Spider-Man 2.1 features eight minutes of new footage incorporated into the movie, including a longer, less-adversarial conversation between Harry and Peter at the birthday party, more from comedian Hal Sparks in the elevator scene, more fighting with Doc Ock, and a goofy appearance by J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man costume. While the new scenes are interesting to watch and add some laughs, they don’t justify a second purchase of the movie. The bonus features are new but underwhelming. The commentary track by producer Laura Ziskin and screenwriter Alvin Sargent (there were two different commentaries on the original two-disc Spider-Man 2) is rather dull and only tangentially mentions what we’re most interested in–the new scenes. A 12-minute featurette on the second disc does discuss those, while another congratulates the visual-effects crew for their Oscar. Also included: 30 minutes of visual-effects analysis, a multi-angle look at Danny Elfman’s score, and a pop-up trivia track. –David Horiuchi

I’m with Mr Horiuchi on his assessment that the 2.1 edition does not warrant an additional purchase, but I was able to find a digital code that included both versions of the film for only $6, so I’m not going to complain too much. There’s some great aspects of this film, but the director (Sam Raimi) simply couldn’t help himself with some of the b-grade horror stuff that goes on. That being said, it’s Sam Raimi, you should really know what you’re going to get when you hire him for a movie, even if it is Spider-man, which is why I usually defend Spider-man 3 for being the mess that it ended up being.

Spider-man 2 was the last “great” Spider-man film until we got to Spider-man: Homecoming, which isn’t really a knock on Andrew Garfield’s Amazing Spider-man films, I just felt that he was never really given a chance to really show his abilities and his films were unfortunately overladen with cgi and poorly thought out plot points.