Spider-Man 3 swung to the top of a year dominated by lousy third installments
Image: Graphic: Libby McGuire Film Features Spider-Man
Dance, Toby, Dance (Spider-Man 3)
The three part threes all arrived in May of 2007, one after the other after the other. First weekend in May: Spider-Man 3. Third weekend: Shrek The Third. Fourth: Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End. Each of those part threes earned nearly a billion dollars at the global box office. In North America, Spider-Man 3 was the biggest hit of the year, and Shrek The Third was close behind it. At World’s End came in at #4. Michael Bay’s first Transformers earned about $10 million more, just barely edging Gore Verbinski’s third Pirates adventure off of the podium. Outside North America, At World’s End was 2007’s big winner.
Really, though, all of them were winners. By 2007, studios had learned that they could rely on name-value franchises. If an idea worked once, it would work again. All three of those part threes were fantastically expensive, but all of them were also hugely lucrative. These were big, effects-heavy adventures with movie stars and romantic subplots and comedy scenes, and they were familiar. Those three movies were merely the biggest part threes of the year; theaters were lousy with them in 2007, the year of The Bourne Ultimatum, Ocean’s Thirteen, Rush Hour 3, and Resident Evil: Extinction. The formulas were working. The part threes were winning.
Those part threes were winning even though they were terrible. All three of the big May sequels are case studies in just how hard it is to maintain a franchise. By their third installments, the Spider-Man, Shrek, and Pirates series had lost all sense of charm, storytelling momentum, and scale. The three weren’t created equal in the first place, but at their best, all counted as effective blockbuster filmmaking. Spider-Man 2 (2004), the best film in any of those franchises, is a vivid, inventive, minor masterpiece of a movie—one of the early examples of just how much fun the big-budget superhero sequel could be. It’s not fair to ask every blockbuster to be Spider-Man 2, but it’s fair to ask that these big-product movies accomplish something. The three part threes of May 2007 don’t offer much of anything.
In certain film-nerd corners, 2007 has a reputation for being a great movie year, mostly because of the Oscar-night showdown between There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men. You could definitely walk into multiplexes that year and find cool things: Michael Clayton, Zodiac, Superbad, Ratatouille, Knocked Up, The Orphanage, Hot Fuzz, Gone Baby Gone, The Mist, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. Some of those movies were even hits! But if you look at the biggest movies of 2007, you will find a whole lot of empty and charmless repetition. You will find studios desperate to run their best ideas into the ground.
Spider-Man 3, Shrek The Third, and Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End aren’t necessarily bad in the same ways. At World’s End, for instance, is numbingly long and obsessively devoted to its own incoherent mythology. Shrek The Third drowns in its rancid snark-bile, which was already starting to curdle by the time the credits rolled on the first Shrek six years earlier. Spider-Man 3, meanwhile, is a strange case of an often great filmmaker twisting himself up into pretzels in an attempt to please himself, his audience, and his producers. Those producers, at the very least, must have been happy.
With 14 years of hindsight, the whole Spider-Man 3 narrative seems clear. After the success of his first two Spider-Man films, Sam Raimi had ideas about moving his versions of Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson, and Harry Osborn into something resembling adulthood. Raimi got excited about the visual possibilities of the Sandman, a classic Spider-Man villain, and he was also thinking about including the Vulture. Raimi worked on a script with his brother Ivan, a Michigan doctor who’d been his writing partner on Darkman and Army Of Darkness, and with the veteran screenwriter Alvin Sargent. (Sargent, who turned 80 a month before Spider-Man 3 hit theaters, had written Spider-Man 2, and he was married to Spider-Man series producer Laura Ziskin. He had been writing movies since the ’60s. He’d won Oscars for 1977’s Julia and 1980’s Ordinary People. Wild career on that guy!)
But Avi Arad was not content with making another Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie. Arad, a former toy executive, had become one of the higher-ups at Marvel during the comic company’s floundering financial years in the ’90s, and he’d been the driving force behind establishing Marvel Studios. By the time Marvel started making its own movies, though, Arad was out. Instead, he produced the movies that other studios made out of licensed Marvel properties. Arad’s track record is mixed. In 2007 alone, he produced Spider-Man 3, Ghost Rider, Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer, and Bratz. I get mad just looking at that list. Arad really wanted Raimi to put Venom in a movie. In the comics, Venom is an incoherent character with an impossibly twisty years-long backstory, but Arad knew that fans liked Venom. He insisted. Raimi caved.
