05/28/07: By the way, we're having quite the
cicada infestation around here. Check out
our Cicada page for more information.
05/27/07: With Pirates of the Caribbean 3 opening this weekend, and Shrek 3 in its second week, we thought this would be a good time to go see
Spider-Man 3. And we were right. Ten minutes before the matinée showing on Saturday at one of the local multiplexes, we were still the only people in the audience. And they didn't even bother to play any music or have that ad sideshow running while the lights were up. It was a little creepy. Ultimately, I think I counted 18 more people filter in before the trailers finished and the movie started. And the movie? Eh...
I've been a fan of Spider-Man from way back (
September of 1973 to be exact) so I've watched each of the three movies with the suspicious eye of someone who remembers the original versions of these stories. Sure, I realize that there will be liberties taken, as there always is when a concept is transferred from one media to another, and I further realize that times change and popular entertainment changes with the times, but this character is a cherished part of my childhood, and I'd love nothing more than to see them done right.
The first movie, with its many flaws, was still an exciting time at the show. It was the origin story, so it had to contain lots of exposition to bring the viewer (who hasn't been reading the comic for almost 30 years) up to speed. The effects were good, the casting just right, and while I wasn't thrilled with the Goblin costume, the rest of the movie looked great. The
second film was even better, containing one of my favorite villains as well as much of the humor and character of the comics. It seemed to be aimed more at me, the long-time Spider-Man fan, than the first. There were bits of several story lines from the sixties and seventies thrown in, and they were treated with what I thought was the proper reverence.
Now, there's the third. I should probably have started out by saying that I absolutely loathe the Venom character. I thought that the black suit was briefly interesting when they introduced it as one of the few "long term" changes to come out of the
Secret Wars series, but I could never understand the appeal of an alien being turning an uninteresting third-string character into a homicidal psychopath. They even gave this character its own comic book for a while! Venom, along with the similarly sociopathic character Carnage, were the driving forces behind the
"Maximum Carnage" series that almost made me stop buying Spider-Man comics for good. I thought it was even worse then the universally reviled
Clone Saga, but that's another story...
But the movie? I thought it looked good.
Thomas Hayden Church looked perfect as Flint Marko, but while the scene where we first see Sandman emerging from the sand was a great use of the CG effects that have come a long way since the first movie, I had to scratch my head when he becomes a 15-story sandstorm. I mean, how do you explain that? Sure, it's a big stretch to have a guy's cells merge with the sand under his feet and eventually become a being made of sand, but it's still sand. I'll buy that he can survive having half his face buffed off by a passing subway car, but how was he able to grow to be skyscraper size and still be solid enough to pummel our favorite web-slinger? Does he now have "mastery over all sand"? And I think it was plain wrong to change one of the foundations of the Spider-Man legend. If the guy that killed
Uncle Ben wasn't the guy that Spider-Man could have stopped, to me it turns Uncle Ben's death into a random act of senseless violence instead of the catalyst of Peter's drive to right wrongs. Sorry, Pete, nothing you could have done. Move on with your life.
One of the benefits of having a story come out in monthly bits, something you can't do when you have one shot to tell a story ever 2-3 years, is that you can have characters and plots develop over time. I think it was too soon to have
Harry come back as yet another Goblin ("Goblin Junior" as Pete calls him) but I guess they wanted to wrap up that part of the storyline, in case there are no more Spider-Man movies from this creative team, which looks to be a possibility. The battle with the New Goblin early in the movie is exciting, but it's almost too fast to follow what's going on. We were initially planning to try to see this in
IMAX, but after this sequence was over, I was glad we didn't because I'll bet one of us would have motion sickness from that!
Overall, though, the movie was a little unsatisfying. It had a few laughs, especially the scenes in the Daily Bugle office with J. Jonah Jameson, and in the restaurant with
Bruce Campbell as the Maître d’. I agree with one reviewer that if they make a fourth movie, it should star these two characters. But the movie is too long (I caught Stephie checking her watch at one point) and the "Parker as swingin' ladies man" scenes in particular really dragged. There were some nice scenes, like with Pete and his landlord, but they're too few and far between. It could have been better.
Then again, it could have been much worse. Instead of Venom, they could have used the
Mindworm...
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