Ten Reasons Why Spidey 3 Sucked
After having forced my wife to watch Spiderman 3 tonight, I was painfully reminded of why I didn’t really like this flick in the first place. Evidently, over the last 6 months my brain must have taken a vacation. I remember standing in Best Buy when the DVD hit the shelves and saying to myself “It wasn’t that bad, was it?” As it turns out, yeah it was.
I figured it might be a good idea for other geeks not to force their wifes to watch it either, so I’ve gone and put together a list of just some of the things Sam Raimi must have been telling himself as he made this disastrous third installment. It’s the only possible explanation. Oh yeah, this list contains spoilers, as if that matters.
• Spider sense is great for avoiding goblin gliders in the first movie, but not in the third. It evidently also doesn’t help to warn you that meteorites have struck nearby or that alien symbiotes are about to crawl all over you.
• When you are a man made of sand, it’s helpful that you can find a large truck with the words “Sand” on the side to hide in. Must be all that Manhattan beach erosion we keep hearing about.
• Police chiefs apparently keep detailed records of every single car jacking that happens in the New York City metro area. They also tend to hold that information secret until a seemingly crucial moment in the life of no-named student/freelance photographers.
• If you are planning on proposing to the woman you love, make sure the beautiful lab partner you kissed as Spiderman earlier in the day, just happens to dine at the restaurant you are proposing in.
• If you’re a struggling actress down on her luck, who’s being blackmailed into breaking up with the love of her life, what ever you do, don’t whisper to him “It’s a trap, Peter!”. Oh, and remember not to tell him why you broke his heart later on.
• Goblin grenades are powerful enough to completely vaporize Venom and turn large chunks of the Sandman’s arm to glass, but not deadly enough to kill Harry at point blank range.
• Forget a career playing virtuoso jazz piano! Who needs that when you can scrape and scrounge getting paid $50 a pop for pictures of Spiderman?
• When weening yourself of a violent alien symbiote, be sure to find the one church in all of New York City with the guy who absolutely hates your guts waiting in the wings.
• Butlers who clean the wounds of dead people tend to reveal crucial plot information months after they first discover it, and just at the proper moment.
• Lastly, whenever you introduce a story line about a poor, sick daughter, what ever you do, don’t follow it up or offer closure. Just remember that resolution is highly overrated.
Of course, this has all been said before by people brighter than me. I just wonder if I can get my money back from Best Buy…
“It evidently also doesn’t help to warn you that meteorites have struck nearby or that alien symbiotes are about to crawl all over you.”
I’m sure others will cite this, but, at least in the comic book, Spidey’s spider-sense does not work with alien life forms. That’s why, at least in the comic, Venom could be camouflaged and standing right next to Peter and would never get picked up on radar. Now if, say, Venom threw a steel girder at Spidey, the sense would go off…
Of course, this was left completely out of the movie, but adding that bit of explanatory exposition would have been clunky at best (like, well, ALL of Dr. Connors’ lines… which remind me, Ged, you forgot how Dr. Connors becomes not only an expert in alien bioforms, but also NEGLECTS to inform ANY authorities to his discovery).
On all other counts, I completely agree. Seriously, this could have been two GOOD (maybe even GREAT) movies, but when you’ve only got the cast guaranteed through a trilogy, this is the mess you get.
Ooh, boy. Just saw Sony’s going to do three MORE Spider-man movies. And I’ll bet you the Osbornes show up AGAIN in at least one of them.
Beatin’ that dead horse deader, I guess…
Rock, good point about the alien, but I don’t think it had anything to do with the explanation from the comic. I think it was more like the writers completely forgot he had spider sense. He never used it once in Spidey 3 if I’m not mistaken.
Hey, isn’t Dr. Conners the one who becomes “The Lizard” later on too? Maybe that little piece of the symbiote he kept in the jar will have something to do with that. Nah, that would be too ’cause and effect’ and not enough ‘random’. 🙂
Comic books are soap operas. In soap operas events happen to characters, characters don’t actually cause events to happen.
I thought the first Spiderman was good because the movie wasn’t developed as a joke. Raimi took it seriously. But to be honest the material just doesn’t measure up to normal literature or story telling. Spiderman is fundamentally a soap opera, this wasn’t obvious until several movies where made.