Spider-Man

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man begins with Peter Parker as a bright but awkward student who struggles to find his place among classmates, including his friend Harry Osborn and his longtime crush Mary Jane Watson. On a school trip to a genetics laboratory, Peter is bitten by an engineered spider and falls ill. At the same time, Harry’s father Norman tests an experimental enhancement formula on himself after his company’s military contract is threatened. Peter wakes with heightened strength, reflexes and senses, while Norman’s experiment gives him power at a far more destructive cost. The parallel origins establish two men altered by science, but only one begins to understand that power imposes obligations.

Peter's new abilities first feel like a private answer to old humiliations. Uncle Ben tries to talk to him about the responsibility that comes with unusual power, but Peter is angry and dismisses the advice. He wins an underground wrestling match, hoping to earn money for a car, but the promoter cheats him. When a thief robs the promoter, Peter lets him escape out of resentment. Soon afterward that same man kills Peter's Uncle Ben during a carjacking. Peter hunts the thief down and sees him fall to his death; only then does Ben's earlier warning become a principle Peter understands through grief. He begins fighting crime under a mask because Ben's death changes what he believes his strength is for.

As Spider-Man becomes a New York sensation, Peter tries to balance school, family and a job photographing the masked hero for the Daily Bugle. Publisher J. Jonah Jameson turns those pictures into a hostile campaign, while Harry’s friendship with Peter is strained by Norman’s expectations and his own feelings for Mary Jane. Peter’s secret life brings him into repeated confrontations with the Green Goblin, a costumed attacker who targets public events and the people around him. Norman is the Goblin, but Peter does not know that. The film builds suspense through the gap between the audience’s knowledge and Peter’s growing fear that the villain has learned who he is.

Norman’s position inside Oscorp collapses when the company’s board decides to remove him and sell the business. At the Unity Day celebration, the Green Goblin attacks the directors, and Spider-Man intervenes to protect Mary Jane. The newspapers give the masked killer a name, and Norman begins to look for the person behind the mask. Peter later meets Norman at Thanksgiving with Aunt May, Harry and Mary Jane; Norman notices Peter’s wounds and connects them to the Goblin’s attacks. He then injures May, making Peter understand that the danger has become personal even before he can name its source. Raimi links domestic spaces to superhero spectacle, so a family dinner can become the point where the secret war enters the home.

The Goblin has already offered Spider-Man an alliance, arguing that their abilities place them above ordinary people. Peter refuses to accept that view of power. After discovering Peter's identity, Norman captures Mary Jane and a tram car full of children, forcing Spider-Man to choose between them while the two groups hang above the water. Peter manages to save both, but the fight that follows leaves him battered and vulnerable. Norman drops the disguise and asks for forgiveness while secretly preparing his glider to strike. Peter’s spider-sense warns him in time; Norman is impaled by his own weapon. Before dying, he asks Peter not to tell Harry that he was the Green Goblin, leaving Peter to carry a truth that will damage his friendship if it becomes known.

At Norman's funeral, Harry promises revenge on Spider-Man, believing the hero killed his father. Mary Jane tells Peter that she loves him, but Peter withholds his own feelings because he thinks distance will protect her from the enemies he attracts. This choice gives the ending a quiet cost: becoming a hero has not solved Peter's loneliness, and the people he wants to protect remain vulnerable to what he keeps secret. Raimi's comic-book imagery repeatedly breaks into the ordinary city, with swinging movement, sudden close-ups and exaggerated shifts in perspective making Peter's powers feel physical. Danny Elfman's score adds a sweeping heroic register, but the story keeps returning to cramped apartments, school hallways and working New York streets.

The 2002 film adapts the Spider-Man comics into a self-contained origin story, not a claim that Peter’s life follows one definitive version across every later adaptation. It condenses the many people and ideas around the character into Peter, Norman, Harry, Mary Jane, Ben and May, letting the Green Goblin serve as both public danger and personal mirror. Its central dramatic question is not whether Peter can win a fight, but whether he can accept the cost of using his gifts responsibly. Peter's refusal of Mary Jane and the closing swing across New York keep that tension alive: he can save the city in public, yet still make painful private choices that others do not understand.