The movie was remarkably faithful in its adaptions of the characters -- especially Aunt May, Uncle Ben, Norman Osborne, and J. Jonah Jameson. (And was that Betty Brant in a brief scene in the newsroom?) I heard the guy next to me whisper how faithful the movie was to its source material -- the visit to the science lab, the whole Uncle Ben thing...

But what I missed was Spider-Man's non-stop banter during fight scenes. ("Junkies are people! They have legal rights, too!") In fact, there wasn't nearly enough action in the movie -- mainly because the comic book's fight scenes would've been impossible to stage. (Spider-Man tackles the Green Goblin in mid-air, or hangs suspended below the glider as it flies away....) At one point the two characters just resorted to hand-to-hand combat. And since Green Goblin's whole face was covered with an immobile mask, neither actor's mouth was visible for dialogue during this dramatic confrontation, which had an unfortunate resemblance to the Japanese TV series Ultraman.

The horrible 70s Spider-Man live-action TV series ran into the same problem. To subdue his opponents, Spider-Man was reduced to having fist-fights. Though I think it would be deeply uncharitable to complain about the Spider-Man skits on The Electric Company. (One Slashdot reader went as far as posting that Spider-Man "is the reason I learned to read.") And all that really needs to be said about the original 60s cartoon is that it had the coolest theme song of all time .

In the most recent version, the actors were earnest enough (All right, I wasn't 100% sold by Kirsten Dunst's last speech, though at least they got the hair color right....) But it just plain wasn't as much fun as reading a Spider-Man comic book.

There. I said it.

Thus spaketh I, the webmaster behind the AOL Watch web site...