Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) is Citizen Kane for superhero movies

I recently did a rewatch of Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man film, and it made me realize how much of the film I’d forgotten. You have your classics that are impossible to forget: the moments that echoed out to be defining moments of the entire genre, like climbing the wall and the upside-down kiss. And then there are the memes that often pipe up like, “Go web” and “I'm something of a scientist myself.” But a lot of the actual events of the movie completely fell out of my head. And re-experiencing them in the context of the superhero films as we have them today was… wild.

For starters, the camp and drama of the film cannot be exaggerated. There are so many explosions that just happen. You can almost see the ‘Kablam!’ on the comic page; the explosions are so, almost casual. Like we’re not expected to think there are any further ramifications from Green Goblin just blowing something up. I think this is actually the way to go: in comic books, once the explosion is off the page, it’s like it never happened. It means we can focus on the more insane things, like the guy in green armor on a glider laughing like a maniac and the red and blue spandex man swinging through the city. Those are the interesting parts, not the explosions.

From the montage of Peter getting shots of himself as Spider-Man and J. Jonah Jameson’s everything to Green Goblin pretending to be a woman in distress to lure Spider-Man into a burning building, it really captures that silliness and that high-drama character work we expect from a comic book. Willem Dafoe’s work of Norman talking to the Goblin in the mirror is pure genius. And that’s just skilled acting and directing; there are no tricks of camera work or CGI. It’s just really good stuff.

That being said, not everything holds up. The pacing of the movie is weird, and I definitely did not remember how long the timeline of the movie was. I knew they started in high school; I fully didn’t remember that they graduated high school in the movie. They moved to New York, and everything happened so fast! I mean, it’s good. The time skip makes for a more reasonable timeline for Spider-Man to have accrued that much notoriety before the age of smartphones. But in a world where superhero movies feel so much more condensed, it was kind of jarring to be whipped along so fast. It kind of made it hard to really latch onto anything—I felt like the movie was just happening to me.

It also must be said that Peter Parker is not as funny as he needs to be. Peter Parker is the wisecracking web-slinger who doesn’t shut up, and this movie just does not deliver the humor the way I want it to. In a world where we have Andrew Garfield’s “My weakness! It’s small knives!” and Tom Holland’s “That thing does not obey the laws of physics at all.” it’s really hard to get behind mild-mannered Peter Parker. He tells some jokes, sure, but none that are one-liner-y enough for me to actually remember them. And, yes, the MCU has been criticized for its overuse of one-liners, but one-liners are comic-booky; fight me!

Even having said all this, it cannot be overstated what the original Spider-Man film did for superhero media as a whole. The way Citizen Kane plunged new frontiers in filmmaking and set a new precedent, so did Spider-Man (2002) with live-action superhero adaptations. The combination of practical and (at the time) cutting-edge CGI effects meant that audiences could truly be immersed in a world where superheroes were real for the first time. Audiences responded with such enthusiasm that it changed the face of not just superhero media, but all media forever. It’s the blueprint.

But, much like Citizen Kane, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to hold up to more contemporary audiences. I can’t imagine asking my eight-year-old nephew to sit down and watch this after he’s experienced the likes of Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Far From Home. Maybe, when he’s older, he’ll be able to watch the movie and appreciate it for its charms, but for now, he’d only think it was boring and had poor effects. He yells at me when my Minecraft lags! He would see the 2002 CGI and tear it to shreds!

That’s not to say that we should take the words of an eight-year-old as gospel, just that there’s something to be said for nostalgia here. It’s hard to find someone who didn’t watch these movies when they came out as kids and therefore loves them because of that nostalgia. It’s technically wonderful and definitely set the bar, but to me, it’s coming to a place where you have to watch the original Spider-Man trilogy because you have to watch it, like you have to watch Citizen Kane. But not necessarily because you like it.