SPIDER-MAN 3 (2007)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

On re-watching SPIDER MAN 3, I didn't hate it the way I did while viewing it in the theaters, and I can see some real potential in the storyline, blocked by many, many creative missteps. But it's still not a film many people are likely to fall in love with.

A couple of #3's narrative problems were carry-overs from director Sam Raimi's last two outings with the wall-crawler (again played by baby-faced Tobey Maguire). SPIDER MAN 2 allowed Peter Parker's great love Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) to discover his true identity, and to reluctantly support his heroic destiny. At the same time, Peter's high-school buddy Harry (James Franco), a sometime rival for Mary Jane, also learned Spider-Man's identity. But Harry believed that Spider-Man had killed Harry's criminal father The Green Goblin, and so he became consumed with a passion for revenge, even if he was momentarily thrown by the revelation of the hero's identity. It was almost axiomatic that this Harry would follow a course parallel to that of the comics-version, becoming the new Green Goblin in order to attack the web-slinger. And perhaps it was also a given that the course of true love could not be allowed to run smooth either-- not only because Mary Jane began to have problems with her career, but also when she believes herself getting some romantic competition from a movie-version of Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard).

One misstep is the relentlessly grim nature of Spider-Man's romantic arc. Perhaps it would be unfair to have expected Raimi to hew to the course of the comic book, wherein Gwen and Mary Jane maintained a comical Betty-and-Veronica pursuit of Peter Parker for several years. But since in this iteration Peter actually has no interest in Gwen, Mary Jane's animus toward her perceived rival doesn't have much teeth to it, and it comes off as just another big misunderstanding, akin to Harry's misperception of Spider-Man's past deeds.

On a minor note, though Spider-Man has become more accepted by most citizens of New York, Peter Parker also finds himself getting competition from another ace photographer. Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), and by yet more coincidence Parker is also "followed home" by the alien symbiote that will later bond with Brock, a.k.a. Venom.

Then there's the misstep I most wanted to erase: the largely pointless revision of the classic Spider-Man origin. The setup for Spider-Man's entire career was predicated on the notion that the hero had a chance to take a societally beneficial action by stopping a fleeing criminal, and that, because he did not, Peter's beloved uncle lost his life, thus giving the youth good reason to devote himself to altruistic pursuits. In #3, Raimi and his two script-collaborators decided that they wanted to include the classic Lee-Ditko villain The Sandman (Thomas Haden Church). But the original Sandman didn't really have much emotional resonance; he was just a tough bully-boy given the power to morph his mutated body into various sandy shapes. So  Raimi et al decided to make Sandman accidentally responsible for the death of Uncle Ben, while the accused perp, the one whom Peter Parker neglects to apprehend, was only tangentially involved. The awfulness of this idea was exacerbated by the clumsy attempt to give Sandman a sympathetic arc: now he's a escaped convict frustrated in his attempts to visit his ailing li'l daughter-- who is more a plot-device than a character. 

In the first SPIDER-MAN, Norman Osborn fruitlessly seeks to seduce Parker to the dark side of superhumanity. However, when Peter hears the news that his uncle's killer is still free, Parker embraces the darkness like never before-- and only partly because the symbiote has begun bonding with him. In the original comics that introduced the Venom symbiote, the alien has a "Mister Hyde" effect on Spider-Man, and in similar fashion Raimi sought to exploit Venom as a means-- and maybe an excuse-- for goody-good Parker  to step over the line separating hero from villain. Thus, when Parker meets Sandman in battle, knowing what the criminal did in the past, the hero unleashes a flood that he fervently hopes will wash the sandy sinner to Kingdom Come. This is one of the few good scenes in #3, since the polluted wall-crawler earnestly intends to slay the Sandman, who's only saved by his uncanny ability to reconstitute his granular body.

In my opinion, this would have been the point where Parker should have realized that the symbiote was affecting his moral compass, and where he should have thrust it off him, so that, as in the comics, Venom would take up residence in Eddie Brock, who was far more lacking in morality (as shown in the scenes where Brock attempts to use his photography to frame Spider-Man for criminal activity). Instead, Raimi sledgehammers the point to death, and the film comes to a virtual stop as Raimi piles on more and more evidence that goodguy Parker has turned into a total dickwad. The viewer knows that at some point the hero must reject the symbiote, so the extra scenes of Parker's dickishness have little purpose, though I suppose they do provide Mary Jane with a reason to reject Parker and to seek comfort in the arms of Harry Osborn.

 The continuing "sibling conflict" over Mary Jane has some potential, but it's undermined by the melodramatic misunderstanding involving Harry's dead supervillain dad. Harry starts out the film by attacking Spider-Man in the guise of The Goblin, but he conveniently loses his memory (a trope also borrowed from the comics) for a while, and then, just as conveniently, gets his memories back just in time to try shafting Parker. Trouble is, the movie already has a manipulative villain in the Venom-symbiote, and so Harry's ire toward Parker has to be quickly disposed of to set up the climactic team-up of Venom and Sandman against the web-slinger.

Though it's a messy and overly soapy plot, those actors repeating their earlier roles-- Maguire, Dunst, Franco, and J.K. Simmons as the acerbic J. Jonah Jameson-- acquit themselves well in general. It's hard to judge whether Church and Grace could have done better had their characters been more than simple stereotypes. Then again, Bryce Dallas Howard doesn't have a lot more to work with as this film's version of Gwen Stacy, and the actress sells her character as having her own integrity despite a lack of layered character-moments.

Since one of the great accomplishments of the first two films was their mastery of the kineticism of Spider-Man's fight-scenes, #3 is also a disappointment here. The new Goblin's attack on Spider-Man stands as the film's best action-sequence, but the hero's later battles with Sandman and Venom are no better than fair. It's interesting that Harry expires at the end of this film, even emulating the pattern of his father's death in the first film-- yet only the first Green Goblin gets revived for the continuity-melding narrative of SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME. So from first to last, Harry, whom Parker calls "Goblin Junior," ends up getting the short end of the supervillain stick.