Spinning a fine tale

You could call Spider-Man, if you were tempted, Batman with cobwebs. But it would be wrong. It's far darker, more complex and - good grief ! - even moving. The hero is no Superman, either. Tobey Maguire, who plays him in and out of his websuit, hasn't the look of a six-pack jock.

As Peter Parker, orphaned and living with uncle (Cliff Robertson) and aunt (Rosemary Harris) in working-class Queens, he's agreeably like most 16-year-old kids, skinny, shy, awkward and vulnerable, the target of highschool bullies and too bashful even to speak to Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), the girl next door. Then a spider bites him on a class field trip to a science lab, just as he's snapping the girl from a safe distance.

The power-bite is clearly a lovebite, too. When young Peter awakes in the morning, after an arachnid hangover, his loins have a new stretch in them as well as his limbs.

Director Sam Raimi's skill lies in teasingly showing the onset of a boy's awakened sexuality through the non-sexual exploits of the same boy endowed with powers of anti-gravity athleticism, ultrasharp vision, superhuman strength and the ability to spin sticky tendons out of his inner manhood and swing along New York's skyscraper canyons like a citified Tarzan. The release of fluids, as in other contexts, is absolutely captivating.

The SFX of John Dykstra don't swamp Maguire's sweetly exuberant nature or the character's visceral thrill in discovering he's not like other boys. He's on a "high" in every sense of the emotion.

What brings him down to earth with a tragic bump is the discovery that great powers carry great responsibilities. After flooring his school tormentor in an encounter that hits the ceiling, and larking around for pocket money in the wrestling ring, he inadvertently commits an act that leads to his uncle's violent death. It sobers him up and turns the high-flyer into a righter-of-wrongs.

Comic-strip superheroes aren't usually burdened with guilt. But Spider-Man has a lot of it on his conscience.

His anti-crime agenda sets him swooping down via self-generated spider's threads, in the full blueandred glory of his form-fitting battlegear, and netting evildoers for the cops. But it isn't simply the kind of civic crusade as pioneered by oldsters like Superman. It develops moral conundrums. Is such a public vigilante a curse or blessing?

The city's cynical newspaper editor (JK Simmons, in an explosively funny demonstration of populist demagoguery) plays it both ways for news value. To his girlfriend, Spider-Man's a saviour - and the tenderest scene between them is when she half peels back his face-mask and bestows a kiss on his lips while he hangs upside down on his web. But will she see humble Peter Parker in that heroic light? And then there's the feeling that those he loves the most, pay for it with tragedy. Power is a curse, too.

Though conceived before 11 September - and rumoured to have shed one sequence where he stretches his net between the Twin Towers - Spider-Man has a welcome hesitation about endorsing "The American Way" that functioned as auto-pilot for all the other flying fighters of injustice. In fact, the story ends on a note of melancholic, but stoic, self-sacrifice, rather than in a romantic clinch. "Life and liberty" under the Stars and Stripes (glimpsed, but significantly not flaunted in the very last shot) remain intact; but this more realistic ending is certainly a pause in the pursuit of happiness. The other thing that distinguishes Spider-Man is the presence of an adversary who has suffered the same kind of fateful accident as the hero.