Word: spider
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There are already signs that Maguire's life and career have changed dramatically. Just days after he showed up on 7,500 screens as Spider-Man, he appeared in the spotlight again--this time on the cover of a tabloid, walking arm in arm with Nicole Kidman. A headline screamed: NICOLE AND SPIDER-MAN RED-HOT ROMANCE! Maguire is a movie star now, and his life has become a spectator sport. He has been romantically linked to a leading lady (Spider-Man's Kirsten Dunst), and now he's a major player in the Kidman-Cruise celebrity-gossip sweepstakes...
Recipe for a May blockbuster: teen misfit falls in love, disobeys a sympathetic father figure, battles monsters and stumbles toward a complicated manhood. We doubt that the Spider-Man people swapped script notes with George Lucas and his Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones team; still, the similarities are striking. So, probably, are the eventual box-office numbers. Spidey has quickly scaled the Hollywood heights, but Lucas may be able to ward off this arach attack. Remember, folks: every previous Star Wars movie has been the top-grossing film of its year...
Like the army of clones deployed in Episode II, a gaggle of critics has already spread the news that the picture stinks. It doesn't. It has more action than either Spider-Man or the last Star Wars film, The Phantom Menace. It's gorgeously designed and color coordinated; the god who created this galaxy was working from a very rich palette. In its digital version (Clones will be shown on traditional film in most theaters), the image is shallow but sharp and subtle. If this is the future of movies--at least of epics with visual effects that make...
...probably the most repeated line from the movie Spider-Man: Peter Parker's ailing Aunt May asks her doting nephew not to work so hard. After all, she reminds him, "you're not Superman." The joke is on her, because we know that her nephew is in fact a superhero; but it's also on us, because she has pinpointed what we like about not only Spider-Man and his geeky-sweet alter ego Peter, but most of the masked marvels we've followed from the comics to the screen. We don't want our superheroes to be invulnerable Supermen...
...early 1960s, when Marvel Comics was introducing Spider-Man, X-Men and The Fantastic Four, the cold war had complicated America's optimism. Marvel's characters embodied the atom angst of the day: the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the Hulk owed their powers to radiation. (In the movie, the radioactive spider that bit Peter Parker is now bioengineered, perfect for the age of anthrax and cloning.) More important, Marvel characters had psychology. They were conflicted and were driven, like Peter Parker, by guilt (Peter is haunted by having inadvertently caused his uncle's death) rather than simple revenge...