I watched Spider-Man last night (for the first time) on DVD, loaned to me by Julie. It was good, but perhaps not as good as I was hoping. That's not to say that I didn’t like it, but it didn't contradict my rule of thumb that The best action movies are rated R ;).
The character development was good, and I’m pleased that Sam Raimi was able to stay true to the Spider-Man of the comics. I’m still not sure how I feel about the organic web-shooters, but I suppose they still make more sense than mechanical ones.
I had always heard that even though the CG sometimes looked a bit lame in the trailers, the CG-Spidey was believable in the context of the film. Well, it didn’t really work for me. To be fair, it was virtually seamless at serveral moments, but other sequences appeared to be obviously all-CG to me (CG Spidey, CG buildings, CG cars, and so on).
I think it was that the lighting on the CG objects wasn’t quite right in some scenes. For instance, while the Green Goblin is flying around on his craft at the expo, there were times were his costume remained a constant shade of green (instead of varying shades as the ambient lighting fluctuated).
In some ways, it reminded me of my reaction to X-Men. That too was rated PG-13, and it didn’t really have enough action to satisfy me. But, I realize that it must have been one of those “it’s just me” moments, because most of my friends really enjoyed it.
One more thing (spoilers follow). I wasn’t terribly impressed by the Method By Which the Bad Guy Dies in Spider-Man. It wasn’t some ingenius plan on the part of Spider-Man, nor cool martial arts on the part of Spider-Man. Rather, right when the villain’s attack-hoverpad is about to slice into Spidey, he simply moves out of the way and the spears slice into the Bad Guy instead. Bleh.