Spider-ManSave

Queens, New York. Peter Parker — Tobey Maguire, brown hair flopping into his eyes, in a denim jacket and Converses, narrating in voice-over — sprints down a residential street trying to catch the school bus. He's a senior at Midtown High School. He lives with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben in a small two-story house in Forest Hills. The girl next door, Mary Jane Watson — Kirsten Dunst, red hair, half-shrugged sweater, the dream that every American teenager from 1962 to 2002 had at some point — waves at him from her own front porch and gets on the bus with him. They sit four rows apart. Peter draws her in his notebook on the way to school. His best friend Harry Osborn — James Franco, the rich kid, the son of Norman Osborn the CEO of OsCorp — is in the same class. Today the class is on a field trip to Columbia University's Department of Genetic Research.

Columbia's lab is a wall of glass terrariums housing genetically-engineered hybrid spiders. There are fifteen test specimens. The grad student lecturing the class can identify exactly fourteen of them. Peter is leaning into the glass, taking photographs for the school newspaper, when a spider — the missing fifteenth — drops down from the ceiling onto his hand and bites the back of his wrist between the knuckles. Peter doesn't notice for the next forty minutes. He gets home that evening, sees the swollen red welt, feels nauseous, and goes to bed. He spends the night sweating through his sheets in a fever dream while his body rewrites every cell of his DNA at the genetic level. He wakes up in the morning twenty pounds heavier, with perfect vision (he wears glasses no more), six-pack abs, and forearm strength that lets him crush his alarm clock into dust by shutting it off too hard.

Midtown High the next day. Peter walks into the cafeteria in a daze. Flash Thompson, the school bully, slams his shoulder into Peter's back to provoke a fight. Peter dodges him at the speed of a fly. Mary Jane Watson, in front of him in the lunch line, trips on the floor with her lunch tray. Without thinking, Peter catches the tray, her milk carton, her plate, her juice, and her cup of mac-and-cheese — all in mid-air, in one fluid motion, with his eyes closed. The whole cafeteria stops. He hands the tray back to her. "How'd you do that?" Peter doesn't know. He walks to his next class in a fog. By the third period, he's discovering his fingertips stick to walls when he wants them to. By gym class, he can climb the rope to the ceiling with one hand. By the end of school, in an alley fight with Flash he doesn't want, Peter dodges every punch in slow motion and accidentally launches Flash twenty feet across the hallway with one open-handed slap.

He runs out of school. He spends the afternoon climbing a brick wall, swinging through alleys on web-fluid that shoots from a fleshy spinneret-organ in each wrist (Raimi's organic web-shooters, unique to this trilogy — unlike the mechanical-shooters of the comics), and figuring out that the spider has rewired him into a human-arachnid hybrid. He needs money. He has a Polaroid camera. He has the body of a stuntman. He decides to enter an underground cage-fighting tournament in Brooklyn to win a $3,000 first-prize purse he can use to buy a beat-up car to impress Mary Jane.

Meanwhile across town. Norman Osborn — Willem Dafoe, in a $3,000 suit, demanding immediate results from OsCorp's research-and-development division — has been ordered by the U.S. Department of Defense to prove his experimental Goblin-serum can enhance a human subject's strength and stamina by 800 percent within six weeks or the military contract goes to OsCorp's competitor. Norman, desperate, locks himself in OsCorp's containment chamber and personally injects the green vaporiz formula. He convulses for thirty seconds and goes catatonic. The next morning he wakes up in his own private hospital room appearing fully recovered. His head scientist Dr. Stromm enters to check on him. Norman, in a rage trance, snaps Stromm's neck. He walks out of OsCorp wearing the OsCorp military prototype — a green-and-purple armored exoskeleton glider-suit that has been waiting in containment, fully outfitted with razor-edged glider blades, pumpkin grenades, and a fanged purple mask. The next morning a Defense Department review board is meeting at the Brooklyn waterfront to award the contract to OsCorp's rival. Norman, as the Green Goblin, flies onto the Brooklyn rooftop, kills the review board with pumpkin grenades, and disappears into the sky.

Peter, meanwhile, is in the cage-match locker room with $3,000 of prize money waiting to be paid to him by the promoter. The promoter stiffs him — pays $100 only and disappears with the cash. Peter walks out furious into the lobby. A burglar enters from the side, holds the promoter at gunpoint, robs the cash from the promoter's safe, and runs out past Peter — who could have stopped him with a single web. Peter lets the burglar pass because the promoter just screwed him. The promoter, on the floor with the empty safe, accusing Peter of complicity. Peter walks out indignantly. "I missed the part where that's my problem."

Outside on the sidewalk. Uncle Ben — Cliff Robertson, gentle, slow-spoken, the only father figure Peter has ever had — has been waiting in his old Oldsmobile to give Peter a ride home after the match. Peter walks toward the car. He passes the same burglar from the lobby running for a beat-up Chevrolet at the curb, opening the car door. As Peter approaches Uncle Ben's car, the burglar pulls a gun and demands the car keys from Ben. Ben refuses. The burglar shoots him. Ben falls onto the pavement. The burglar runs. Peter catches up to him moments later three blocks away in an abandoned warehouse. They fight. Peter pulls the burglar's mask off. He recognizes him as the same burglar from the lobby — the burglar Peter let walk past him minutes earlier. The burglar, panicking, runs backwards onto a windowsill. He misses his footing. He falls four stories to his death on the warehouse floor. Peter looks at the corpse. He looks at his own webbed wrist. He understands.

