Spider-Man 2 puts Peter Parker through a mid-film collapse, giving up the suit and spending half an hour enjoying an ordinary life before the film takes it back off him. Alfred Molina’s Otto Octavius drives the plot as a good man whose intelligent mechanical arms override him once the safeguard keeping them obedient is destroyed, and Raimi stages the hospital sequence as outright horror rather than action.
The train rescue is the centrepiece: Peter halts a runaway elevated train, collapses, and is carried back inside by passengers who see his face, work out how young he is, and agree without discussion to say nothing. Mary Jane is given her own career and the closing decision, walking out of her own wedding to choose Peter with full knowledge of what that costs. Rated four out of five.
I did not like a large chunk of this film the first time I saw it, and I have since changed my mind. That’s unusual enough to be worth writing down, and it’s why this Spider-Man 2 review took two viewings and a fortnight longer than it should have. I have walked out of plenty of adaptations annoyed. I cannot remember the last time I walked back in and found I had been arguing with the wrong thing.
The sticking point was the middle. Peter gives up, drops the suit in a bin, and the film hands him half an hour of being happy about it. He sleeps properly. He passes his classes. He walks around town with a spring in his step and a soundtrack that thinks all of this is lovely. My reaction sitting in the cinema was that this is simply not Peter Parker. The character I have been reading for years does not run from responsibility, and that is more or less the entire point of him. He is the one who turns up when it costs him everything, every single time, and a version who bins the costume because he’s tired has stopped being the character.
Why I came round
I went again a week later, and the sequence plays completely differently once you know where it lands. The film is not endorsing any of it. It is showing you a man getting exactly what he says he wants and being quietly hollow inside it, and then it takes the whole thing away from him. Aunt May tells him about the boy up the road who needs somebody to believe in. He stands and watches a building burn with his hands in his pockets. The happiness is real and it is also the wrong life, and the film is patient enough to let both of those be true for a solid thirty minutes before he picks the suit back up with his eyes open. That’s a better arc than the one I was asking for. The version I wanted, where he never wavers, is the version where nothing is at stake and the ending is free.
What I had actually objected to was being made uncomfortable, which is not the same as the film getting him wrong. Thirty minutes is a long time to sit with a character doing the thing you have spent years admiring him for never doing, and I think that discomfort is the point rather than a miscalculation. I am still not entirely at ease with it. But it’s earned, and being wrong about it the first time was mostly me defending the comics against a film that turned out to understand them better than I did.
Molina is doing something the first film didn’t
Alfred Molina’s Otto Octavius is the best thing here and it isn’t close. What makes him work is that he isn’t a bad man who acquired powers. He is a good one, a scientist Peter genuinely admires, who straps four intelligent mechanical arms to his spine and then loses the one safeguard keeping them obedient. From that moment the arms are arguing with him and winning every round. Raimi shoots the hospital scene as outright horror, all shrieking metal and surgeons flung across the room, and it is comfortably the most frightening thing in either of these films.
So the villainy here is a man being overruled by something stronger sitting on his back. He is not choosing it, and the film never pretends he is. That reading is closer to the comics than people give it credit for, and if you go and look at what fans have written up about Octavius over the decades the tension between the scientist and the arms has been there in one form or another for a very long time. When the film finally gives him the choice at the end, having let him watch his own machine come within minutes of drowning a city, he chooses correctly and takes it down with himself inside it. He will not die a monster. A villain who gets to make the right call at the end of his own story is rarer than it ought to be, and Molina plays every stage of it, the grief included, without once tipping into camp. Willem Dafoe was magnificent because he was gloriously unhinged. Molina is doing the opposite thing and it works just as well.
The horror instinct runs wider than that one scene, too. The arms move like something out of a creature feature, all sudden lunges and skittering, and the sound design gives them a chattering metallic voice closer to insect than machine. When Octavius drags himself up a wall using them he moves wrong, and Raimi shoots him low and wide so he looms. None of that is what you would expect from a summer film with a toy line, and it’s exactly why Octavius carries weight that most of these villains don’t.
The train
The best sequence in either film, and I suspect people will still be talking about it in twenty years. Peter stops a runaway elevated train by planting his feet and taking the entire load through his arms until it grinds to a halt, and then he passes out and falls. What the film does next is the part that matters. The passengers catch him, carry him inside, and see his face. They go quiet, because he is a kid, and about half of them look like they wish they hadn’t seen it. Then they hand him back his mask and agree without any discussion to say nothing to anybody.
There is no music swell telling me how to feel. Just a carriage full of New Yorkers working out that the person who saved them is somebody’s son. It is everything the character is about, delivered in ninety seconds without a line of dialogue explaining it, and it is instantly iconic. Every Spider-Man film after this one is going to have to reckon with that scene, because it’s the one people will remember. It also quietly answers the middle act. He gave the job up because he thought nobody wanted it from him, and here is a train full of people deciding on the spot that they do.
There’s a lightness elsewhere that keeps all of this from curdling. The lift scene, where a stranger makes small talk with Spider-Man about the suit, is the funniest thing in either film. Bruce Campbell turns up. The pizza delivery is played as pure slapstick. Raimi’s range is wider than the first film let on, and here he uses the comedy to buy himself room for the horror rather than to undercut it.
What it costs him
The film is much better to Mary Jane than the first one was. She has her own life here, a career going well while his falls apart, and the engagement to somebody else is a real decision rather than a plot obstacle. Kirsten Dunst gets considerably more to do, and the ending belongs to her: she walks out of her own wedding, turns up at his flat, and tells him she has worked out what he is and is choosing it anyway. The last shot is her face at the window as he swings off, and it isn’t happy. She knows what she’s signed up for. That’s a more grown-up close than this genre usually manages. Harry gets the other good thread, sliding from grief into obsession, and the goblin equipment behind the wall is a properly cold note to leave him on. James Franco has been playing a long game across both films and playing it well.
The complaints are minor and I’ll keep them brief. Peter’s powers failing because he’s emotionally conflicted is convenient, even though the film commits to it hard enough to sell it. The science stopped pretending some time ago. Aunt May’s speech about heroes is the one moment where the film says out loud what it has otherwise demonstrated perfectly well without help. And the web-swinging still turns into an animation whenever the camera gets far enough away, which will date badly.
Four out of five. A better film than the first in most measurable ways, and I still think the first one has the more iconic half hour in it. This is the one with the best villain, the best single sequence and the most honest ending, and it also has a thirty-minute stretch in the middle that I had to watch twice before I stopped fighting it. Where the first film was a relief, this is a genuinely good film that happens to have a man in a costume in it. Raimi has now done this twice. I would like very much to see him do it again.