I had the very great pleasure to catch the 12:01am showing of Spider-Man 2 tonight. Let me tell you right now, this flick is going to stick around for a while. It wasn’t better or worse than the first movie. Much of the same really. We do get a lot more story and a lot more moral issues thrown into it. That’s all good, but what makes the movie so great is time this flick was released and how it relates to these times.

In these strange days, it’s hard to look around and ignore the blatant evils in this world. From wars that should have never been started, censored and manipulated media being fed to us, government corruption, our own country’s “leaders” (who were never to be trusted in the first place) making decisions solely based on self gain, and reality tv shows, I would say it’s extremely difficult to even imagine what people were like before these evils existed.

Spider-Man 2 counters this evil. It uplifts us and gives us hope that no matter how much bad there is, you can always make a difference. It shows that anyone could be a hero and that turning your back on certain issues or just ignoring them all together is doing what could be a just society a great injustice. It lets you close your eyes for just a little bit and imagine what could be accomplished if you decided to do something about the wrongs you see in the world.

Peter Parker struggles with this throughout most of the movie. Even though he has the power to do and be something really great, he only sees the negative effects of these actions in his personal life. He feels as long as he’s Spiderman, the people who will hurt the most are the people he’s closest too. These struggles we see in the movie are some of the absolute best scenes here and are only topped by when he eventually understands that answering the call of the city for Spiderman is what is best for him and the society around him. You, in fact, see how common citizens feed off of Spiderman’s will in order to gain their own inspiration. You simply can’t help but cheer for things like this.

Spider-Man 2 is an exciting, smart, beautiful, funny, and absolutely inspiring movie that can relate to anybody and I highly recommend you see what is clearly not just one of the best comic book flicks every, but also one of the best movies of the year. Maybe it will inspire you to do exactly what I think underlining meaning is… By letting your actions be seen and your voice be heard, you can be your own hero.

Note: I edited the original post slightly because of grammatical mistakes. What do you expect at 4 in the morning?