The movie does too much. It’s got origin stories for Venom and Sandman. It’s got Peter Parker getting covered in alien goo that gives him enhanced powers and a slick new look but that also sends him on his journey into becoming a jazz-dancing asshole. It’s got two different intersecting love triangles. It’s got Harry Osborn trying to kill Parker, almost dying, losing his memory, becoming friends with Parker again, then trying to kill Parker again, almost dying again, becoming friends with Parker again, before finally and mercifully dying. The film is two and a half hours long, and it barely ever pauses to catch its breath.
Raimi talked himself into the whole Venom thing by thinking about the blurry line between good and evil—about how good people make mistakes and bad people have redeemable moments. In confronting his own worst tendencies—tendencies magnified by alien goo—Parker learns to interrogate the false binaries in his life and the stories he’s written for himself. That’s the idea, anyway. But with so much plot machinery in action, Raimi is limited to showing his characters screaming their own internal monologues at mirrors in five-second bursts.
There are some interesting ideas and scenes amid all the noise of Spider-Man 3. For two movies, Tobey Maguire had played Peter Parker as a squeaky, sweaty dork. When he starts believing his own hype in Spider-Man 3 (“I don’t know, I guess I’ve become something of an icon”) it works as a convincing argument against the inherent virtue of nerdery. Also, there are a few individual scenes, especially the gothic-expressionist birth of the Sandman, where Raimi reminds the world that he’s essentially a horror director. The sight of Thomas Haden Church dissolving into dust remains unsettlingly effective.
Those ideas only rarely get a chance to make an impression. Spider-Man 3 remains anchored to its busy plot and to perceived expectations for a new Spider-Man movie. Much of the film is on autopilot. It’s the third straight film, for instance, where a too-charming-for-this Kirsten Dunst has to spend a big action scene screaming in terror while precariously suspended from great heights and where onlookers stare up at the super-powered fights happening over their heads, apparently not worried about the inevitable falling debris. In its day, Spider-Man 3 was the most expensive motion picture ever made, and yet it still has the same primitive-CGI issues that affect all the Raimi Spider-Man joints. It has a lot of CGI, but it doesn’t have especially good CGI, so the loud climactic fight really just looks like pixels flying over Midtown.
The Spider-Man 3 casting makes for a fascinating time capsule. Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and the wooden James Franco were all holdovers from previous films, but Raimi did well when he cast Bryce Dallas Howard, who’d never been in a big movie, as Peter Parker’s impossibly hot supermodel science-nerd dreamgirl Gwen Stacy. Howard’s Gwen is not a remotely plausible or three-dimensional figure. But then again, neither is anybody else, and Howard at least has charisma. The other big casting choices didn’t go so well. It’s pretty funny to think that Raimi brought in former sitcom star Thomas Haden Church, coming off of an Oscar nomination for playing a charming cad in Sideways, to glower and brood his way through Sandman’s hackneyed arc. (Church’s Sideways costar Paul Giamatti would have to wait another seven years until he got his own Spider-Man villain role, but Giamatti’s face-tatted Russian-gangster version of the Rhino turned out to be the only good thing about The Amazing Spider-Man 2.)
And then there’s Topher Grace. Grace was another former sitcom guy. He was a couple of years out from finishing a long run on That ’70s Show, and he seemed like he’d have a real film career ahead of him. If Grace had been cast in a different superhero movie—if, for instance, he’d had a crack at the fast, smirky patter of a Jon Favreau-style Marvel film—then he might have popped. Instead, he’s forced to play Eddie Brock as a grating, smarmy dickhead before becoming an entirely menace-free version of Venom. (Grace reportedly packed on a whole lot of muscle for the role. You can’t tell.)
