Painful.Now that I’ve summarized my movie-watching experience, I’ll get a little more specific.
I loved Spiderman 1 and 2. I was never a fan of the super-hero comics, but I have enjoyed many of the new super-her movies, and Spiderman was the best. The story was compelling and each of the first two movies brought together some added depth and meaning to tickle the imaginations of those of us interested in more than amazing computer effects and kick-butt action scenes. There was romance, a hero having to make sacrifices and hard choices, and a best friend turned enemy.
I eagerly anticipated Spiderman 3, which I expected to follow in the same vein. Boy, was I disappointed.
My husband and I actually left the movie with barely half an hour left to go. I never leave movies in the theatre. I would have left this one sooner, if it weren’t for the fact that I had enjoyed the first two so much and I kept hoping it would redeem itself.
We opened with some recapping and information dumping. Life is wonderful for Spiderman. He has everything he could possibly want in life. He’s going to propose to MJ.
Then we start setting up bad guys. Unfortunately, it’s plural, and none of them were well developed. Harry becomes the Green Goblin, of course, but this movie did not deepen the best friend turned enemy arc. All they did was give Harry some pretty darn convenient amnesia so they could rewind time and have him rediscover what he’d already found out, as if they could get the same reaction from the same revelation two movies in a row.
Enter Sandman, our next bad guy. I don’t know who he was in the comic books and I don’t really care, but in the movie he was a tender balance between unbelievable and corny. We are supposed to feel sorry for him because he has a sick daughter at home but it was a pretty underdeveloped situation, especially with how much was going on in the movie. Then came the unbelievable part — he falls into some physics experiment where the words “particle physics” were thrown in at random to try to make sense of how a machine could disintegrate a man and he could come back to life in the form of a sand monster. Yeah. Right. I mean, I managed to go ahead and suspend disbelief for the original spider bite and for Green Goblin’s strength experiment, and even for Professor Octavius’ mind-controlling AI, but this just stretched the limits of credulity a few notches too far. Maybe it would have helped if there was anything else compelling about the subplot. Maybe that was why I suspended disbelief before. Either way, I don’t buy it.
Then came dark Spiderman. A random blob of black stuff from space lands on Earth and follows him home, covering him in anger-enhancing parasites at just the right moment to disinterest me. Honestly, by the time that happened (at least an hour into the movie) I was already so bored I was ready to leave. I had hoped that Spiderman himself would have had something to do with turning evil — some human temptation — but it was not that eloquent. The black stuff gave him an excuse to act like an ass for a few minutes, pretending (incredibly unconvincingly) to be cool while, for some reason, women checked him out.
Finally, there was the photographer trying to get Peter Parker’s position at the Daily Bugle. I’m really not sure what to say about that one except — enough already! How many bad guys do we need in one movie?
Most of the movie was spent on the romance between Peter and MJ, though. That had its moments, but it was not the movie I went to see.
All in all, I checked my watch at least fifty times and finally tugged on my husband’s sleeve to whisper, “This is awful.” I was relieved that he agreed. He asked if I wanted to leave and I said yes, but still gave the movie another fifteen minutes before finally standing up. I was desperate for it to live up to the first two but in the end, could not bear to watch it spiral into oblivion. I therefore have no idea how the movie ends and frankly, I don’t care.
I highly recommend not watching this movie, especially if you liked the first two Spiderman flicks. It will disappoint.