Saturday, July 5, 2008

7/5/2008 - Spider-Man 3 How It Should Have Ended

I don't know at what point Spider-Man 3 got all of the hate that its getting now. It seems to be pretty popular to hate Spider-Man 3, even though there are a lot of other movies that deserve more. I thought it was fine even though it clearly is the least enjoyable of the three Spider-Man movies. My major criticism of it is that because director Sam Raimi wanted to wrap everything up as a trilogy, he threw too many things into it for one movie to handle.

I thought the origin of Venom was pretty spot on, but his inclusion as a last-minute villain left much to be desired. I would have really preferred Eddie Brock getting possessed by the black suit and then fade to credits as a major cliffhanger for the next movie. I mean it would have been pretty epic to have Spider-Man and Venom battling it out during the course of an entire film.

And they should have saved the Gwen Stacy storyline for that movie instead of shoehorning it into this one. I mean if Gwen Stacy were to serve just one purpose in a Spider-Man movie, that would be for Peter to fall in love with her and then be killed off by a major villain so that Peter could be the victim of even more angst. At the very least, Gwen should have been the "damsel in distress" at the end of Spider-Man 3. If you think about it, the last girl Eddie saw Peter with was Gwen. So why kidnap Mary Jane?

I guess the reason for Raimi's decisions was that he wanted the Sandman to be a sympathetic villain and he wanted Harry Osborn to eventually to forgive Peter. With that in mind, I guess I can overlook some of the plot contrivances (the alien suit just happening to land near Peter, for example), and the usual Sam Raimi weirdness (the Peter song and dance routine). A lot of people are less forgiving, however. The folks at "How It Should Have Ended" eschewed their regular format of critiquing a movie's ending and went on to provide a parody of the entire movie for Spider-Man 3:

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I quite agree. It was evident after the success of the first two films that three probably wouldn't be its limit-- why not a cliffhanger? I absolutely wouldn't have minded a symbiote setup with no Venom until next time. There's a lot of talk that Carnage is likely to be the next pick. They've left this open because of the piece of the symbiote left behind in Doc Connors' lab. But... do we really want a movie with Carnage and no Venom? After all, the Carnage/Venom rivalry is a million times more interesting and fun to watch than Carnage/Spider-Man. But you're also right that people have been too hard on it-- more than either of the others, this felt more like a comic book. It may be the worst, but it's still worth watching. I enjoyed your comments!