Spider-Man 2 Revisited: 5 Criticisms Nobody Ever Admits
Are they really as good and bad as you think?
Now that Spider-Man: Far From Home is in cinemas, it's the perfect time to go back and look back through the complete, starry history of Spider-Man on the big screen.
It's been pretty choppy waters at times, but even now, Sam Raimi's first sequel is widely considered one of the greatest comic book movies ever. Were it not for the majesty of Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, it might have sat atop the perch of best Spider-Man movie ever forever.
After all, this is the Internet where everything is either the best-thing-ever or the worst-thing-ever with no room for anything to be between, but what if the Spider-Man films are actually far less black-and-white in terms of quality and amount to a lot more grey? Because as wonderful as Spider-Man 2 is, there's some exceedingly detrimental stuff in it that just doesn't seem to get much attention.
Perhaps it's sacrilege, but it doesn't make any of these criticisms in any way unfair...
5. The Villains' Entire Plan Is Stupid
On a fundamental level, the plot cooked up by the combined brains of Doctor Otto Octavius and Harry Osborne, two of the brightest minds in this universe, is utterly idiotic.
Octavius is experimenting with fusion and wants to continue this work even after his most recent experiment left him permanently attached to four robotic limbs and killed his beloved wife. However, in order to do so, he has to acquire more tritium (read: nondescript MacGuffin) to fuel his reactor and the only person in the city with access to said tritium is Harry Osborne. Thus, they strike a deal; Harry will give Octavius all of the tritium he has in exchange for Octavius bringing him Spider-Man so that Harry can exact his revenge on the web-slinger.
From the word go, this plan is ludicrous. Harry tells Octavius that Peter Parker should know where Spidey is since he takes his pictures for the Bugle, but begs him not to hurt Peter. So what is the first thing Octavius does after this?
He throws an entire car at Peter Parker.
Sure, Peter has spidey senses and is able to dodge said car but Octavius has no idea that Peter is Spider-Man yet. Assuming Peter is just a normal kid, this crushes him and Octavius is left without any leads to Spider-Man and without any tritium, so how exactly was this plan ever going to work?