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cathyr19355 at 12:14am on 06/05/2007
cathyr19355 at 12:14am on 06/05/2007Tonight, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
esrblog and I went with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pmat and shakati to see the much-hyped Spiderman 3 movie.
The movie was neither as great as its partisans are saying nor as bad as its critics claim. Though I don't intend to get into the finer points of the plot, a lot of what I'm going to say counts as spoiler material. Since the movie was just released Friday and many of my readers are likely to want to see it before I have a chance to contaminate them with my opinions, I will put the rest of my remarks under an lj-cut.
The reviewers who liked Spiderman 3 mostly talk about how great the fight scenes are. They're absolutely right. The fight scenes are pretty cool, and they feature exotic weaponry and tactics that only superhero types ever get to wield. More to the point in light of the fact that this is Spiderman's movie, Spiderman has become very skilled at using his web-shooting ability in battle. He's now able to shoot wads of web to deflect flying objects, slalom off of other objects in order to change direction quickly, and even as offensive weaponry. The only flaw I found in the fight scenes was that some of them run a bit too long, as though Sam Raimi had been channeling the Peter Jackson of "King Kong" while shooting them.
The reviewers who hated Spiderman 3 complain about the plot. They're partly right. Most of the plot could have been made to work. It's just your basic plot of hero overdosing on his own sense of righteousness, falling into temptation, and overcoming it. Ancient, but not implausible, and there are a few nice scenes, here and there, that help set it up in the context of Spiderman and what we already know from the first two movies of Peter Parker's story.
But the script, and a lot of the plot gimmicks, are not only ridiculous in themselves, but actively take up cudgels and grenades and openly go to war against the audience's willing suspension of disbelief. For example, at various points in the action Spidey and another minor character become...well, possessed by this black sludge that falls to earth on a meteor. A small glowing meteor, that lands in the same park where Peter and MJ are making out. So small a meteor, that Peter and MJ never even notice that anything's fallen near them.
Right.
Later on, Peter takes a specimen of the goo to his physics professor, who examines it under a microscope.
Right.
This physicist--who takes pains to admit, out loud, that he's a physicist, not a biologist--tells Peter, "This stuff behaves like a symbiote. It binds to its host, and amplifies its host's tendencies, particularly aggression."
Right.
Best of all, this black goo crawls around as though it has a mind of its own, actively looking foridiots people to infest.
Right.
The function of the goo in the story, of course, is to symbolize Spiderman's struggle with the Dark Side of the Force. If that was the only clunker in the script, things wouldn't be so bad, because Maguire portraying Spidey flirting with the Dark Side of the Force is one of the most entertaining things in the movie. (For one thing, this infiltration by the Dark Side leads Spidey to start flirting, for real, with women other than MJ, and develop both a sense of rhythm and a wicked knowledge of jazz piano. Under its influence, Parker also buys an elegant outfit very different from his usual middle-school duds, inducingesrblog to remark snarkily to me afterwards, "Now we know that Spiderman really is a geek; only alien possession is able to give him fashion sense.")
But the script does other things wrong. It contains lines so flat the average audience member could have done better, and requires way too many characters to give up deeply seated attitudes and emotional fixations in seconds, justifying the changes with the feeblest of cliches. In the final scene, Peter actually says "I forgive you" to the man who really killed his uncle, when he learns that the man who actually killed his uncle did so because he needed the uncle's car to complete a robbery that he committed to obtain the money for medical treatments for his dying daughter. This change of heart might have been more plausible, of course, if the man, transformed by another miracle of physics into the Sandman, hadn't just spent at least a half hour trying to kill Spidey, trashing several city blocks, and endangering MJ in the process. Huh?
The actors struggle bravely with the script, but none of them succeed in consistently giving an emotionally convincing performance throughout the entire movie. Maguire and the characters who are playing villains get a bit of a break here, because it's easier to portray a selfish violent jerk (which is what Spidey starts to turn into, and what most of the villains he fights already are) than it is to play a person with a normal conscience. As a result, James Franco (i.e., Harry Osborn), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May) and most of the actors in minor roles come across as lame caricatures of human beings for most of the movie. Kirsten Dunst's performance is largely unchanged from the other movies because she still hasn't learned how to act, but her deficiencies as an actor are more conspicuous in light of the struggles of the stronger actors around her. Bryce Dallas Howard doesn't even get a chance to try to act, because her role only requires her to be a jealousy object for MJ, which doesn't take much acting because she's naturally sexier than Dunst. Only J.K. Simmons as Jamison, the cigar-chomping editor Parker works for, gives a performance to match his performances in Spiderman 1 and Spiderman 2, probably because his role was written as a caricature. But whatever the reason is, his cameos were, for me, among the best scenes of the movie.
As a result, the movie feels as though Sam and Ivan Raimi, who are credited with the screenplay, had been channeling George Lucas--the George Lucas of "The Phantom Menace." I'd like to believe that, once they saw the final product, the Raimis would conclude that they should stay away from screenwriting, but I suspect that the box office will continue to be good enough to inspire them to start writing Spiderman 4.
