Spider-Man 3 (2007)

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, I think Topher Grace wandered into the movie, and some Black Goo as Himself

Have I Seen it Before: Sure, but certainly fewer times than the rest of the Raimi series.

Did I Like It: Almost uniformly no.

It’s 1995 and I’m seeing Batman Forever for the first time. While I couldn’t quite put my finger on exactly why the film wasn’t working for me (I was, after all, only 10 years old, although with my full-beard you’d never be able to tell), but I knew part of it was that the film was poorer without Danny Elfman’s score, and Elliot Goldenthal’s efforts weren’t measuring up. Why couldn’t the melody of the original theme still be used?

While that is still true, with the jarring addition of Christopher Young’s scores on top of Elfman’s, I am now of the conclusion that keeping the original themes but adding new themes in a hybrid score is kind of a bummer. The music in this movie never quite works. It is, however, not the only thing that doesn’t work.

The movie is so packed with plot (and, for that matter, villains), that the story falls apart under the weight of its own coincidence. The symbiote just happens to crash to Earth not from Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and Mary-Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) sharing a quiet romantic moment. Flint Marko (Thomas Hayden Church) just happens to wander into a weird sand-based particle accelerator (the movie’s not terribly interested in having me follow what this thing is) at the same time they are testing it. And Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) just happens to wander into a church to beg God to kill Parker at the very same instance Spider-Man is trying to rid himself of the symbiote. Stories have a tendency to trade in efficient happenstance, but this beggars all belief, even in a movie about black alien goo.

Which brings us to Venom. Poor, sad, maligned Venom. Actually, I don’t suppose he is that maligned. He’s too beloved by the Spider-man fan base for his own good. Hence, the studios insistence that Raimi include the character in this film, and it is clearer than most things in life that the director is not into this particular film. In his defense, I too am about as interested in the alien symbiotes (in fact, I’m getting a little tired of typing them in this piece) as Raimi. It also feels like Raimi is by this point sort of done with Spider-man as a whole, and would much rather make a musical romantic comedy. I have no problem with that, and wouldn’t mind watching Raimi’s unfettered spin on such a film, but I kind of wish he had actually found a way to make that movie, instead of offering this half-baked mishmash of conflicting studio memos.

The special effects are improved from the previous entries, however. What's more, they still largely hold up today, much more so than for Raimi’s original outing, Spider-Man (2002). The Sandman/Marko concoction is a pretty impressive creation, keeping his pathos even in amid a torrent of CGI and motion capture, easily much better than the weird kabuki show that surrounded the first film's Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). Even the sort of awkward creation of Venom may not work in its own right, but still manage to be of a piece with the rest of the trilogy’s visual vocabulary. Unfortunately, all of this refinement in technology isn’t adding up to much.

And yet, still, I may miss Maguire and company in their roles. I would have liked to see a Spider-Man 4, even if it wasn’t to be directed by Raimi, that would have followed the doomed friendship trio of Maguire, Dunst, and maybe Franco, if Harry had lived. I buy them as long-time friends about to be torn apart by lives going in different directions, even here in a movie that doesn’t do them many favors and may tarnish the memory of their better, prior outings. I might miss them a little less in the years since Tom Holland has become a sort of Iron Robin to Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, but still, even with all of this film’s problems, Tobey Maguire may still be my Spider-man, if for no other reason than he when he was not the smoothest high school student, or the in-over-his-head college kid (still not terribly smooth), or the man who realizes life is only going to get harder as time goes on, because when he was all of those things, I was right there with him. A fourth movie might have continued that journey, and led to this entry being an outlying downbeat, instead of a disappointing finale.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Tobey Maguire, James Franco, Kirsten Dunst, Alfred Molina

Have I Seen it Before: I’m a man in my 30s. Let’s just assume that I have dutifully seen every film featuring Spider-Man and probably will for the rest of my life.

Did I Like It: Sometimes you just need to work the bugs out before you can really swing.

I’m wondering about my sort of down opinion on Sam Raimi’s first effort with the character, Spider-Man (2002). Is it truly that the first film’s special effects don’t work as well as we may have once thought? Is it true that the superhero origin story never quite translates to the most thrilling movie possible? Or is it the case that when I first saw the original film I was having a bad time in life, and that colors my reactions to this day.

