Spider-Man 3

If you didn’t like the first “Spider-Man,” or its terrific sequel, you might as well stop reading now because you won’t like “Spider-Man 3.” It’s got the same characters, more vertigo inducing fights, and more messages wrapped into its emotion-heavy plots. Of course if you didn’t like the first one, or the second, you might need to square with the fact that you probably just plain hate cinema.
I’m afraid I won’t be lambasting this latest entry into the series; as it turns I liked it very much, though that is not to say it is without its flaws. Sequels are easier to love than originals, but they’re also easier to hate. What I mean is, when there’s already been a movie (or two) to introduce us to the characters and situations, a sequel can continue to build from there so our love of the original(s) carries on as a love of the sequels.
It’s important to point out that this only happens when the sequel is good. I say it’s easier to hate them because if a sequel is bad, it’s not just one poor movie; it tarnishes our appreciation for its predecessors.
The only real flaw of “Spider-Man 3” is that it tries to deliver too much of a good thing. Without going into too much detail, I’ll see if I can recall the various plot lines. There’s Peter and Mary Jane’s romance, which is threatened by flirty classmate Gwen Stacy, who is dating Peter’s rival photographer Eddie Brock. Mary Jane’s having trouble with her career, but Peter doesn’t know this because he’s obsessed with his uncle’s killer ex-con Flint Marco, though not quite as obsessed as he is with himself.
Infectious black alien goo that amplifies aggression is passed around like every other disease in New York, and Marco is genetically tweaked so he can become a sandstorm at will. Harry Osborn, still obsessed with avenging his father, sinks to all kinds of lows to hurt Peter.
Peter, as promised in trailers and posters, becomes a much darker and more vengeful version of himself, who, when he’s not viciously fighting villains or ex-best friends, saunters around New York attempting to flirt and being a pretty slimy little brat if you ask me. Mix all that together and we’ve got enough material to fill three movies stuffed into this one.
Surprisingly it doesn’t all seem as disjointed on screen as it does on the page. Director Sam Raimi knows how to keep things moving, and he’s never above throwing in an awkward laugh, or a cringe inducing brawl just to keep it interesting. All the characters have their stories and they intertwine nicely before converging at the end to be resolved.
I’m generally against sequels that try to rewrite history, but it happens here and it works pretty well. It is a comic book movie, after all, and if such stories didn’t know how to keep the plot twists coming we’d have lost interest a long time ago.
I’m not generally against movies that have overt messages; it’s just annoying when a movie wants to have a message and winds up spewing out some faux-philosophic crap in an attempt to be deep. The “Spider-Man” series has always been head and shoulders above all other comic book adaptations because it was more than just spectacle and summer romance. It is in this aspect that number three earns its place alongside one and two.
Forgiveness is a pretty tough subject to handle well, it is divine you know. Not many movies could really do it justice as a theme, or present a full enough story to make us, the audience, understand why it’s such a tough subject. “Spider-Man” has the benefit of two previous movies, which means that this time around we’ve already seen most of the wrongs done, and we can appreciate how hard it is for the characters to let go of their hate and desire for revenge.
Don’t get yourself worried, this isn’t some two and a half hour sermon; it’s got a lot of humor, a couple good jump scenes, state of the art special effects, breathtaking scenes of grandeur, and one particularly good villain. It just also has the decency to strive for emotional ethical depth.
It is, undisputedly, the first real blockbuster in what many experts are predicting could be a record breaking three months at the movies. I don’t know how “Shrek 3” or “Pirates of the Caribbean At World’s End” are going to turn out, though I can say fairly safely that “Transformers” will be a sad joke. The point is, it’s nice that in the summer, a season usually featuring a lot of noisy meaningless movies, there’s at least one that tries to be something worthwhile when it could have been just another pointless, half-hearted, in other words typical, sequel.

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