Where do I begin? Especially when kakita has already chastised me for not equating the movie to the second coming? *LOL* (Well, technically he didn’t do so in those specific terms, but the idea is there)
I think I’ll choose not to focus on the movie as a whole, but rather on one character: Alfred Molina’s Dr. Otto Octavius.
As long as I can remember, Dr. Octopus has been the quintessential Spidey villian in my opinion. I’m not sure why though. Personally, I’ve never liked him - he was simply too 2nd-rate for me. (The irony is, of course, that I am a huge fan of many 2nd-rate superheroes). But Doc Ock was curiously never rated highly in my book.
He was a genius, undoubtedly. Apart from that, he also had four mechanical arms that allowed him to be rather bad-ass if it came down to physical combat. And to top it all off… he had a physique I could identify with. But despite all that, Dr. Octopus was simply missing that coolness factor.
All this changed with watching director Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2.
In Raimi’s movie interpretation, Otto Octavius is a kind, gentle giant of a man. He’s a philanthropist who wants to create a renewable source of energy, just for the sake of doing so. His attachment to OsCorp and its sponsorship is something he does reluctantly. He doesn’t share Harry Osborn’s desire for fame or fortune and simply needs their funding for his research. Octavius is also a genuine nerd, who doesn’t see the need for human contact, especially not when he already has all the human contact he needs from his wife. Yet, in true nerd nature, there’s a huge amount of pride that he draws from the publicity attached to his breakthrough.
The movie Octavius was so much more believable to me because of the fact that he never refers to himself as Doctor Octopus - that unlike his comic book counterpart, the mechanical arms are never the focus of the character. Instead, he is still the same Dr. Octavius, the same brilliant man who is now driven by the “voices” in his head - a byproduct of the mechanical arms’ artificial intellect. The fact that his life remains focused on his life’s work appeal more to me than the typical drive for vengeance that the original’s Green Goblin had.
Alfred Molina is brilliant in the role. The key to his success is the fact that he absorbs himself wholly into the role he plays. He is truly a character actor in the vein of Ron Perlman and John Rhys-Davies. To put it simply, only Molina could make Otto Octavius work.
(P.S. It was nice to see Donna Murphy (who played Otto’s wife Rosalie) again. She last appeared in Star Trek: Insurrection as Anij and more or less reprises her role as a subtle supportive woman here.)
