Spiderman 3 - Disappointing
I’m a disappointed fan, and for a whole lot of reasons. I loved the first two Spiderman movies, and found Toby Maguire to be totally endearing as Peter Parker, but this movie was an overall mess with an occasional pleasant scene. I don’t know if the studio demanded More, Better BIGGER ACTION! or if Raimi lost his deft touch, but this film was over done and over loaded with villains and conflict. I thought long and hard about this film last night before I went to sleep, and I realized that they were trying to explore the theme of “forgiveness”, but they didn’t need seven points of conflict to do that. Let’s count them up — we had Peter vs. Harry over MJ’s affections. The we had Spiderman vs. the Hobgoblin over the death of daddy, and Harry/Hobgoblin’s need for revenge. We had Peter vs. the a**hole photographer who took his job. And then the guy turns into Venom so we had Spiderman vs. Venom. We had Spiderman vs. Sandman. And of course we had Spidey vs. Black Spiderman. And we had Peter in conflict with MJ.
I was disappointed that they changed screenwriters, and went with Raimi’s brother. The scenes with Aunt May in the first two films where she had subtley and deftly provided Peter with life lessons gave way to scenes where she Delivered the Message with a Jack Hammer — talk about on the nose and heavy handed.
Then there was the confused nature of the scenes. I found myself turning to my companions at various points and saying “what was that scene about?” “What was that scene supposed to do?” There is one in particular between Peter and MJ that had me shaking my head, and wondering if Dunst’s contract said she had to have x many minutes of screen time.
And that’s when I began to see the real flaw in this movie beyond the “too many notes Herr Mozart” problem. Building a book or a film is like constructing a pyramid or a ziggurat. The opening scenes lay the foundation of this structure. They set up the problem and the people. After that each subsequent scene has to build on these early scenes. They have to start narrowing the focus and carrying forward the story as you pull everything in toward the conclusion. You can’t just string scenes like beads on as string. You’ve got to consider the color and clarity and shape of the structure you are building. I like a scene to carry me into the next scene, and in some cases catapult me into the following scene. The scenes in Spiderman 3 felt like they were just thrown together randomly, and then there was this mad scramble at the end as they tried to pull it all together for Harry to forgive Peter and go off to save the girl.
And my finale little feminist rant — I’m really tired of the women in these movies being screaming luggage. Oh, and Peter in the throes of Dark Peter had me giggling because all I could think about was Weird Al’s song “White and Nerdy”.
Well, maybe Harry Potter will be good, and I’ve heard the next FANTASTIC FOUR is much better than the first one.
Melinda
May 7th, 2007 at 4:52 am
I, too, was disappointed in Spiderman 3. I saw the same flaws you did. One thing I noticed in retrospect was that the opening credits seemed to reflect these flaws. As we saw bits and snips of scenes between bits of web things appeared fractured, fragmented. The scenes of the film held this feeling where, as you observe, individual scenes appeared completely disjointed and unconnected to the whole.
And I just had to laugh at the meteorite carring the bit of symbiote falling to Earth in Central Park going completely unnoticed not only by all the NYC papers but by Peter and MJ who were apparently a few yards away. It’s sad, but John Stewart’s joke while interviewing Maguire about a bit of goo falling from space ruining Stewart’s suspension of disbelief rang far too true.
May 7th, 2007 at 7:41 am
God, Peter, you are so right. I actually turned to Carl during the opening credits, and said I found it very jarring and not at all effective. Yes, they were giving us a big heads up.
May 7th, 2007 at 11:51 am
[…] Snodgrass, story editor for some of the best seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, has a blog. Here, she gives her review of the film, from a screenwriter’s point of view. Well worth the […]
May 7th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
What I can’t figure out is why Peter Parker’s spider-sense,
which they used to such good effect in the other films, completely
failed to warn him, on multiple occasions, about the space goo.
Ian
May 7th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Looking back on it, besides the structural faults, SPIDERMAN III was also guilty of hypocritical Hollywood gooey-sentiment, aka all the ‘forgiveness’ stuff.
Peter Parker forgives the Sandman for… killing his uncle. Well, wonderful, fellah, but it doesn’t make your uncle notably less, you know, _dead_. How does _he_ feel about it?
Not to mention the half-dozen other people the Sandman killed or maimed in the course of the movie. This guy is a one man murder-machine; he has a definite problem with impulse control.
What Parker is really forgiving the Sandman for is making him, PP, _feel_ bad; a narcissistic focus on his own feelings is sorta-kinda evident here, and just _so_ Hollywood. Get over your emotions, PP; they aren’t all that important to anyone else and they shouldn’t be to you.
