Starring Toby McGuire, Kirsten Dunst, Willem Dafoe, Rosemary Harris and Cliff Robertson. Rated M.

I've said it before in this forum -- I was a big Marvel Comics fan as a kid.

While Spiderman wasn't my favourite (that honour went to the Incredible Hulk) he was up there with the best of them.

Now, Hollywood and Stan Lee have got together to pump celluloid life into the character. And that's basically what they did -- pumped life and some 3D realism into what is essentially a comic-book tale, straight off the pages of Stan Lee's mind.

Peter Parker is your average schoolboy geek, picked on by the cool kids, laughed at by the cool girls, and with a secret crush of his own on the girl next door, Mary Jane Watson.

Life takes an upward swing for the geeky schoolboy when, on a class field trip, he is bitten by a genetically modified super-spider.

With a good deal of mirth from our perspective, Peter Parker slowly and accidentally discovers he now has super-human powers.

Orphaned since childhood, Peter lives with a comely old aunt and uncle until one night, while waiting to pick Peter up from the library, Uncle Ben is shot by a robber in a random carjacking.

Peter, to his great horror however, realises he has lost his uncle to a man he had just moments before stepped aside from in the committing of a robbery.

Uncle Ben's last words come back to haunt him -- with great power comes great responsibility.

Testing his new-found powers proves a challenge. Scaling walls with sticky fingertips is easy, but the flying through the air with the greatest of ease proves just a little more tricky to come to grips with.

But when he does master the art of web spinning, Peter Parker becomes a true champion and protector of the people.

-- and with great power comes great responsibility -- and with great power comes great and powerful enemies.

Enter The Green Goblin -- a mad scientist, maddened by his own greed and a military experiment gone horribly wrong.

In the fight against good and evil, there's only room for one super-human in any great city and it doesn't take long for Spiderman to cramp the evil style of The Green Goblin.

As with any cowardly despot, The Green Goblin first identifies his adversary's Achilles' heal and then attacks, in this case, the innocent people closest to Peter Parker - Aunt May and Mary Jane Watson.

Deadly battle ensues - and there can only be one winner. Let's just say that The Green Goblin will not be back for the sequel.

If you are not a comicworm and were not weened on a diet of Incredible Hulk, Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four, X-Men, DareDevil, Iron Man and the rest, then you will probably be entertained by the pure fantasy of it all.

If on the other hand, you spent large chunks of your childhood curled up with a Marvel Comic, plotting ways to gain superpowers of your own, stitching together wild and colourful costumes that never seemed to impart the powers you desired and nearly killing yourself off the garage roof in vain attempts to fly - then you'll love this.

You'll love it as much as X-Men and you'll be hanging out for the next blockbuster - Hulk.

Five shamrocks