May 3, 2002 |  Let me throw a great big flopping prejudice right out on the table: Even since I plunked down twelve cents for my first Marvel Comic many long years ago, Spider-Man has always struck me as the way-coolest of comic book heroes.

More affectingly haunted and humane than Batman, more charismatic than all of The X-Men combined, Spidey – a.k.a. Peter Parker, a lower-middle-class kid from Queens, N.Y., who just happened to be bitten by a radioactive spider while on a high-school field trip – is a super-empowered everyman, at once larger than life and down to earth.

Just think about it: How many other super heroes have ever appeared impatient or perplexed while sewing and maintaining his own trademark costume? For that matter, how many super-duper dudes ever have had to master multitasking -- simultaneously battling bad guys, attending high school (and, eventually, college) classes, working as a free-lance photographer, providing for his elderly widowed aunt – while maintaining some semblance of a social life?

Sure, Spider-Man is a bit older, wiser and marginally more financially secure these days. (Even in the world of comic books, where time stands still for eons, a teen-age hero eventually reaches manhood.) But for those of us who remember the first two or three decades of his web-spinning exploits, Spider-Man continues to personify – more than Superman, more than Green Lantern, more than The Incredible Hulk -- super-heroism as a mixed blessing. It's often a dirty, demanding and degrading job (with no fringe benefits). Just as often, though, it's an intoxicating, exhilarating gas.

The beauty part of Sam Raimi's immensely entertaining Spider-Man , the first big-screen rendering of the arachnidan adventurer, is the movie's faithful incorporation and artful translation of mostly everything that fans know and love about Spidey.

To be sure, Raimi and screenwriter David Koepp have altered a few key details of the Spidey mythos – in this version, Spider-Man's web is strictly natural-fiber stuff, not processed gunk squeezed out of tubes – and moved him from Queens to Manhattan with unseemly haste. Overall, however, the filmmakers are spectacularly successful at capturing the distinctive tone, style and character details of the long-running Marvel Comics series, even while making a terrifically exciting movie that non-fans can thoroughly enjoy without knowing anything about the source material.

The end result is, quite simply, the very best slam-bang, gee-whiz comic-book movie ever made.

Raimi and Koepp are seasoned veterans when it comes to dramatizing super-heroics – Raimi directed the stylish Darkman , Koepp scripted the under-rated The Shadow – and their fleet storytelling skills serve them well as they handle the heavy lifting of exposition. With rat-tat-tat efficiency, the movie introduces Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) as a shy, scholarly high-school senior who lives with his beloved Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) and Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) in a working-class section of Queens. While on a field trip to a research center, Peter is bitten – yeeouch! --by a “genetically altered super-spider.” Shortly afterwards, he starts to feel very, very strange…

Meanwhile, over on the other side of town, The Green Goblin – who actually didn't make his first appearance until 14 th issue of The Amazing Spider-Man , but never mind – begins to materialize. Millionaire science whiz Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) makes the big mistake of personally sampling an experimental formula designed to “enhance” infantrymen. He winds up smarter and stronger, but also – yes, you guessed it! – quite mad. So he dons a metallic goblin mask, commandeers a high-flying, rocket-propelled motorscooter, and sets out to make a general nuisance of himself.

Back in Queens, Peter discovers he has spider strength, spider speed, spider “sense” – don't try sneaking up on him, he'll know you're coming! – and the ability to shoot sticky, super-strong spider webbing from his wrists. All of which, naturally, he tries to exploit by launching a career as a masked wrestler. Uncle Ben tries to warn Peter: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Unfortunately, Uncle Ben doesn't live long enough to provide any other words of wisdom. But his death – in a brutally ironic twist taken straight out of the first Spider-Man comic-book story – nudges Peter onto a more selfless path of do-gooding and derring-do.

With a little help from an army of CGI wizards and other f/x technicians, Raimi boldly goes where no comic-book movie has gone before, depicting the amazing activities of Spider-Man – climbing up walls, bounding from rooftop to rooftop, dangling from high ceilings and swinging from even higher buildings – with eye-popping clarity and disbelief-suspending verisimilitude. Some of the imagery appears ripped from the pages Marvel Comics of the '60s and '70s. (It was during that period, not incidentally, when the comics briefly were known as Marvel Pop Art productions.) The movie makes the unbelievable seem so believable, in sharply defined, almost 3-D detail, that you're perpetually jazzed and delighted by the breakneck spectacle.

And the battle scenes with the sky-tripping, bombing-tossing Green Goblin are pretty doggone impressive, too.

To their great credit, the actors are not overshadowed by the stunning visuals. Robertson and Harris make the most of their brief but important roles, James Franco is aptly moody as Osborn's spoiled but basically decent son, and J.K. Simmons is an amusing comic-book caricature as newspaper editor (and part-time Spidey foe) J. Jonah Jameson.

Some diehard Marvel buffs initially expressed doubts about the casting of sensitive-boyish Tobey Maguire ( The Cider House Rules ) in the title role. But Maguire is totally convincing and ingratiatingly sympathetic as a working-class super hero who reluctantly shoulders the burden of super-empowerment. He's at his best in the early scenes where Peter repeatedly astonishes himself while mastering his amazing abilities. (Check out the moment when he impulsively runs up a wall without fully realizing what he's doing.) But Maguire also scores in more serious scenes, and looks appropriately dashing while zipping around in his red-and-black spider suit.

Dafoe brings wild-eyed, wicked-smiling panache to playing Osborn and The Green Goblin as conflicting halves of a split personality. (He also knows just how to wring a laugh from a seemingly innocuous line like, “I'm sorry I'm late – work was murder!”) And Kirsten Dunst hits the perfectly balance of bad-girl sultriness and distressed-damsel innocence as Mary Jane Watson, the girl next door who thinks Peter Parker is very sweet, but Spider-Man is… well, pretty amazing.