The other day, I picked up the Spider-Man 3 game for the princely sum of seven dollars plus tax.
I got it because a) c'mon man, seven bucks for a 360 game, and b) I really dug the Spider-Man 2 game, and this seemed like more of the same. It is.
I'd gotten the Spider-Man 2 game for the PS2 back in the day because I fucking love the movie. I've seen it a couple of dozen times now, and it never gets old. That scene in the operating room is one of the most purely Raimi things I've seen on film since he took the step up to the A-list. LOVE IT.
And this from a guy (me) who's never bought a Spider-Man comic. Back in my hardcore comic days, I was way more about Doom Patrol and X-Men and Milk&Cheese.
But playing 3 reminded me of an odd fact - I've only seen the first and third movies once each, in the theater. I liked both but thought they were flawed, 3 moreso than 1.
It struck me as a jumble of cool ideas that are intermittently fun, but never quite come together to create a great movie. I place the blame squarely on the three villains. We've seen time and again in superhero movies that, when the cast bloats, the movie suffers. I loved the fact that the first two Spider-Man movies kept the focus on a single villain. By taking the screen time you'd ordinarily have to split between a couple of characters and putting it all on a single villain, you get a layered, interesting antagonist. When you have three villains, all you get are three actors in costumes skidding over a hasty backstory on their way to an action sequence. The Dark Knight obviously managed two villains, but I think that worked because it's a long movie -- and thus more screen time -- and Harvey Dent spends the majority of the movie in non-villain mode.
I hope we get a Spider-Man 4, and I hope the villain is the Lizard, and that's it... not the Lizard, Kraven, the Scorpion, Rhino, Carnage, etc.
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Both Spiderman 3 and Dark Knight, I think, were literally the same length: 2 hours and 30 minutes. The main problem with SM3 was that it didn't manage that time well, spending nearly 15-20 just on "emo Parker" goofing around, introducing an amnesia subplot that's ultimately pointless, etc.
Also, it seemed odd after Doc Ock that the only threat available was Osbourn's "kill Spiderman," Sandman's "rob banks, knock out/beat up guards, later kill Spiderman" and venom's "kill Peter Parker." I mean, SM1 had a villain that was mentally unstable and wanted to cause as much carnage as possible; 2 had a similar thing, plus a potentially city-destroying weapon; and 3, the supposed big bang, the final piece of the trilogy, was something that lacked any real threat despite having three heavy-hitters.
Yeah, most of SM3's action sequences are missing the emotional conflict the first two have. In 1, Peter's fighting his father figure gone bad, in 2 his mentor gone bad. In 3... that climatic battle is just a lot of punching. I suppose you could make the case that Peter himself is the main villain of 3, as personified by Eddie Brock (the stronger/evil version of Peter Parker) and Venom (the stronger/evil version of Spider-Man). Which is fine, if we didn't also have Sandman.
I was way more engaged by the fights with Harry Osbourn than anything else in the movie.
Damn, now I gotta go watch this thing again...
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