Spider-Man

The story

Full story — spoilers ahead.

Peter Parker is a kid from Queens: smart, awkward, in love with Mary Jane Watson, and used to being the punchline. He lives with Uncle Ben and Aunt May, who treat him like the son they chose. On a school trip he is bitten by a genetically altered spider. He wakes up with muscle, sharper vision, and the ability to stick to a wall. The first thing he does with it is not heroic. He enters a wrestling cage for money and lets a thief run past him in a hallway because the manager stiffed him and he is angry.

That thief kills Uncle Ben during a carjacking. Peter gets there in time to see the face and understand the sentence Ben had been trying to teach him: with great power comes great responsibility. The rest of the movie is a boy trying to live inside that sentence while still being a boy.

He becomes Spider-Man because the city needs someone who can stop a car with one hand and because Peter needs a way to be useful that does not require him to be smooth. He sells pictures of himself to a newspaper editor who hates the hero and pays for the photos anyway. He still cannot talk to Mary Jane without tripping. She is living with abuse at home and a dream of acting that keeps getting her into rooms with the wrong men.

Norman Osborn is the other father in the story. He runs Oscorp, is losing a military contract, and tests a strength serum on himself rather than lose the company. The serum makes him powerful and splits him. The Green Goblin is Norman talking to a mask, then putting the mask on. He is also Harry’s father, and Harry is Peter’s only real friend. That is the trap. Every public fight is a private dinner waiting to go wrong.

The Goblin attacks the city to draw Spider-Man out: a parade, a balcony, a burning building where Mary Jane is the point of the exercise. Norman figures out who the boy in the suit is. He offers Peter a partnership, then a choice. At the Queensboro Bridge he holds Mary Jane in one tram and a cable car of children in the other and tells Spider-Man to pick. Peter refuses the math and saves both, with help from the strangers the Goblin assumed would eat each other.

The last fight is in an abandoned building that feels like a skull. Peter wins. Norman, dying, asks him not to tell Harry. Peter keeps that promise and loses Harry anyway, because Harry saw Spider-Man standing over the body. Mary Jane kisses him on a graveyard hill and tells him she knows who he is in the way that matters. He still walks away from the romance. He has decided that the people he loves are safer if he stays lonely.

Spider-Man is an origin that earns the costume. The spider bite is the easy part. The hard part is a teenager learning that power does not make you free. It makes you late for dinner, bad at dating, and responsible for people who will never know your name. The Goblin dies. The responsibility does not.