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I have very mixed feelings about this movie. It was really cool and looked great, but there are things that aren't sitting well with me. I'll have to sleep on it.
I grew up loving movies and loving comics, but never expecting the two to mesh satisfactorily. The Superman and Hulk TV shows had their own charms, but were not a truthful interpretation from the comics any more than a Star Wars comic-book could give you the same feeling as the movies. Well, that has all changed due to advances in special effects and the growing number of comics readers who have become filmmakers. Where once we were expected to be impressed by shots of stuntmen in Spider-man suits climbing up a wall while obviously filmed sliding down a wire and run backward, now filmmakers can achieve anything on screen they can imagine, freeing them to create movies based on comics that show everything that happens in a comic. Accepting the fact that marvelous f/x are more commonplace, the pressure is on to satisfy audiences with comic-book movies beyond the action chapterplays of old.
Spider-man 3 ambitiously attempts to top its two predecessors in every way – more action, more spectacle, more humor and more emotional resonance. It doesn’t quite reach all of its goals, but at 140 minutes in length, it still feels like some things needed to be rushed in order to keep the movie at a manageable length. Spider-man 3 has enough going on for three movies. We see Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) struggle along the rocky road of their relationship, both making mistakes. We see escaped convict Flint Marko (Thomas Hayden Church) become the supervillain Sandman, who is bent on stealing enough money to finance a cure for his crippled daughter. It’s revealed that this new villain was the real killer of Peter’s uncle. We see Peter’s one time friend Harry Osborn (James Franco) gain the powers and weapons of his father (Willem Dafoe), the Green Goblin, lose his memory in a battle with Spidey, regain his memory and carry out a plan to destroy Parker. We see the alien symbiote Venom from outer space attach itself to Peter in the form of a black costume, turning him disagreeably aggressive, and then once Peter manages to get rid of it, it attaches itself to Peter’s news photography rival Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), who has a grudge against Peter. We see Bruce Campbell as a goofy French Maitre d’ and an awkward cameo by Stan Lee. We even get to see more of Peter’s landlord Mr. Ditkovitch (Elya Baskin) and his daughter Ursula (Mageina Tovah).
That’s an awful lot to cover in one movie, and unfortunately director Sam Raimi and company have to resort to a few narrative shoehorns to squeeze it all in, including more than a few happy coincidences and back-and-forth editing. It takes so long to set up the Sandman storyline that one begins to wonder whether it has anything to do with Spider-man or is part of another movie. At one point, the script even resorts to having a minor character step forward to give a speech in order to get certain plot wheels turning. And once Raimi has all his plates spinning, it becomes troublesome to wind everything up by the end, which features one too many tearful conclusions. The movie stretches pretty far, but fortunately it doesn’t break, and in some sense the multiple storylines replicate the running subplots of the comics. Fittingly, a webwork of plot is spun to connect all the stories together, making it seem as if one thread is dependent on the others, and they all come together at the finale.
And it all fits together under the movie’s theme: forgiveness. All the lead characters make trespasses in the course of the tale, and much of the emotional weight comes from whether those trespasses can and will be forgiven. It’s nice to know that even on his third outing in the series, Raimi wants his movie to be about something.
Lest we forget, it’s also about awesome action in the merry Marvel manner. Spidey fights all three villains twice, then the four of them get together for a wild free-for-all at the end. Each of these battles is given a distinct flavor, and some of it is vicious enough to make you wince (the PG-13 rating was passed “for sequences of intense action violence”). The f/x surrounding these superpowered characters is often breathtaking, making them fantastic and believable at the same time. Only Grace’s Eddie Brock lacks something, though that could be because his story arc came from a weaker period in the comic’s history.
If the lone fault in Spider-man 3 is that it tries to do too much, then one can’t judge it too harshly. Too much is always better than not enough. Oh, and that goes double for the IMAX version!
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