Spiderman 3

I saw Spiderman 3 last night. There were parts of it I really loved, and while I can't say I hated anything about it, I was left a little un-fulfilled by the ending.

First of all, The action was great throughout. The actors are all top-notch (I especially like Topher Grace AKA Eric Foreman as the "bad boy" competition for Peter Parker's job as photographer at the Bugle. He did a great job of being just annoying enough that you wanted to punch hsi lights out, while still being likeable enough that... well, let's not go there quite yet. I also thought The Sandman was brilliantly portrayed as another villian who's not really evil - just misunderstood. Of course, the Peter/MJ/Harry trio are all brilliant.

I started thinking about the villians in this film, and one of the things I realized about all of Spidey's foes is that they're not truely evil in the classic comic book villian sense. They're just.... disturbed. All of the villians in the series are not evil people; they're just tragic. First, the Green Goblin loses the government contract that would have saved his company, and he loses his sanity experimenting on himself. Who couldn't sympathize with Doctor Octopus? He loses everything: his career, his wife, even his future.

What I loved is how, in this third installment, the hero himself must face his own internal battle. This time, it's not the struggle to overcome teenage awkwardness, and it's not the challenge of telling the woman you love that you can't be without her. Instead, he's fighting for his very soul. Will he win by being the good man he is, or will he let revenge and hate run his life? It's like the parallel challenges that Anakin and Luke Skywalker faced: one went to the dark side, and the other stayed on the light.

Were there things I didn't like? Yes. Certain parts of the conclusion left me feeling more confused than satisfied, and I could have wished for a very different outcome for another character.

Finally, there were a couple of consistency issues in the film. Consistency problems, whether internal (something happens one way at one point in the movie, but has a very different effect another time) or external (breaking the laws of physics or nature) always bug me in a film.
When watching a scene, the audience has to get sucked in. They have to believe every second of what they're seeing. When a major, glaring violation of the laws of physics happens, it doesn't make me go "wow, look at that!" Instead, it makes me go, "aw jeez. How fake," and the whole scene loses much of its impact (sometime, I'll write about airplanes in space). One such incident was the crane scene early on. A girder smashes right through part of a building... one that should have stopped the girder cold. Those scenes always annoy me, because I know what should happen, and so when something different happens, I can't stay with the scene. It's gone from "oh wow" to "oh fake".

Likewise, the moment of the Sandman's origin is completely implausible, because the security was far too lax for something as significant as what was going on there. They didn't even have a camera on the scene to record the event?

Those kinds of things don't have to be that way. It wouldn't have cost any more money to write the scenes properly and to design an effects sequence that wouldn't break the rules of reality. Yes, I know that a sentient ball of sand is a little implausible, but that's why it's even more important to keep the other laws of nature intact. By keeping the rest of the story completely believable, the writer makes the viewer want to believe that the one thing he sees that seems to break the rules is still real.

Despite that (which is admittedly my pet peeve in action and sci-fi movies), I though this movie stood up well next to its two predecessors. In fact, I'm betting that there will be an S4. I can only imagine what they'll think up for that one.