At some point while working on Spider-Man 3, Raimi must’ve realized that he couldn’t manage everything. He had a hard deadline; the release date for the third Spider-Man was announced before the second film even came out. Much of Spider-Man 3 feels like the work of a checked-out filmmaker going through the motions. There are also a few moments where it’s pretty clear that Raimi would much rather be making a musical. The infamous jazz-dancing scenes seemed hugely embarrassing at the time, but they’re some of the only parts of Spider-Man 3 that have really aged well. The dancing stuff has a reason to exist. It shows that Peter is such an incorrigible dweeb that he doesn’t realize how goofy his cool-guy moves come off. Raimi conveys that impression without the hackneyed dialogue that dogs the rest of the movie, and he also shows Tobey Maguire gyrating in that doorway for about five beats longer than necessary. That bit of pure silliness is one of the rare moments where Spider-Man 3 crackles to life.
It wouldn’t happen again. After the artistic failures and commercial triumphs of their part threes, the Shrek and Pirates Of The Caribbean movies continued to limp along. The Spider-Man franchise did not. Raimi spent years working on a fourth Spider-Man, but he came to detest the version that was taking shape, and he finally announced that he couldn’t finish the movie in time for its planned 2011 release date. Maguire and Dunst refused to return without Raimi, and Spider-Man was dead in the water. The producers of Spider-Man had essentially hounded their hugely successful franchise out of existence. Rather than a fourth movie, they slapped together Marc Webb’s disastrous Amazing Spider-Man reboots. When those bricked, Sony resorted to leasing the character back to the Marvel people, who had some idea what to do with it.
It’s funny. By 2007, franchises had come to rule Hollywood. That year, six of the 10 highest-grossing movies were sequels, while another two, Transformers and Alvin And The Chipmunks, were kids’-TV adaptations that were clearly intended to spin off sequels (or squeakquels) of their own. But Hollywood had not yet learned how to manage those franchises. At the time, the blueprint was to just keep hammering away repetitively at past successes until everyone was sick of them. But that was changing. A year later, Iron Man came out and hinted at the idea of an interconnected, self-sustaining movie universe. People still complain, with good reason, about how franchises have taken over filmmaking, but at least we’re not dealing with things like those three part threes anymore.
The runner-ups: In the slim pickings of the 2007 top 10, The Bourne Ultimatum—yet another part three—stands out, if only because it understands how to keep the momentum of its predecessors going. It really is just more of the same—more Matt Damon running around glamorous locations, getting into fights with fellow black-ops assassins and frantically trying to find information about his own somehow-still-mysterious past. Also, the messy shaky-cam/quick-cut action movie aesthetic got old fast. In Ultimatum, though, the formula still works, and the visceral fights and kinetic chases make for pretty great dad-centric entertainment.
Next time: The Dark Knight exceeds all possible expectations and re-popularizes the idea that, hey, you know, maybe these movies can be good.
353 Comments
It’s a film nowhere near as good as its predecessors but I’ve never understood the absolute hatred for this one. It’s got some great performances and individual scenes which just don’t quite work overall but I’ve always enjoyed it for the most part.
Exactly. I’m glad that this article at least gets that Peter’s strutting scene was *meant* to be cringey. So many complaints about the movie suggest that people thought that Raimi was trying to make him cool and just messed up.
Which is frankly wild. I mean, he’s walking down a street in what seems to be supermodel town, and each and every woman looking at him does so cringing very hard at the minimum, looking at him in obvious disgust in some cases. How somebody could have read that scene any differently is bewildering.
(Or not — as @Old-Man Barking writes, it was probably more about not wanting to accept that fact, and not so much about not perceiving it correctly Which says something about fan culture itself, in a way.)
Yes, the lip-biting brunette in that YouTube thumbnail and Mageina Tovah’s Ursula are the only women who react positively to Peter’s bad boy transformation in that scene (And Ursula was already fawning over him in Spider-Man 2, so this is not exactly a new development.)
No one “read it wrong” dumbasses. It doesn’t matter if it was on purpose. It’s just physically bad lol.
I don’t think many people thought it was Raimi trying to make him cool, it’s just that the scene (while fine by itself) is too goofy to really fit with the movie around it. I got the distinct impression it was Raimi trying to find some kind of fun in this overstuffed mess of a movie he was dealing with.
While I personally don’t mind the Amazing Spider-Man movies (the first one is a too-soon reboot, but aside from that it’s pretty good) I was impressed that they managed to reach the “overstuffed, incoherent mess” in only two movies instead of the usual three.
