel. Furthermore, Sam Raimi’s production company, Renaissance Pictures, best known for the enormous successes of tv’s Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994-9) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), have made several televised forays into superherodom, most notably with the series M.A.N.T.I.S. (1994-6) and two direct-to-video Darkman sequels.

Spider-Man was a huge hit upon opening – it, in fact, outgrossed Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), which only emerged a few weeks after it did. There is much fun to be had in the film. The special effects and stunt people have a field day – Sam Raimi’s camera gets right in there sweeping along with Spider-Man in effortless three-dimensional loops and swoops through the air, leaping from building to building, wrapping around telephone poles and the like. (It is also nice to see John Dykstra, the original visual effects supervisor on Star Wars (1977), back at work again after having fallen silent for nearly a decade). Cinematic superheroics have always had a certain problem, at least up until the 1980s, in trying replicate the grandiose superheroism of the feats that take place on the drawn page. Two perfect examples might be the tv series The Adventures of Superman (1953-8) and the aforementioned The Amazing Spiderman, both of which brought superheroic characters to life only to fail to create epic enough opponents or battles for them, at most having the characters punch through a wall to apprehend run of the mill criminals. In terms of cinematic superheroics, things rarely get more epic in scope than the sequence here with the Green Goblin atop a bridge forcing Spider-Man to choose between saving Mary Jane and a falling cable car of innocent people.

On the other hand, beyond the exhilarating web-slinging superheroics and lightning paced acrobatics, Spider-Man does not quite work. Perhaps one can make the peculiar criticism that Spider-Man is too much of a comic-book of a film. Which, one supposes, is exactly what it sets out to be. However, all the great examples comic-book superheroes on film – Superman (1978), Superman II (1980), Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), The Crow (1994), X-Men, The Dark Knight (2008) – work because they are more than superhero films, they engage with something beyond the comic-book. This is usually the advantage that film can bring, namely to insert real people into the costumes – be it the earnest boyscout sincerity of Christopher Reeve in the Superman films, the urgent driven psychological complexities of the Batman movies or the intensity of Hugh Jackman at the centre of X-Men. Spider-Man has the near perfect casting of Tobey Maguire in the title role – Maguire is all gloopy, lost puppy dog cuteness. Neither boyishly handsome nor ruggedly superhuman, he projects just the right sort of gawkish innocence that the part requires. Beyond Tobey Maguire however, Spider-Man seems perfunctory. The romance with Kirsten Dunst tries hard – there’s the almost kinky image of Dunst kissing Tobey Maguire with the lower half of his spider mask unveiled as he hangs upside down from a fire escape – but the depths that Raimi invests the film with are shallow. After all the build-up, the resolution the romance finally reaches in the last scene is a considerable wet blanket. David Koepp’s script has made a modicum of effort to invest it with some psychological realism and depth. It is just, one feels, that Sam Raimi’s typical approach gets in the way.

Sam Raimi is an interestingly schizophrenic talent. The Evil Dead was a ferocious splatter film but his subsequent films – the flop Coen Brothers collaboration Crimewave (1985) and The Evil Dead II – became increasingly more cartoonish to the point where the third Evil Dead film Army of Darkness (1992) is more comedy than it is ever horror. Even Raimi’s dark and ‘serious’ superhero film Darkman is underscored by moments of black humour and bizarrely cartoonish effects. After Army of Darkness, Raimi left fantastic cinema behind and seemed to be making a concerted effort to become a ‘serious’ filmmaker with the Western The Quick and the Dead (1995), the excellent thriller A Simple Plan (1998) – still his best film, and the increasingly banal likes of the Kevin Costner baseball drama For the Love of the Game (1999) and the clairvoyant thriller The Gift (2000). Certainly, by the time of For the Love of the Game and The Gift, Sam Raimi’s films had become so boringly respectable and so clearly intended for the Middle American Academy Awards voter crowds, that it was high time that Raimi revisited his genre roots to rediscover what it was that made the Evil Dead films work.

