The Spoiler-Free Summary

Bear in mind that I have not, as yet, actually managed to watch any Heroes. (This deficiency is being resolved, never fear.) That said, Spiderman 3 feels more like a quick summary of a season of Spiderman: the TV Series than it does a coherent movie. Anyone who hasn't seen the first two films and doesn't want spoilers for the third shouldn't read any further. In fact, if you've not seen the first two films you shouldn't even be thinking about watching 3: not only will you not understand the plot (the "story so far" bits in the opening titles are useful for reminding people who've seen the first two films of what's happened, but not much more than that), the other two are better.

The Spoiler-Full Review

I'd prepared myself for watching this by watching the first two movies at a friend's house the previous weekend, so I am pretty sure my memories of the first two films haven't become rosy with nostalgia. Raimi's original Spiderman movie was an incredibly fun adaptation of the material and wonderful eye-candy. Spiderman 2 trod water - barely any of the plot details from that film are important, aside from Mary Jane finding out that Peter Parker is Spiderman and starting to date him, and Harry Osborn finding out that his dad was the Green Goblin but not letting that derail his mad quest for revenge against Spiderman/Peter Parker. These things could very easily have happened at the end of Spiderman 1, but if they did the film company wouldn't have been able the franchise for a trilogy, and where would they be then?

Spiderman 3, meanwhile, looks like a committee got together and came up with a whole bunch of ideas of how to tie up the trilogy and Raimi used all of them. There are three supervillains in this one - Harry as a new Goblin, the Sandman, and Venom - but next-to-no effort is made to properly integrate them. Instead, you have a Goblin bit, then a Sandman bit, then a Venom bit, and they don't really come together until the very end. "Hey Sandman, come and collaborate with me," says Venom. "Sure," says the Sandman. "Whups, I didn't mean to do that," he says, after Venom is defeated. "Why the fuck did you do that then?" asks the audience.

This film lasts nearly two-and-a-half hours, longer than any of the previous two films. (It feels much longer, and not in a good way.) This is not enough time to really adequately deal with any of the three opponents, especially when lengthly periods are devoted to Peter's inevitable relationship troubles and discussions with Aunt May (I think this film had the least superhero action of any part of the trilogy). The Sandman is particularly poorly-served: we're briefly introduced to his sick daughter, it is revealed to us that he needs money to pay for her treatment, we find out that he is the guy who actually pulled the trigger on Uncle Ben in film one. Oh, and he falls into a particle accelerator in order to get turned into a supervillain. (That part's actually funny). The problem is, the film has barely enough time to establish all that: the Sandman doesn't actually do very much. He robs a couple of banks, he is almost killed by Spiderman, he teams up with Venom, he goes away again once he's done.

What's missing in this sequence? His goddamn daughter. He carries around her picture and so forth and talks about her, sure, but he doesn't seem to do anything to actually make her life better. We can vaguely assume that he's sending the proceeds from bank robberies to her, but do we ever find out what happens to her? No. For all we know, Spiderman's condemned her to death by stopping the Sandman - and that is precisely the sort of decision Spiderman is known for tearing himself up over - but we don't get any resolution of that plotline. You could take the daughter out of the film and the Sandman's sequences would make as much sense. It would also free up time wasted in a boring sequence where, pre-transformation, the Sandman breaks into his ex-wife's house in order to see his daughter and the director tries to play with our emotions unsuccessfully.

Meanwhile, the Venom plotline suffers similarly. Spiderman meets an alien symbiote. Spiderman gets a cool black costume made of said symbiote which makes him more powerful and turns him into an asshole. Tobey Maguire tries to act evil but can't pull it off. Whoops.

To their credit, the filmmakers and cast seem to have realised that there's no way Tobey Maguire can act evil without looking silly, and so they went for comedy. Peter Parker, under the influence of Venom, turns into a gothy emo kid in order to have a really whiny fight with Harry Osborn. The audience could not help but laugh out loud at Evil Peter, with his floppy hair and his eyeliner and his sulky expression. Once Peter decides it is cool to be an aggressive jerk, he develops into a fully-fledged bastard, a sort of Evil Jazz Jarvis Cocker (if you see the film you'll know exactly what I mean by that). Eventually, he decides it is better to be a nice reclusive shy nerd as opposed to an aggressive asshole (because remember folks, there's only two choices available to a man), and he rips the symbiote off, only for it to bond to some photographer we're not especially interested in.

Now, here's an interesting point. In the previous movies nobody ever became a supervillain without having voices in their head. The Green Goblin had gas-induced insanity, and Dr Octopus was goaded on by the artificial intelligence in his mechanical arms. This time, however, the film refuses to let that be a cop-out (even though Harry has voices in his head, and Venom qualifies as a voice in someone's head): in the second-to-last scene (which really should have been the last scene, but oh well) Peter Parker's narration points out that choice is important, man, and we always have a choice to do the right thing no matter how bad things get.

This is a pretty trite point, and the film doesn't successfully engage with it in my opinion. The Sandman's thread tries to explore this, but it fails: he makes terrible, idiotic choices, but at the end he basically gets away with it and blows away on the breeze. The Venom thread, similarly, makes an effort to get into the choice thing, but it actually undermines it because Peter Parker is protected from all of the negative consequences of his bad choices: he doesn't actually kill anyone, even though we think he's killed both Harry and the Sandman, and Mary Jane gets back together with him at the end after he's stomped on his heart, and he even managed to get a permanent job at the Daily Bugle while he was being Evil Jazz Jarvis Cocker. The only two people who really exemplify the point the film was trying to make are Harry - who chooses to do the right thing, and dies a redeemed man - and the guy Venom possesses after Spiderman rejects him, who gets killed by jumping on a grenade to protect Venom.

This film has many good qualities. Jonah Jameson steals the show again. The evil Peter sequences are funny. In fact, in many places the film is completely hilarious. I think Sam Raimi realised that his script was weak and decided to save it by playing for laughs. It is a ploy which almost works, but the better solution would have been to get a stronger script. As far as eye-candy and exciting fights go, this film simply doesn't deliver, because it doesn't actually want to be a superhero action movie: it wants to be a soap opera with superheroes.

The most frustrating thing is that the actors all do a decent job - the characterisation is fabulous - but we're left with a bunch of characters swanning around in search of the plot. The soap opera approach could succeed on TV. (By all accounts, it has in the form of Heroes.) It fails on film. Go read Jay Pinkerton's Spiderman parodies instead of seeing this film, the parodies are far better.