Spider-Man 2
2004 · Sam Raimi
Peter Parker is going through a major identity crisis. Burned out from being Spider-Man, he decides to shelve his superhero alter ego, which leaves the city suffering in the wake of carnage left by the evil Doc Ock. In the meantime, Parker still can't act on his feelings for Mary Jane Watson, a girl he's loved since childhood. A certain anger begins to brew in his best friend Harry Osborn as well...
dir. Sam Raimi · 2004
The superhero picture at its most humane, made before the genre hardened into industrial product. Sam Raimi, the Michigan wildman of the Evil Dead films, brought two things the form rarely gets: genuine slapstick sympathy for a hero whose life is falling apart — rent overdue, pizzas delivered late, powers sputtering under psychosomatic strain — and a horror director's glee, unleashed in an operating-room sequence of pure Grand Guignol that has no business in a PG-13 blockbuster. Alfred Molina's Doc Ock is a tragic figure in the Universal-monster mold, and the elevated-train setpiece remains a benchmark of legible, weighty, emotionally motivated action. The screenplay, credited to Alvin Sargent (Ordinary People) from a story co-written by Michael Chabon, treats renunciation and duty with an old-Hollywood earnestness; its debt to Superman II is acknowledged, its influence on every 'burned-out hero' arc since is everywhere. Two decades of multiverses later, it is still the entry filmmakers cite when asked how these movies ought to feel — handmade, sincere, a little screwball, unafraid of corn.
Lines of influence
- Evil Dead II (1987) — The deadite rushing-POV 'shaky-cam' and possessed-limb slapstick reappear almost literally in Doc Ock's animatronic arms and the buzz-saw hospital surgery attack, a horror setpiece dropped whole into a superhero movie.
- The Evil Dead (1981) — Raimi's untethered, low-mounted camera charging unbroken through space is the direct grammar behind the web-swinging first-person rushes.
- Darkman (1990) — Raimi's own operatic comic-book melodrama about a disfigured, tragic near-monster is the dry run for turning superhero pathos into full-blown pulp opera.
- Superman II (1980) — The 'hero renounces his powers to live a normal life with the woman he loves, then must reclaim them' arc is lifted structurally intact, including the abdication-and-return beat.
- Superman: The Movie (1978) — Sets the sincere, unironic mythic register and the catching-falling-civilians rescue template that the runaway-train sequence pays off.
- Bride of Frankenstein (1935) — Supplies the sympathetic tragic-monster mold — a decent man deformed by his own science into a rampaging creature he cannot control — that shapes Otto Octavius.
- Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) — Model for legible geographic action staging in which every beat of a moving-vehicle setpiece reads spatially clear, the discipline Raimi cites for the train fight.
- The General (1926) — Real-space, train-borne physical comedy executed with total spatial clarity — the silent-slapstick DNA of the elevated-train sequence and Peter's pratfall gags.
- King Kong (1933) — Raimi's beloved Harryhausen-lineage creature spectacle, where the tragic beast is animated as a character with pathos, informs the eight-limbed puppetry given genuine menace and grief.
- Spider-Man (2002) — Establishes the whip-pan web-swinging camera and the guilt-engine sincerity of Peter Parker that this sequel refines into its 'burned-out hero' machinery.
- X2: X-Men United (2003) — A contemporaneous superhero sequel that plays team morality straight-faced rather than camp, part of the same early-2000s wager on sincerity over irony.
- Batman Returns (1992) — Gothic comic-book opera organized around a deformed, pitiable villain whose tragedy mirrors the hero — the tonal template Raimi extends with Doc Ock.
- Spider-Man 3 (2007) — Pushes the tragic-villain-as-mirror structure and the horror/slapstick tonal swings of this film further, to the point of overload.
- Drag Me to Hell (2009) — Returns the spring-loaded, gross-out horror-comedy setpiece craft — refined via Doc Ock's surgery scene — to undiluted horror.
- Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) — Re-imports the Evil Dead rushing camera and jump-scare grammar into a Marvel tentpole, the direct heir of the Doc Ock hospital sequence's horror-in-a-superhero-film move.
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) — Inherits the priority on comic-panel action legibility and the everyman-under-the-mask sincerity, translating Raimi's swing kinetics into animated form.
- The Dark Knight (2008) — Escalates the morally-weighted, tragic-cost blockbuster villain and practical large-format setpiece craft that this film proved a comic adaptation could carry.