And that is exactly what Sam Raimi does in Spider-Man – sort of. Raimi has the greatest fun with the acrobatics, fight scenes and the camera-leaps through the Manhattan skies. Unfortunately, Spider-Man needed to be more than that and when it comes to the psychological depth, Raimi only inserts mawkishly simplistic emotional cues – Aunt May saying her prayers just before the Green Goblin bursts in, the good passers-by on the bridge booing and pelting the Green Goblin, the winsome earnestness of the romantic scenes and so on. David Koepp’s script sets up a complex tangle of romantic interests and jealousies between Peter, Spider-Man, Mary Jane, Osborn and Harry Osborn but rather than an attempt to render psychological depth to the various characters, as say the psychologically interwoven complexity of the relationship between Batman and The Joker in the 1989 Batman and especially in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, everything seems contrived around the level of Melrose Place (1992-9)-type melodrama.

As in Darkman, which tried to mimic Batman’s dark psychology, Sam Raimi tends to insert ludicrously melodramatic effect in lieu of psychological motivation. This is no better demonstrated than when it comes to The Green Goblin. Rather than take the character down to its psychological roots and discover the things that drives him, all that Raimi does is resort to extraordinarily corny devices to demonstrate the Goblin’s psychological split such as having good and bad Willem Dafoe’s arguing with themselves in a mirror or he talking to a green mask sitting on a chair. Stripped of psychological complexity and depth, all that the Green Goblin consists of is a stuntman in a green suit and an overacting Willem Dafoe.

Raimi himself seems not unlike his characterization of the Green Goblin – a character who is split between two people, one being a lunatic who loves splatter and cartoons and has the greatest of glee contriving slapstick scenes and macabre jokes, and the other who makes films like A Simple Plan and For the Love of the Game, a boy who believes in decent ordinariness and who wants earnestly to be accepted by the respectable establishment. Spider-Man’s failings are that Sam Raimi can never manage to find a ground that allows him to merge the two extremes. Or rather, that when they do, they merge on the level of mawkish naivete that a children’s film operates on. The trouble with Spider-Man is that it needed Sam Raimi to have employed some of the winsome earnestness and plaintive honesty that he managed to invest A Simple Plan and The Gift with rather than feel the need to write the film down to a simplistic level while indulging the comic-book side of himself.

In fact, one wishes that Spider-Man had been directed by its scriptwriter David Koepp. David Koepp has written a number of commercial films of recent years, including Jurassic Park (1993), Mission: Impossible (1996) and one other quite good superhero film The Shadow (1994). However, it is as director with his three excellent films so far, the downfall of civilization drama The Trigger Effect (1996), the ghost story Stir of Echoes (1999) and Secret Window (2004) and to a lesser extent the comedy Ghost Town (2008), that Koepp has demonstrated he is a director of considerable finesse. If only they had employed David Koepp rather than Sam Raimi, Spider-Man might have emerged as a genuine classic.

Sam Raimi and most of the cast (but not David Koepp) returned with two sequels Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), both of which do things far more successfully than this film. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) was long announced, wavering between whether it would involve return appearances from Sam Raimi and all the principals but is now a complete reboot with Andrew Garfield inheriting the role of Peter Parker. Spider-Man was parodied in Superhero Movie (2008).

Sam Raimi’s other genre films as director are:- The Evil Dead (1982), Crimewave (1985), The Evil Dead II (1987), Darkman (1990), Army of Darkness (1992), The Gift (2000) and Drag Me to Hell (2009). Raimi also co-wrote the Coen Brothers fantasy film The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). Raimi also heads Renaissance Productions that have produced the films Lunatics: A Love Story (1991), Hard Target (1993) and Timecop (1993) and the tv series M.A.N.T.I.S. (1994-6), American Gothic (1995), Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994-9), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), Young Hercules (1998-2000), Cleopatra 2525 (2000-2) and Jack of All Trades (2000-1). Raimi has also formed the Ghost House Pictures production company and co-produced the likes of The Grudge (2004), Boogeyman (2005), The Messengers (2007), Rise (2007), 30 Days of Night (2007) and The Possession (2011), as well as the tv series Legend of the Seeker (2008-10) and 13: Fear is Real (2009).

(Winner for Most Overrated Film, Nominee for Best Actor (Tobey Maguire) and Best Special Effects at this site’s Best of 2002 Awards. No. 1 on the SF, Horror & Fantasy Box-Office Top 10 of 2002 list).