The whole James Brown montage is easily my favorite part of the Raimi trilogy. Spider-Man 3 as a whole is not a good movie, but that montage is flawless.
Right? I’ve always been baffled by that take. Peter is not cool, and trying to be cool makes him into the biggest loser. Every character he interacts with responds negatively. Sometimes the intention doesn’t come across, but I don’t know how this can be considered a “failure to execute.” Peter is a DORK. that’s clearly gotten across!
Really? Just look at the faces of the bystanders – they’re all disgusted. Who sees that and thinks it’s cool?
I’ve always liked the defense of the scene that its the kind of ridiculous behavior an introverted nerd like Peter thinks is cool.
I really had few issues with Venom, my issues lie entirely with Sandman actually, and Harry’s fairly cringe story. Like, it’s blatantly obvious his dad was a villain, why is he mad that he was “killed by Spider-Man?” They know he murdered numerous people. On top of that he gets sitcom amnesia, but only back to right before he finds out Peter is Spider-Man. But I think I hate Sandman’s story the most. I hate how it retcons the first film, it totally guts the point of the first one and the emotionally devastating point that Peter was in direct contact with the guy who murdered Uncle Ben in cold blood. Making him retroactively good and just out for healthcare money undermines the fact that Peter’s inaction killed Ben. Who’s to say Sandman doesn’t accidentally (which is also really dumb) kill Ben anyway?
If I was to hazard a guess, it’s because for a lot of us of a certain age, Peter Parker is the only super-hero we can really identify with.Watching him turn into an embarrassing dork hurt a little. It’s cringy in a way that is difficult to watch. That’s just my thought on it.
Naaah, I’ve noticed the trend. When a series or movie franchise for any reason sours with the audience, even the good stuff is taken on bad faith. Piling on the franchise becomes the common source of visceral joy since you know you can lie about it as much as possible wirhout repercussion. It’s almost a form of communal bullying.
“It’s almost a form of communal bullying.”Ugh. Absolutely. The cardinal rule of any superhero/sci-fi/fantasy movie is: don’t read the comments. When it comes to these movies, hell is other people. They’re ALL “tits and dragons” so if you happen to discover an actual movie hiding in these genres, count yourself lucky. Otherwise just drool yourself through these using a wet Fleshlight and a hot dog up your butt.
“When a series or movie franchise for any reason sours with the audience, even the good stuff is taken on bad faith”I don’t disagree in the short term (or even medium term). I think in the longer term, though, there are a lot of opportunities for fandom correction. Both overloved and underappreciated movies have a good shot at shedding a lot of the superficial reactions over time.
I think Spiderman 3 just doesn’t benefit from a less cloudy point of view.
The Fantastic Four movies are not nearly the abominations people make them out to be. It’s just piling on now.
I think part of that is just because it’s always easier to hate on something for likes and upvotes than to argue that some stuff worked and some stuff didn’t. My favorite example is the last season of Game of Thrones. I would argue that there was good stuff in there mixed in with a whole lot of sloppy writing, but to see most of the hot takes on the internet, one would think it was the single worst thing ever to air on TV.
There’s a little Nutty Professor in there, no?
It definitely contrasts with him getting to kiss Mary Jane in the first movie, that’s for sure. I think that scene gave hope to many nerds back in the day.
The dancing scene is actually great; it’s memorable and completely in character for this Spider-Man.
I mean I fully disagree, but it resulted in a pretty amazing Into the Spiderverse gag, so whatever.
Most of the hate is that it’s a brutal come down after the first two movies, particularly the second one. Also, it has a lot in common with other unsuccessful superhero sequels, where more villains and plot is added just for the sake of declaring the movie bigger. It’s a huge mess. Still, the strutting scene is the movie’s Jar Jar. It’s the memorably bad thing that people remember as the reason the movie’s bad. I personally don’t find that sequence very well executed, but it’s not in the top 10 problems with the movie.
One of the top 10 problems was “retconning” the Sandman as involved in the killing of Uncle Ben. Everything must be connected!
