123 - Power

 Another film I've not seen in quite a while is the first of the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films. It actually holds up really well, and does make a change from super hero movies where the villain threatens the entire fabric of reality itself. 

Here, Norman Obborne's Green Goblin is really only a bit of a menace to a bit of New York; he doesn't really seem to have much of a grand plan, other than revenge on those who he thinks have wronged him. And it kinda works. 

I guess you have to start small with these things. Let them build up. If they'd used, for example, Mephisto from the off that would have set the stakes too high. Starting with this smaller threat allows us to see the more ordinary side of things. 

And even then it was clearly building things with its little references. It mentions a photographer called Eddie (who's clearly Eddie Brock who would later become Venom) and a Doctor Connors (Curt, who becomes the Lizard), but it's all somewhat subtle and if you don't know who these people are, it really doesn't matter.

It's not perfect, and one mistake it makes is to take Peter et al out of High School too soon; just halfway through the film. I kinda think we needed a bit more of this environment, probably at least keeping them there for the whole of the film. 

And also, no Gwen Stacy... but the movies never really got the hang of the whole Gwen and Mary Jane scenario, with (as I recall) only one of the many Spider-Man movies having both characters in (SM3), and in the case of the MCU films not actually having either character in them at all. (Zendaya's character, although called MJ, is not Mary Jane, rather Michelle Jones, a different character).  

Or at least, that's my memory of them. I guess my memory will be refreshed in coming days...

The reason I watched this film today is that me and the kids are having a bit of a Marvel super hero movie marathon over coming weeks, watching as many of the Marvel movies as we possibly can. And should any pedants reading this say "but that movie was made by Sony, not Marvel", by "Marvel movies" I mean movies with characters from the Marvel comics in them. And we're only looking at post-2000 films, so anything before then is excluded. At the moment, the running order of 48 films is looking like;

7 Spider-Man films*

3 Fantastic Four films

DareDevil

13 Z-Men films

Hulk

23 MCU films

* - This doesn't include the Tom Holland films. 

I don't think there's anything I've missed, except the Thomas Jane Punisher movie, which I'm not counting. Can't think of anything else that should go in there. If there's anything you think I've missed let me know; bearing in mind it has to be post-2000, so things like the Roger Corman Fantastic Four, or any of the TV movies of the 70s and 80s, don't count. Nor do the Netflix TV shows, or Agents of SHIELD, etc. That may be for another time... 

And the above is the order we're watching them in, too; basically by series, then by release date in each series. We, well I, did think of mixing them all together and watching in pure release date, mixing up all the series, but the kids over-ruled me on that one.