Spider-Man 3
Eternal optimist that I am, I continue to hold out hope for a consistently good superhero franchise. Before seeing
Spider-Man 3, I still had two shots at maintaining that dream. Now it's completely in the hands of Christopher Nolan and his Batman collaborators, because Sam Raimi has turned in a thoroughly disappointing third film in the Spider-Man series.
Unlike the Batman comics and graphic novels, I was never much of a Spider-Man reader as a kid. In fact, back when I read comics regularly I tended to stay away from the Marvel universe in general in favor of DC. So imagine my surprise when the best two superhero movie series emerged from Marvel (X-Men and Spider-Man). Tim Burton's first two Batman films, while far from ideal, were both respectable enough efforts before Joel Schumacher made a mockery of the character. Even the first two Superman films were decent for their time, followed by two atrocious films.
So what is it about part three that seems to jinx every superhero movie franchise? First X-Men and now Spider-Man have both been tarnished by the third entry in their respective series, though
Spider-Man 3 isn't quite as bad as the haphazard mess of X-Men: The Last Stand.
I think I know what it is: By part three, each of these series has fallen into a trap of trying to cram too much into one movie. Too many villains, too many subplots, too many storylines—and because these are action movies, they also need those set pieces—all at the expense of the proper character development and focus on the thematic elements that made their predecessors so great. Simply put, by part three the producers get greedy and bite off more than the story can chew.
In the case of Spider-Man 3, as with most Superhero 3 movies, all of this clutter leaves less time for the story of a somewhat important character—the one for whom the movie is named. These films end up forgetting it's the hero we came to see, not the stories of all the supporting characters.
Since we last left our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, things have been going well for Peter Parker. The City of New York has embraced him as a hero, he's acing his classes at Columbia and he plans on proposing to Mary Jane despite a harmless infatuation with a classmate.
But all is not well in fact. M.J.'s acting career is on the skids and she feels distant from Peter because he's constantly out fighting crime. Making things worse is the city's hero-worship of Spider-Man, blowing his ego out of proportion and blinding him to trouble on the home front.
Compounding his problems are: 1) Old friend Harry Osborne, who has turned himself into Goblin Jr. to avenge the death of his father, for which he wrongly blames Spider-Man; 2) A mysterious black goo with troublesome symbiotic properties, which plummets to Earth on a meteor that conveniently strikes Central Park right next to where Peter and M.J. are star-gazing; 3) Petty thug Flint Marko, on the run after a prison break, who accidentally stumbles into a particle beam test of some kind in the swamps of Jersey and turns into Sandman, a creature that can manipulate all the sand around him for powerful criminal purposes and then literally up and vanish like dust in the wind; 4) A rival photographer at the "Daily Bugle," who threatens Peter's only flimsy excuse for a livelihood.
If that's not enough for you, these are the following themes Sam Raimi attempts to address within the plots, subplots and sub-subplots mentioned above: ego, jealously, revenge, friendship, love, death, commitment, temptation, redemption, forgiveness and a few more I probably forgot or lost track of along the way.
Just about all of Spider-Man 3's failings can be pinned on the unmanageable screenplay of Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent. It's an absolute mess from start to finish and shows little of the thoughtfulness that went into the previous two scripts (Sergant wrote
Spider-Man 2 on a story by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar and Michael Chabon and David Koepp wrote the first
Spider-Man).
Raimi is a director of exceptional technical and visual acumen and wry humor, but he seems to have tackled this script as a director rather than a writer, forcing everything he wanted to see on screen onto the page, and the over-crowded plot doesn't allow for proper character development. Making exposition scenes interesting is troublesome for any writer and/or director, but they can't all be thrown out in lieu of more subplots. Then nothing makes sense and ridiculous out-of-the-blue revelations start popping up all over act three to bring everything to conclusion.
Any one of the three villainous subplots could have been tossed. Probably the most pointless of them in the final version of the script was the hapless, sad-sack Sandman. Dropping him would have allowed more time for the other storylines to develop properly, or keeping him and dropping Venom, or... well, you get the idea.
Fortunately, Raimi's heart is still in the right place and that's what saves
Spider-Man 3 from being a total train wreck like Batman Forever or
Superman III. It's a major step back for a franchise that helped reinvigorate the comic-book genre several years ago, but there's still time to right the ship and hopefully wrap this series up with some dignity.
Note to Christopher Nolan and the Batman crew: Keep it simple. One major villain at a time, no love interests other than Catwoman, and for God's sake no codpieces or nipples.