The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Review: Spider-Man 3 (Andrew's Take)

An outsider is alienated from the world by his powers, but uses them at great personal cost to save a humanity that doesn't understand him. I'm not talking about Spider-man here, but Optimus Prime, star of upcoming toy commercial Transformers and a character most are happy to dismiss as empty. He has the same basic set up as Spider-man. If you want to get picky about ordinary, relatable humans and giant alien robots, compare Optimus to Super(-? No? Well fuck you)man. They're the same, yet are treated very differently. Does this blatant geek-baiting have anything to do with reviewing Spider-Man 3? Kind of. Read on!

Now we're at the third entry in the franchise, we're very much into 'villain of the week' territory. This is shown by having a load of unrelated scenes shoved together in the first act. How does a scene with Peter Parker being hopelessly in love with Mary Jane relate to a scene about a petty crook visiting his sick daughter? It doesn't. The underlying grammar of the scene change is 'here's this week's bad guy, so let's give him a motivation'. It is intertextual film grammar, based on the audience knowing what is going to happen in these sorts of films. They know that the unrelated crook is going to turn into a supervillain and fight Spidey, so all these scenes make perfect sense. Without that outside knowledge of the formula most of the first act, which consists of endless unrelated scenes of set-up and exposition, is horribly bitty and disjointed.

We're dealing with a standard superhero movie here, whereas Spider-Man 2, with only a small amount of reaching on my part, could be regarded as a real movie, with a story, theme, character arcs and everything, that just happened to be about a superhero. A good test for whether this will be a problem for a viewer's enjoyment is the introduction of an alien symbiote goo monster. It is introduced by simply landing on earth near to Peter Parker. That's it. If that seems too coincidental, too abrupt or too random for you, this movie is going to annoy the hell out of you. If you can accept it, and think 'woah, and alien symbiote goo monster! I wonder how that's going to cause trouble for good old Spidey!' (and let's just assume for a moment that we don't all know the various histories of Venom from Secret Wars/the 90's cartoon/The Ultimate line of comics etc...), then you're pretty much good to go.

Because this movie is cut from very much the same cloth as the first two Spider-man films. Massively energetic fight scenes that are always given strong emotional motivations linked to the current crisis in Peter Parker's life, interspersed with very simply shot scenes of relationship drama and a couple of wacky fun bits, usually involving JJ Jameson. It was a very deliberate approach by director Sam Raimi to alternate the fantastic with the mundane and, while I personally got a little bored by the talky scenes, they were integral to the success of the films. On the whole, the individual scenes, taken by themselves, are as good, if not better, than anything in the first two movies. Here's the problem though:

In the first two movies, in which there is only one villain, the relationship scenes inform the fight scenes and vice versa, so even when their pacing (especially in number 2) grinds to halt with long, slightly cheesy speechifying by Aunt May or moping by Peter, the overall momentum is kept up by a unity of purpose and theme. The magic came in how the slow and the fast fed off each other. In this film we have Harry as a new Green Goblin, a rival photographer, The Sandman, an alien symbiote and Peter getting into arguments with Mary Jane. Each storyline has a relatively intersting arc, but each one is picked up and dropped every five minutes with very little connection between them until the last act so that balance between slow and quiet scenes and flash bang wallop scenes is destroyed. The film has the same building blocks as the first two but, and let's keep this Lego metaphor, all the different colours make for a very messy wall.

All criticisms revolving around the pacing being off, the film being over-stuffed, too short, too long, boring, too hyperkinetic, random, meaningless and so on all come from this fast/slow waltz around one theme formula from the 2nd movie in a film that has at least three themes.

As a 'villain of the week' movie, these criticisms don't hold too much weight as the movie mostly pops along at a fair old whack and gives us plenty of nifty fighty action and otherwise entertaining scenes at regular intervals. Fans of good, stand-alone movies, or those who think Spider-man is a character of some depth (see first paragraph), will be left wanting.

Let's add some more criticisms while we're at it. The central crisis between Peter and Mary Jame is set up very badly. You see Peter is supposed to be acting very selfishly, ignoring MJ's pain at the loss of an acting gig so he can talk about his own life as Spider-man. Unfortunately, Peter remains one of the most gormlessly unselfish characters in all of movies ever and MJ simply comes over as a pouting, self-obsessed teenager. 'Who cares if you are saving the world, someone said I couldn't sing very well!'. Peter is never portrayed in the first act as anything other than trying to help. So the crisis is actually completely the opposite to what the movie thinks it is plus Peter's self-obsession is what leads to the symbiote having power over him, so that stumble over setting up that aspect of him doesn't do any favours for the symbiote story line. So, that bit is demonstrably bad.

Equally demonstrably bad is the final act fight. If we can accept that this is just a 'villain of the week' movie, the narrative shenanigans needed to reach the two-on-two battle are fair enough, but the fight itself not only recycles beats from previous fights but doesn't feature all that much two-on-two action. Sandman is rooted to the spot for most of it and Venom and the Green Goblin seem to appear and disappear from the fight with alarming convenience.

Back on the 'good stand-alone movie' tack, it also commits the sin of just being a punch up. Despite all those pacing flaws, all the other fights in the movie still manage to be motivated by Peter's emotional state, giving them meaning and heft. The final one is reduced to 'save the girl by punching the bad guy a lot'. Spectacular for the most part so it's hard to complain, but less involving then the others and, when the emotions and thematic stuff finally turn up, they feel corny and shoe-horned in.

So: a worthy enough third part but shows a franchise rapidly descending into, albeit excellently made, superhero gruel. I'll give it a seven, if we're counting, as I'm feeling generous and not yet worn out by a summer's worth of hyper-edited explosions.

Before I go though, I'd like to bring up the criticism of the evil-Peter dance scene. It's always a joy to read through the various reviews on the geek websites for films like this as the things they tend to get annoyed at give us a nice perspective on why we, as a group, are a very silly lot.

The dance scene is embarrassing, shameful, totally out of place, horribly made and kills the movie. Apparently. That all of the movies mix humour with straight faced heroics and slightly lumpen melodrama is ignored. That all of the scenes, be they fighty or weepy, are over the top, on the nose and cheesy is also ignored. The joy of the Spider-man films is that the over-the-topness is always grounded by Peter's emotional state. The scenes that work always start with Peter, in this case distraught over losing MJ and overcoming it through braggadocio and general acting-like-a-dickness, and then layer the entertainment over the top as needed, and the evil-Peter scenes are no different. It is also the companion piece to the 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' sequence in Spider-Man 2, which everyone loves.

I would suggest that those who hate the dance scene are simply those think web-slinging superheroes are more realistic than a dance scene, think dance is a bit gay, and are only a couple of steps away from thinking Batman should be a hard-R. Danger!

As readers of The Fake Life are all blessed with great intelligence and snake-like hips, I'm confident that you all love the dance scene.

7 out of 10