Spider-Man 2

Watching this movie has always been a good experience for me, and I feel, after watching the Hulk movie previously, this film does a similar thing to that one, in that it dives into our lead character's psyche, but this one focuses more on the strains that being a superhero has on his everyday life.

The story obviously has Spider-Man, played again by Tobey Maguire, trying to balance his life between being a superhero and being a civilian, and a lot of the movie actually focuses on that. But every superhero movie needs a supervillain, and we get an amazing one in the character of Doctor Octopus, played by Alfred Molina. There are also sequences about his relationships with Mary Jane Watson, played again by Kirsten Dunst, and Harry Osborn, played again by James Franco.

I'd say that, in a change from the first movie, it's more about the human drama than the action sequences. That's not to say the action sequences are bad, in fact, they're quite good and have a lot of spectacle and stakes behind them. Still, the fact remains that the character development takes center stage, with Peter having to learn to balance his superhero and civilian lifestyles without either of them falling apart being the main one. Doctor Octopus also gets a lot of sympathy as being a disgraced scientist who wants to make the world a better place but ends up letting his ego take over from his rational mind. Some of the best acting, surprisingly, comes from Rosemary Harris, who plays Aunt May. She feels like the emotional support to Peter when he's struggling and a major step up from how she was written in the first one. It is arguably one of Aunt May's strongest films, at least until the MCU version shows up, but even then, she shines in the few scenes she has.

Overall, this film is a lot more of a complex story that, just like Peter balancing his superhero and civilian lives, balances between human drama and superhero action flick. This is one of the greatest superhero movies of all time for this very reason, and a lot of it still holds up today.

Next time, we go back into the world of DC Comics with what I have heard is a bizarre take on a famous comic character, to the point that they barely seem to resemble their comic version at all. I guess we'll see what happens next time when I review Catwoman.

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