There’s too much going on. The main culprit being the inclusion of Venom and the black costume. There’s enough story to just focus on Sandman and Harry’s anger over his father’s death, without shoehorning in Eddie Brock and the symbiote (thanks to pressure from Ari Avad). Even the addition of Gwen and George Stacey felt unnecessary and I love those two characters.
Yes, I too loved the Stacys in the comics, but they didn’t belong in the 3rd movie. If they were going to bring in Gwen, it should have been in the 1st movie. She doesn’t make sense coming in at this point.
The movie’s a mess but, for me, the addition of Gwen at that point was the thing I found most jarring.
Because Raimi’s personality can’t be a halfway thing. He either needs to stomp down his weirdness & just tell the story (A Simple Plan) or go whole hog with it (the first two movies in this series, the Evil Dead trilogy). This movie comes across like it’s trying to hit all the approved studio notes while still being a Sam Raimi joint and it just. Does. Not Work.
You really think the first Spider-Man (which I love) is Raimi going whole-hog like the Evil Dead movies?! There are sequences, especially in Spider-Man 2 (even better), that definitely feel like Raimi unleashed (birth of Doc Ock, of course), and I know Raimi himself said in some interview that he didn’t particularly feel that the second movie was “more him” than the first, even though a lot of us felt exactly that way at the time. But I think the first two Spider-Man movies are pretty much exactly Raimi hitting a lot of studio-approved beats (whether or not they were actually studio-mandated—probably not, in a lot of cases—they’re undeniably crowd-pleasing, and very much indebted to the Richard Donner Superman movies, which are not exactly the inspiration for Evil Dead or Darkman) while maintaining his sensibility. It’s not as restrained as A Simple Plan and it’s nowhere near as nutty as Army of Darkness or Evil Dead 2.
Spider-Man 3 is pretty much the same deal; it’s just not executed quite so well, and feels unbalanced between the Raimi-ish parts that are SUPER Sam Raimi (and delightful) and other parts that feel like a sloppy, rushed attempt to tie all of the over-many storylines together.
It’s decidedly not as good as the first two, but I’d take this over a lot of recent, better-liked superhero adventures. (I enjoyed Far From Home, but I think this movie is better in a lot of ways.) It has wonderful moments and personality, and even the sloppiness makes it relatively unpredictable. I always found it baffling that in 2006, X-Men: The Last Stand didn’t get great reviews, but the fan reaction seemed to be a bit more “eh, OK, they tried their best” (and it was reflected in the strongest-yet box office for the series) and then a year later, Spider-Man 3 was described as this horrible comedown. I think SM3’s rep has improved a little bit and X3’s has diminished, but at the time I was very the-wrong-kid-died about their receptions.
I feel like the studio didn’t know enough about comic books in the first movie to really tell Raimi what to do. They just saw the action sequences were going well, said “cool, whatever” and left him to his devices. In the case of the second movie, it was an “if it ain’t broke” mentality of just letting the guy who did well with the first one do his thing, which is how we get the Evil Dead chainsaw scene in the morgue. With the third, as Tom laid out so well, Avi Arad reared his ugly head and started demanding “mOaR aCtIoN!!! mOaR vEnOm!!!” and things went south.And obviously when I say “whole hog” I don’t mean that it’s a hard-R rated horror movie but it is very, VERY much a Sam Raimi movie, through and through.
Also, I don’t remember anyone describing X3 as “Eh, they tried their best.” People hated that movie and Brett Ratner for tanking what was previously a rock solid movie series and ruining the Dark Phoenix, and they were right to do so. Just because the next X-Men movie was markedly worse doesn’t mean that The Last Stand didn’t deeply suck.
There’s no way of proving this because it’s kind of ephemeral and not especially quantifiable, but I SWEAR that Spider-Man 3 caught way more Online Flak than X3 did. I’m sure some people hated X3 but I think plenty received it more with indifference or mild disappointment. (It might just be that more people saw Spider-Man 3; the lowest-grossing Spidey movies make about as much the highest-grossing X-movies.)
I guess this is more of a “feel” thing, but coming off of X-2, and the anticipation of the ascent of the world-destroying Dark Phoenix, I definitely remember a massive “That’s it???” reaction to the smallness of the movie. There’s a reason they pivoted to (terrible) origin stories and (passably good) prequels in the aftermath.
