For one reason or another, a lot of people still feel that Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies were superior to anything that’s come since. Realistically it’s hard not to laugh at that since Raimi’s Spider-Man movies did, in fact, have great action sequences, but the acting wasn’t as great as some folks want to think, and Tobey Maguire, I’m going to just say it, is NOT the best example of Spider-Man. In fact, Tom Holland is showing that he has the ability to play the character and be believable in a way that Maguire and Andrew Garfield just couldn’t nail since he’s shown a great deal of vulnerability and it feels as though he would have been a little more effective against Doctor Octopus if they had ever met. It’s very likely that this isn’t the popular opinion, but oh well since everyone’s entitled to their own and it’s very true the Tobey Maguire did manage to bring Spider-Man and Peter Park to the big screen before anyone else, and he was what was there for a while. But despite giving him props for this, anything that came after the first movie was a bit ‘meh’. People might want to say that Peter grew as a person in the second movie, but it’s kind of hard to see this since he’s still the same uncertain, unsure, insecure individual he was in high school and there isn’t a lot of personal growth there, especially when it comes to his love life. The whole idea of wanting to be with someone that HISHE picked up on is very real, but the problem with how it was represented is that at some point in his career as Spider-Man, Peter Parker did have some handle on his life as a hero, and he wasn’t quite this much of a whiner.
It’s true, Peter did have kind of a rough life starting out since he had to learn how to balance everything between work, being a hero, and having a relationship with a woman. But without any basis to go on at that point, this was what we had, and people loved it. Spider-Man 2 had a great villain but felt more like a brawler than a thinker, and Doc Ock was often a more dangerous adversary for Spider-Man largely because of his intellect. Plus, the fact that he died, in the end, made a lot of people go ‘huh?’. In a way, the Spider-Man movies have been an introduction and an ending to various villains that have plagued Spider-Man for years and issue after issue. While a few of the enemies he’s had did end up dying at some point, Doc Ock wasn’t one of them as he’s been a pervasive enemy for quite some time. Even the Green Goblin was around for a longer period of time than the movie showed, and had this happened then more movies could have been made and their battles could have become even more impressive. But as impressive as Sam Raimi made these movies, and the effects were amazing at the time, the fact is that killing off the enemies wasn’t the best idea in the world. Nor was mucking around with Peter as a character, or his love life, or a few other things that happened in the movies. There’s a reason why the third movie kind of bombed when it came to the fans, though Sandman was actually kind of fun to watch, while Venom was a train wreck.
Everyone has their favorite Spider-Man, and that’s just fine since everyone that enjoys the neighborhood wallcrawler, but the opinion that the second movie was the best often feels like a consolation prize at best for those that didn’t have anything else to compare it to until the MCU version came along. When asking a lot of people as to who their favorite Spider-Man is between Maguire and Garfield the answer would be fairly obvious, but thinking that Maguire is still the favorite when Holland is put into the picture is kind indicative of the nostalgia that a lot of people still feel towards the first three movies. Like it or not, nostalgia has some pretty strong hooks and people hold on for dear life when trying to keep those memories fresh. Admittedly, a lot of us do since we know what we like and we know what are our favorite parts of pop culture are. But like anything, it’s wise to accept and sometimes to embrace change, and moving on from Maguire as Peter Parker was fairly easy for some folks while others want to cherish the memory and state that they believed the earlier versions of this character were the best. As I said, we all have our favorites and that’s to be respected. But Spider-Man 2 still wasn’t quite what some folks think it was cracked up to be.
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