Murdering his uncle wasn’t bad because it made the survivors ‘all tore up’ about things and full of negative feelings — it was bad because it made the uncle _dead_.
You can, if you wish forgive people for things they did to _you_. Forgiving them for things they did to other people is a bit hubristic — that’s God’s perogative.
Is the Sandman going straight? Is he going to turn himself in to the cops? Is he becoming any less of a deranged menace?
Is it, like, just sorta-kinda socially irresponsible to let a superpowerful criminal with a history of impulsive murder go loose, ’cause you had a Magic Moment with him and looked into his eyes and did some bonding?
You are what you do, not what you think about it all. A bad person is a person who does bad things.
May 7th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
The whole problem with the Sandman thread is that it was only there to hammer home the forgiveness theme. His motivation made zero sense. Venom finds him, and says “I know you want to kill him (PP) too. So, let’s join forces.”
Why does Sandman want to kill Spiderman? Supposedly all Sandman wanted was to get money to take care of his deperately ill daughter. Well, he got money. What does he care about Spiderman?
They try to take the curse off the character by having it be an accidental shooting, but it undercuts the power of Uncle Ben’s death. Peter is a selfish little shit, and it has consequences. It isn’t about who hurt uncle it’s about making Peter squirm and suffer — which is our task as writers. We’re _supposed_ to torture our characters. Peter trying to take vengeance is far less interesting than his guilt over his actions/inactions leading to the death of the man who raised him.
May 10th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Nothing better than you sharing snippets of your Mastery of Story Structure! Well, little anyway. If only you’d be willing to give us a little, y’know, more.
I’ve not yet seen Spidey Trey. I haven’t seen much to encourage me to do so. This is just the latest, and one of the more cogent, arguments against.
Though I suspect you know this about me already, I publicly want to add my name to the list of those who utterly hate the “screaming female hostage” cliche. I only wish a certain person in charge of a certain project we’re both involved in saw things that way…
May 10th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Hi, Vic,
Glad to see your phospers in these here parts.
The female hostage is something to grab for because you want something that our hero (and it’s always a hero) cares about and will be drawn to the fight to rescue her. It would be wild, and probably wouldn’t go over well if you had a villain taunting our hero “I’ve got your girl, I’ve got your girl!”, and hero says — hey, I can’t fight you and win. I need to go gather support or get the guns tee hee (sorry, folks a little inside gaming joke), or I’m just not going to give into your demands over a single individual.
The only movie that had the male as the whimpering hostage was that truly awful pirate movie with Geena Davis. Oh yeah, CUTTHROAT ISLAND, that was the name.
May 11th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Oh, and did anyone else think that it was just a bit convenient that Venom essentially killed _himself_?
May 11th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I was just so grateful that the movie was almost over that I didn’t care. I thought at the time that it felt like they had run out of money to do the CGI on another big fight sequence. And again, I didn’t need the space goo. It would have been better if Peter, who is maybe all of twenty in this movie, lets the fame and adulation go to his head and starts acting like a jerk.
May 12th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
“starts acting like a jerk”
– yeah, but he has to have some sort of exculpatory _excuse_ to start acting like a jerk.
I suspect that because a lot of people in the industry are twentysomething jerks, they’re unsympathetic to the idea of someone acting like a jerk without excuses being make for it.
And, as you once pointed out, ‘they’re all such chickenshits’.
Compare this to a _good_ action movie — “Casino Royale”. Where the protagonist really _is_ a jerk(*), and no bones are made about it.
(*) in fact, he’s a murderous jerk. Yeah, the bad guys are considerably worse, but they don’t kill themselves to spare the image of the protag.
May 12th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
And while we’re on “gooey”… you’re so absolutely right that they wouldn’t dare do a movie in which the hero says:
“Yeah, you’ve got my girl/SO/partner/little blond moppet/puppy with big eyes, but principle is more important than personal interests, so I’m going to refuse your demands and shoot you anyway even if he/she/it dies.”
One of the reasons they rarely do “conflict of duty and love” movies any more is that the people who make movies have no concept of duty. And not much of love, except the sort the emote into the mirror every morning.
May 29th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
I figured girls/kids/wee critters/lil’ old ladies and gents,etc. were the victims of choice because they weigh less.
Bad guys and heroes can snatch them up easier and they can dangle precariously longer.
Try that with a full-figured crony or an atheletic type built like a tank.
Spiderman 5: MJ is being held hostage by one of the eleventy-seven villains.
She smiles tremulously and says to Peter:
“I guess now would be a bad time to mention I went down on Nick Fury.”