All of them could be a little bit true, and all of those elements are different here in Raimi’s second outing. The special effects are more refined. Rarely do I think of Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) as an animated character injected into some background plates, and Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) is a nearly-perfect blend of puppetry and performance for most of his shots. The story is more self-assured, even as its protagonist spends much of the film plagued by doubt. And, ultimately, I was in a much better head-space in the summer of 2004 than I was in the spring of 2002, but that should hardly matter for this type of analysis, and yet, it does occur to me.

Some would say this is the best superhero movie of all time, and certainly the best Spider-Man movie to date. I would put it in that same pantheon of best movies, along with Superman (1978), The Dark Knight (2008), or any of the number of the best MCU movies. And yet, I think I may have had an even better time during the recent Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), although this could be attributed to the Michael Keaton factor™ that I am sure will become an ongoing theme in these reviews. 

The performances are all finely-tuned. Maguire, for all his reputation as a callow Hollywood party boy in real life, manages to bring Parker’s pure-nerdiness to life believably. Alfred Molina brings real humanity to the diminished mindset and tragedy of the film’s villain. Kirsten Dunst doesn’t get a whole lot to do other than be damsel-ish and frequently in distress, which is a shame that only time passing can really illuminate.

But it’s the little moments that work, too: The scene with May and Peter where he confesses (most of) his culpability in Uncle Ben’s (Cliff Robertson) death is quiet and unnerving. In the years that follow the release of these summer blockbusters, the special effects can age rather annoyingly, the pyrotechnics can fail to awe by the time of a second viewing, but a good quiet scene between two good actors will stick around with you, and it’s good that this film has them.

This comes pretty tantalizingly clear in the film’s choice of a final shot. In the original film, we have Spider-Man jumping around the city, off to another adventure. While this film has a certain reprise of that motif, the true last moment is of Mary-Jane, having just run away from her wedding and watching as her true love leaps into danger once more. The look is wistful, and aware. The happiness she felt just half a minute before is already starting to wilt. It’s one of the few times Dunst gets to really go for some acting, and it is the image that remains in my head all of these years later.

Spider-Man (2002)

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Tobey Maguire, WIllem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Dafoe’s Costume

Have I Seen it Before: 

Did I Like It: It’s an incredibly likable movie, no doubt about that. And yet, if it ages this poorly in only 16 years, I worry if the whole thing really holds up as well as I want it to.

Been playing a lot of the new Playstation 4 Spider-Man game. It may yet be one of the greatest open-world games ever produced, and it fills my mind in a way that makes me want to re-watch the web-slinging stories of my youth. That does not—in any sense—mean watching a movie with Andrew Garfield. No offense, but I watched The Social Network (2010). Get it? Web-slinging?

Ahem.

So I proceeded to watch the first foray of the Spider-Man roughly my own age, Tobey Maguire. It is such a well-meaning film, with its lovingly fraternal depiction of just-post 9/11 New York may never fail to reach for the heart of a viewer who was alive and sentient at the time of its initial release. Aside from a few annoyingly studio-locked scenes—and even just a few shots in otherwise fine scenes—the film is refreshingly a New York Movie™, with the city feeling fully a part of the movie, and not just Vancouver trying its damndest to be EveryCity, USA. 

The cast is near perfect. The direction from Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead (1982), Army of Darkness (1992), For Love of the Game (1999)*) is an artist using all of his tools at their peak. Honestly, I think he’s perfected something beyond a montage, where several pieces of disparate footage can play so quickly—and in some places directly on top of each other—that the effect will forever be Raimi-ian.

And yet, watching the movie now, I can really only be consumed with the nitpicks.

Did he dream an animated representation of his DNA re-writing? Was he missing his own DNA for a little bit there? What would that even do to a person?

How do the students of Peter’s high school not put together that the kid who accidentally webbed a cafeteria tray onto Flash Thompson (Joe Manganiello) and the web-slinging hero that soon introduces himself are the same guy?

These are the kind of things you think about when it has been sixteen years since you first see a movie, I guess. But gosh, you can’t dismiss some of the janky CGI this film is filled with, and the less said about the Green Goblin’s (Willem Dafoe)… armor…? the better.

* No, seriously. Look it up.