Spiderman 2

"I believe there's a hero in all of us, that keeps us honest, gives us strength, makes us noble, and finally allows us to die with pride, even though sometimes we have to be steady, and give up the thing we want the most. Even our dreams. " This was the words at the opening of the trailer of Spiderman 2 and the very same words said by Aunt May to Peter Parker, which summed up the so-called moral of this story. To simplify further, I think there are 2 points here which the movie kept emphasizing; that everybody can be a hero and also that sometimes to do the right things, we have to give up our dreams.
Let's first look at the first point. Spiderman the movie was very much different from the other superhero movies I have seen in its emphasis on the contrast between Spiderman and the guy underneath the skin, Peter Parker. Spiderman is your typical superhero, he can do feats a normal human can't, like swinging from skyscrapers and he has superhuman reflexes. Like a typical superhero, he stands up for the weak and risks his life to fight for justice. Peter Parker however might well be on the far end of the spectrum. It would be an understatement to say that he is average, in fact he is a loser with a capital L. He is spectacularly unsuccessful in everything he got himself in. He nearly flunked his studies, got fired umpteen times and at one time supposedly only had twenty dollars to survive for a month. Without his red and blue suit, his reflexes was subhuman; one could not help laughing at how he was always a split second late in grabbing the last tart or drink on the tray. As for standing up to super villians, well, you should see the way he scurried off when he thought his landlord was going to chase him for the rent. Yet beneath this less than ordinary young man lives the spirit of a hero. And it is also his ordinariness that makes Spiderman more endearing than most of the other superhuman heroes.
Another noteworthy scene that reinforces this point was the scene where Spiderman through immense efforts and a superhuman will stopped a train from going off the end of the tracks. Unconscious and unmasked, the passengers saw that he was but a next door type young man and as one of the passengers remarked, "He's hardly older than my son... he's just a kid. " We are all used to superheroes saving ordinary citizens, but in Spiderman we saw how ordinary citizens could be inspired to stand up and protect their hero. The first scene was Mary Parker or Aunt May whacking Dr. Oct with her umbrella and saving Spiderman from his sneak attack, the second scene of course was how the passengers of the train united in a futile (and they knew it too) to save Spiderman from Dr. Oct. A similar scene also happened in Spiderman 1, when the Green Goblin attempted to attack Spiderman while he was saving the kids in the cable car and(of course) Mary Jane, passer-bys at the bridge hurled an assortment of items at the Green Goblins along with verbal abuses and chased him off. This, I think was part of the movie's theme that "there's a hero in all of us."
The second point that to do the right things, we sometimes have to give up our dreams needs no elaboration, it is linked to the "moral" of Spiderman 1: with great power comes great responsibilities. In the context of the story, the dream that has to be given up was the romance with Mary Jane of course. A friend of mine thought that this almost obsessive love of Peter Parker diminished the superhero and made the story almost petty. I disagree. The point is that a superhero is also an ordinary person who has to balance his own needs and wants with the needs and wants of everybody else. If there is no Mary Jane and this obsessive love in the context, Spiderman would be smaller not larger because we would not have seen what he has to give up to do the right thing.
Other than the strong "moral" element in Spiderman 2, another thing worth mentioning is the humour which is directed at the concept of superhero. The winning scene must be that when Spiderman had to take a humiliating lift ride when he momentarily lost his power to web. It didn't help that he was caught by a fellow lift passenger trying to blend into the red walls of the lift. A parallel scene would be to imagine Superman garbed in his super-suit sitting in the economy class of a commercial plane. Unlike some action flicks, there are some efforts made in making the villians or in this case the super villians more human and therefore less easy to dismiss as just "cackling, perverted, I-want-to-rule-the-world baddie". There is no doubt that Dr. Oct and the Green Goblin in Spderman 1 were quite mad but Octavius was a brilliant scientist who believed that intelligence is a gift that must be used to the good of mankind and also a loving husband. Norman Osborne when he was not the Green Goblin was a father figure to Peter Parker. Both super villians were led by their respective obsessions to take the road of evil. In that sense, the two super villians were not that different from Spiderman. They all had two personalities that were sharply contrasting and they all had their own obsessions. The dividing line between superheroes and super villians and hence good and evil is not that thin after all...