Spider-Man

(2002) dir. Sam Raimi
viewed: 06/08/02 at Selma Theater, Selma, CA

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man is a pretty successful popcorn movie, the kind of thing that Hollywood is supposed to do well, but in reality flops at more often than not.

And in that sense, it’s a pretty successful film. The cast seems well-chosen. I like Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and Willem Dafoe, and they all pull their weight in the film (though it is indeed “light-weight” fare). They carry the film pretty well and it is pretty entertaining throughout.

However, the film’s digital sequences, which are pretty much all of the big action showpieces, seem far too much like video games. The animation is ambitious, attempting to switch between a fully digital (and masked) Spider-Man and back to the natural photographic image of the flesh-and-blood Tobey Maguire. But the animation lacks the depth and realism of the photographic sequences and settings (The film’s New York City location is often beautifully used, featuring many “flying” shots of the city from above). The contrast seems askew and the two forms fail to mesh on the whole.

It is possible to fault the animation’s failure to read as completely believable, as the movement of the characters lacks a naturalism that animation has always struggled to mimic. But it is a lot to ask of the animation to make believable a three dimensional human-like figure with weight and depth that is capable of fantastic impossible physical feats. It needs to look real while acting “unreal”.

A friend suggested that this lack of realism works just fine in that the actions depicted and the world of the film are obviously fantastic and unreal. It is, after all, depicting the stuff of comic books, simply, clearly fantasy. Perhaps it is the style matching the subject?

But I would disagree. At least, in this instance, I doubt seriously that the special effects are meant to be read as unreal. Though it is an interesting notion that the fantasy aspect might be meant to be purely unreal, a departure from the photographic, it seems unlikely that the filmmakers would not be attempting to achieve the utmost believability in their images, to make the fantastic so “believable” that it would be hard to imagine Spider-Man’s actions as impossible.

I believe that digital animation will become more and more able to mimic naturalism to a point that it would be virtually impossible to distinguish the digital from the photographic. And certainly, it becomes more so all of the time. This is just one instance in which the means have yet to achieve the (desired) end (result).

Amusingly, on the purely traditional photographic side of the film, the mushy emotional scenes in which Maguire is meant to emote are so painfully badly written, directed, acted, what-have-you, that they are jarringly hilarious. Their lack of believability is another story altogether.