Oh, there was definitely recognition of the dead end they steered into with The Last Stand. It’s really quite remarkable that X-Men movie production never really ceased until the Disney buyout. At the franchise’s lowest ebb, quality-wise, the gaps were still 2 to 3 years, same as always.
So yeah, maybe I just wasn’t reading the right message boards. It just felt like it was more of a shrug than an outcry. Maybe it’s also that in era before EVERY superhero movie was sort of expected to be one of the year’s three or four biggest movies, the normie reaction to X3 was more, sure that was fun I guess, where more normie reaction to Spider-Man 3 had more of a “da fuck?” type of tone. I find that — anecdotally; impossible to quantify, I know — “regular” audiences often react far more negatively to something that’s interesting but strange than something that’s incredibly or even insultingly mediocre.
And hey, no bigger fan of the first X-Men movie than I am — there’s something where the relativel smallness feels productive and cool, rather than the air letting out of X3 when it stages Dark Phoenix in a forest clearing — but I would put First Class way up there. It’s probably not much more than a fun movie, but it is a REALLY fun movie.
Yeah, First Class is a heck of a lot of fun, and my GOD is Fassbender great as Magneto. I probably underrated that. The X-Men run from 2010-2017 is ridiculously underrated.
Glad I’m not alone in my appreciation for the first X-Men movie. I never thought the 2nd one was that much of an improvement. I was ready for a train wreck in 2000, a team movie with multiple characters crammed into a 100 minute movie sounded like a recipe for disaster. But X-Men was one of the rare exceptions where focusing on 3-4 characters (Rogue, Wolverine, Xavier, Erik) and leaving everyone else cardboard cut-outs was totally necessary in order to work.But I will say I recall the reaction to X3 being much worse than the reaction to Spider-Man 3. People hated X3, where folks thought Spider-Man 3 just had way too much going on (they sideline Harry Osborne with amnesia just so they can take him off the villain table for the first 2 acts). I still think there’s more good in X3 (Kelsey Grammer’s Hank McCoy, for one) than in Spider-Man 3, but they both obviously suffer from bloat.
Yeah, especially now, that first X-Men movie feels refreshing in that it has these very character-centric scenes that almost play like vignettes—mini-origin stories would sort of become the series’ stock in trade, but they’re so affecting in that first one especially. A lot of what’s good about it is dialogue and character, imagine! And yeah, expectations were a big part of it. It was kind of a lame summer, there hadn’t been a good big-name superhero movie in a while (Blade ruled but felt much more like action-horror at the time since I didn’t know the character), it was a troubled production, and then hey…. a totally good rewatchable movie!My hot take is that Kelsey Grammar isn’t good casting for Beast! It’s both on-the-nose casting for his voice (which feels gimmicky if it’s not a vocal-only performance) *and* kind of dumb-guy-trying-to-sound-smart casting at the same time (Grammar isn’t actually a genius! He was great as Frasier and Sideshow Bob but you don’t have to cast him as a genius!).They go in a different direction with Hoult in the prequels and it also doesn’t really work for me. Beast is an awesome character but I don’t think they completely cracked him on film. But Grammar being Beast always struck me as kind of a cheeseball move.
The first filme’s Wolverine-Rogue meeting and relationship is one of the best parts of any X-Men movie. The moments when the films remembered these are real world characters (young Angel filing down his wings, Iceman coming out to his parents, etc), rather than super heroes is when they were at their best.
I guess that’s the baggage TV actors bring to films. I thought Grammar was pretty spot on. I was able to forget Grammar isn’t super smart like I was able to forget he isn’t perma-blue. His Frederik Douglas-style design was inspired compared to what Hoult’s Teen Wolf, Too (but blue) makeup.
I recall Hoult was a last-second recast after the original actor dropped out. He makes a pretty terrible Beast.