He cradles Uncle Ben in the alley for the few seconds the man has left. Ben — bleeding out — squeezes his nephew's hand. "Peter. There's something I haven't told you. With great power… comes great responsibility." Ben dies. Peter screams. He buries himself in the funeral that follows. He doesn't tell Aunt May who the killer was. He doesn't tell anyone what he is. He spends the next three months in his bedroom designing the Spider-Man costume — red mask, blue body, web pattern stenciled in red marker over the chest and arms, all hand-sewn by Peter on his mother's sewing machine. He starts patrolling Queens. He becomes a local urban legend.

He gets a job. Peter convinces J. Jonah Jameson, editor of the Daily Bugle newspaper, to hire him as a freelance photographer. The hook: Peter is the only person in Manhattan who can reliably get clear photographs of Spider-Man in action (because Peter is Spider-Man and is setting up the shots with a tripod-mounted camera in his backpack before the action starts). Jameson — JK Simmons, throat permanently in a yell, cigar always lit — initially hates Peter, but starts buying his Spider-Man photos at $50 each for the front page. Peter has rent money now. He moves out of Aunt May's house and into a Lower East Side walkup with Harry Osborn as a roommate. Harry is now dating Mary Jane Watson. Peter is now in love with Mary Jane Watson. Norman Osborn is now obsessed with Spider-Man as a threat.

The Green Goblin's escalation. Norman has been alternating between his Norman-self and his Goblin-self, sometimes blacking out as one and waking up as the other. He hijacks the Unity Day Festival in Times Square — a parade of OsCorp board members in a publicity float celebrating Norman's recovery — and bombs the parade reviewing stand from his glider. The Goblin's pumpkin grenades fry every OsCorp board member instantly. Spider-Man arrives mid-attack, catches a falling MJ from a balcony, fights the Goblin in midair through the canyon of Times Square. The Goblin escapes. The newspapers next morning blame Spider-Man for the attack. Aunt May is wounded in a separate Goblin home-invasion attack on Peter's apartment a week later. Peter's secret identity is on the verge of compromise.

Queensboro Bridge climax. The Goblin kidnaps Mary Jane from her waitressing job and chains a Roosevelt Island tram full of schoolchildren to the top of the bridge. He flies over the bridge holding MJ in one arm and the tram cable in the other. He gives Spider-Man a choice: save Mary Jane, OR save the tram of schoolchildren. He drops both at the same moment. Spider-Man dives. He catches MJ in one arm and the tram cable in his other hand at the last second, anchored to a bridge cable by his ankle-web. He holds them both up by hand for thirty seconds while the Goblin pelts him with pumpkin grenades. A passing tugboat pulls into the bridge below him to receive the tram, which Spider-Man can finally release. Spider-Man pulls MJ up to the bridge tower. Civilians on the bridge pelt the Goblin with bricks and trash. "You mess with one of us, you mess with ALL of us!"

Final battle. The Goblin tags Spider-Man with a grappling line and yanks him off the bridge into an abandoned warehouse in Long Island City for one last private fight. They smash through walls. They smash through floors. Peter is beaten to a pulp. The Goblin, mid-monologue, removes his own mask to reveal Norman Osborn's face, panting and weeping at the same time, his split personality fully visible in real time. He begs Peter for forgiveness. Then the Goblin-self takes over and remote-summons his razor-edged glider from across the room with a remote control. The glider rockets toward Peter from behind to impale him. Peter, with his spider-sense triggered, dodges at the last possible second. The glider drives into Norman Osborn's torso instead, impaling him through the chest. He dies in Peter's arms. "Don't tell Harry. Don't tell my son. About this. About me." Peter agrees.

Peter — bleeding, in his mask, exhausted — carries Norman Osborn's body back to the Osborn mansion in the rain. He lays the body in Norman's study. Harry walks into the study, sees Spider-Man with his father's body, and assumes Spider-Man is the murderer. The hatred that drives Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007)'s entire Harry-as-New-Goblin arc is planted in this single moment.

Funeral. Norman is buried under cloudy skies. Harry Osborn, in a black suit, kneels at the grave promising vengeance against Spider-Man. Peter, in the same black suit, stands quietly behind. After the burial, Mary Jane Watson walks Peter to the gates of the cemetery and tells him she's in love with him. "All the time, it's you. It's always been you." She kisses him. Peter, who has spent the whole film loving her from a distance, looks at her and tells her he can't love her back. Anyone he loves becomes a target. He turns and walks out of the cemetery alone. The final voiceover plays: "Whatever life holds in store for me, I will never forget these words: with great power, comes great responsibility. This is my gift. My curse. Who am I? I'm Spider-Man." He swings off into Manhattan as the credits roll. Danny Elfman's theme blares. The 21st century comic book movie is officially born.