10 Things You Need To Know About James Cameron's Spider-Man

5. Kafka Gets Invoked

James Cameron is not afraid of a bit of pretension. He's mostly directed genre fare, but tried to imbue his goofy sci-fi action movies with some more high-minded stuff. Aliens was a indictment of the military industrial complex, there was some class stuff going in in Titanic, Terminator 2 has a lot to say about the international arms race, Avatar was Dances With Wolves in space, and whatever The Abyss was about, it had a philosophical perspective. Again borrowed from the Ethan Wiley draft, the feverish night after Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider was more abstract than in Raimi's version. He collapses into bed and has a hallucinatory nightmare, where he dreams he's woken up and been transformed into a giant arachnid. Or would metamorphosed be a more apt description? Because Cameron's version explicitly states a similarity between the scene and surrealist Czech writer Frank Kafka's short story The Metamorphosis, about a young man who awakens one day to find himself turned into a giant bug. Who's he trying to impress?