Review: Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Everything a superhero sequel wants to be: channeling all the greatness of its predecessor, intensifying its best features while jettisoning the rest, and thoughtfully deepening its characters and themes. Osborn’s maniacal, would-be father figure is replaced by Octavius’s tragic, former father figure (and Raimi and Molina indulgently ramp up the classic monster movie characterization to great effect). A quiet, sidelined Aunt May is replaced by an active, three-dimensional Aunt May. An awkwardly paired Mary Jane and Harry are replaced by complex, uniquely motivated characters that are both very much done with Peter’s shit.
And best of all, a passive Peter, acted upon by radioactive spiders, criminal muggers, and green goblins, is replaced by an active Peter who makes choices (however waveringly!) that determine his own fate and deals with their consequences accordingly… a lot like life! He tries to balance being a superhero with being a friend, nephew, photographer, delivery boy, and student. He tells Aunt May about his being responsible for Uncle Ben’s death. He abandons his alter ego to pursue his dreams. And finally he realizes the emptiness of any dream without Spider-Man and dons his alter ego once more.
A mark of a good character arc is the protagonist learning from their antagonist. Seeing his ex-mentor use his amazing abilities to pursue his dreams (however noble) at the expense of humanity helps Peter learn to balance his life and use his own amazing abilities to benefit humanity. But in a true triumph of heartfelt storytelling, Raimi doesn’t stop there. Our antagonist, in turn, learns from our protagonist! In the climactic moment, Peter passes along Aunt May’s wisdom about “staying steady” to Octavius, inspiring him to find the hero within, exercise agency over his life, take control of his amazing abilities (and the impressively menacing tentacles), and die not as a “monster” but, as May said, “with pride.”
Three of the greatest scenes in the whole genre can be found here: Aunt May’s touching monologue to Peter about the importance of heroism to the human struggle, the train fight and the passengers’ ensuing act of kindness toward Peter, and Mary Jane learning the true identity of Spider-Man, all written, shot, and performed with a brilliant subtlety that lends each moment a sense of gravitas and sincerity, and which all work so well, in part, because they exist alongside scenes that are unafraid to dwell on the ridiculousness of superheroes and lean into their inherent campiness. If Raimi knew the magic of Spider-Man is in balancing his super side with his human side, he also knew the magic of superheroes is in balancing their melodrama with their silliness.
It’s really Mary Jane’s character arc that structures the movie, culminating in her actively choosing to be with Peter, uniting his two identities, and accepting all the responsibility that entails. Among the most delightfully thematic details are the inverted shots of her bookending the movie; beginning with a slow zoom-out from her angelically-lit, perfect smile in a paper advertisement for her play and ending with a slow zoom-in to the flesh-and-blood Mary Jane looking out the apartment window with all-too-relatable uncertainty about her choice and its consequences.
That juxtaposition between the opening and closing shots; between the artificial and the real, the ideal and the practical, the perfect and the human is beautifully reflective of not only Peter learning his abilities are both a curse AND a gift, and not only of the whole trilogy’s emphasis on the difficulty (but nevertheless worthwhileness!) of doing the right thing, but of the entire ethos that drove Marvel’s fundamental reimagining of the superhero genre in the 1960s that said, “hey, superheroes are people too.”
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