It's all the fault of that damn black goo. Bet it's made of midichlorians.
esrblog and I went with pmat and shakati to see the much-hyped Spiderman 3 movie.The movie was neither as great as its partisans are saying nor as bad as its critics claim. Though I don't intend to get into the finer points of the plot, a lot of what I'm going to say counts as spoiler material. Since the movie was just released Friday and many of my readers are likely to want to see it before I have a chance to contaminate them with my opinions, I will put the rest of my remarks under an lj-cut.
The reviewers who liked Spiderman 3 mostly talk about how great the fight scenes are. They're absolutely right. The fight scenes are pretty cool, and they feature exotic weaponry and tactics that only superhero types ever get to wield. More to the point in light of the fact that this is Spiderman's movie, Spiderman has become very skilled at using his web-shooting ability in battle. He's now able to shoot wads of web to deflect flying objects, slalom off of other objects in order to change direction quickly, and even as offensive weaponry. The only flaw I found in the fight scenes was that some of them run a bit too long, as though Sam Raimi had been channeling the Peter Jackson of "King Kong" while shooting them.
The reviewers who hated Spiderman 3 complain about the plot. They're partly right. Most of the plot could have been made to work. It's just your basic plot of hero overdosing on his own sense of righteousness, falling into temptation, and overcoming it. Ancient, but not implausible, and there are a few nice scenes, here and there, that help set it up in the context of Spiderman and what we already know from the first two movies of Peter Parker's story.
But the script, and a lot of the plot gimmicks, are not only ridiculous in themselves, but actively take up cudgels and grenades and openly go to war against the audience's willing suspension of disbelief. For example, at various points in the action Spidey and another minor character become...well, possessed by this black sludge that falls to earth on a meteor. A small glowing meteor, that lands in the same park where Peter and MJ are making out. So small a meteor, that Peter and MJ never even notice that anything's fallen near them.
Right.
Later on, Peter takes a specimen of the goo to his physics professor, who examines it under a microscope.
Right.
This physicist--who takes pains to admit, out loud, that he's a physicist, not a biologist--tells Peter, "This stuff behaves like a symbiote. It binds to its host, and amplifies its host's tendencies, particularly aggression."
Right.
Best of all, this black goo crawls around as though it has a mind of its own, actively looking for
Right.
The function of the goo in the story, of course, is to symbolize Spiderman's struggle with the Dark Side of the Force. If that was the only clunker in the script, things wouldn't be so bad, because Maguire portraying Spidey flirting with the Dark Side of the Force is one of the most entertaining things in the movie. (For one thing, this infiltration by the Dark Side leads Spidey to start flirting, for real, with women other than MJ, and develop both a sense of rhythm and a wicked knowledge of jazz piano. Under its influence, Parker also buys an elegant outfit very different from his usual middle-school duds, inducing
esrblog to remark snarkily to me afterwards, "Now we know that Spiderman really is a geek; only alien possession is able to give him fashion sense.") But the script does other things wrong. It contains lines so flat the average audience member could have done better, and requires way too many characters to give up deeply seated attitudes and emotional fixations in seconds, justifying the changes with the feeblest of cliches. In the final scene, Peter actually says "I forgive you" to the man who really killed his uncle, when he learns that the man who actually killed his uncle did so because he needed the uncle's car to complete a robbery that he committed to obtain the money for medical treatments for his dying daughter. This change of heart might have been more plausible, of course, if the man, transformed by another miracle of physics into the Sandman, hadn't just spent at least a half hour trying to kill Spidey, trashing several city blocks, and endangering MJ in the process. Huh?
The actors struggle bravely with the script, but none of them succeed in consistently giving an emotionally convincing performance throughout the entire movie. Maguire and the characters who are playing villains get a bit of a break here, because it's easier to portray a selfish violent jerk (which is what Spidey starts to turn into, and what most of the villains he fights already are) than it is to play a person with a normal conscience. As a result, James Franco (i.e., Harry Osborn), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May) and most of the actors in minor roles come across as lame caricatures of human beings for most of the movie. Kirsten Dunst's performance is largely unchanged from the other movies because she still hasn't learned how to act, but her deficiencies as an actor are more conspicuous in light of the struggles of the stronger actors around her. Bryce Dallas Howard doesn't even get a chance to try to act, because her role only requires her to be a jealousy object for MJ, which doesn't take much acting because she's naturally sexier than Dunst. Only J.K. Simmons as Jamison, the cigar-chomping editor Parker works for, gives a performance to match his performances in Spiderman 1 and Spiderman 2, probably because his role was written as a caricature. But whatever the reason is, his cameos were, for me, among the best scenes of the movie.
As a result, the movie feels as though Sam and Ivan Raimi, who are credited with the screenplay, had been channeling George Lucas--the George Lucas of "The Phantom Menace." I'd like to believe that, once they saw the final product, the Raimis would conclude that they should stay away from screenwriting, but I suspect that the box office will continue to be good enough to inspire them to start writing Spiderman 4.
It's all the fault of that damn black goo. Bet it's made of midichlorians.
disappointed