With X3, once I found out Brett Ratner was involved, any enthusiasm I had for that one vanished. And I *loved* the X-Men growing up. But I knew that movie was going to be steaming pile of disappointment.Spider-Man 3, I felt let down. 1 was good, 2 was great, there was no reason to think 3 would be bad. They were bringing back the director/cast and including Venom! Though I will admit that the first red flag was when I heard Venom was in it and Thomas Haden Church was in it… and he wasn’t Eddie Brock. Then I found out Topher Grace was going to be Brock. That was genuinely bewildering. The whole thing would have worked better if they got rid of Sandman, had Church as Brock, stick to the comics (symbiote takes over, Peter doesnt like the lack of agency, gets rid of symbiote) and the symbiote attaches to Brock, whose life is in the shitter while Parker is doing well. Together they go after Spider-Man. Throw Harry in if you want the second villain and give the two of them some resolution by fighting Venom together with the idea that forgiveness (Spidey/Green Goblin teaming up after Harry learns the truth) is more powerful than hate (Venom).
I think X3 being directed by Brett Ratner modified expectations, especially because he was literally something like the EIGHTH person they asked to direct it, requiring a pushback of the release date because they couldn’t find anyone to replace Singer, and the first person to say yes, Matt Vaughn, left as well.
Meanwhile, without less available inside scoop before hand, and aside from the synopsis seeming overstuffed, all we knew going into Spiderman 3 was “another Sam Raimi Spiderman=incredibly likely to be good!”. As others have commented, there’s also a bit of the “why are you making this nerd wish-fulfillment figure an asshole” to the letdown, almost as if the audience wasn’t prepared to go down the fairly tame road Raimi was taking them down. Now, it’s nowhere near as bad, say, Phantom Menace’s letdown, but there was sort of the same vibe after the opening night I went to: a bunch of cheering superfans leaving quietly bewildered and disappointed, all as one sighing “…Huh”.
With X3, you at least knew it was going to be the sort of movie that would directly quote a rather crude and juvenile meme for a laugh, leading to a bunch of formerly cautiously optimistic folks to leave THAT theater shrugging “…Yep.”
There’s plenty of stuff that works mixed in with plenty that doesn’t and it just becomes a big, weird mess of a film. I mean, what was up with that pie scene? Or cutting away from the final battle to the reporter (who is a dreadful actor) telling us exactly what’s happening and what the stakes are? And let’s not forget the needless Uncle Ben retcon. I enjoy it (and I agree about the dance scene – for me it’s a mirror of the Raindrops carefree strutting from Spider-Man 2) but it’s such an odd mixture of stuff that I would love a huge tell-all oral history on it one day.
For me, between the quality of the 1st two outings and the hype for this one (the trailer for this one had me anxiously counting the months to release), it’s suuuch a letdown.The movie starts solid enough and this mostly carries through to the peak of the movie for me, Sandman reconstituting himself after his transformation. Then the movie that continues is suffocating, no room for any moments to breathe, it’s like I’m watching two movies at once with one being rather shitty.Plot lines established in the earlier, good part of the movie are rushed to an ending or just left dangling and unresolved. Toward the end, leading up to and during the last battle , Sam Raimi’s lack of giving fuck is apparent and pervasive. By the time the end credits hit, I was deflated and dismayed.
Every time I see the Sandman scene I expect him to break out into song.
If anything, the original idea with Vulture and Sandman would have worked a lot better than Venom in this. But overall it’s still a decent movie especially compared to the other superhero movies of the year.
When you have THREE villains in a movie, it’s too many villains.
I would argue that two is too many, but three just makes a big mess.
Firstly, in original Alien Suit Saga, the Symbiote never altered Peter’s personality. All it really did was give him a really weird dreams and use his body as a meat puppet to go out on patrol while he was asleep. It was only after Peter got rid of it that it wanted revenge.Also, fun fact: Secret Wars #12, the end of the event where Peter go the Symbiote, and Web of Spider-Man #1, the issue where Peter gets rid of the Symbiote, both came out at the same time in April 1985. The idea was, if you wanted to figure out where the black suit came from, you’d have to read Secret Wars to find out.Also also, even though it was published after it was revealed the Black Suit was an alien, in Transformers #3, Spider-Man had to appear wearing the black suit because Mattel owned the license for Spider-Man in his red and blue suit and this was a Hasbro tie-in comic. So it’s established that the issue takes place before Peter found out the suit was an alien.And yes, for a brief period of time, Transformers was canon with the Marvel Universe.Second, as to the the dance sequence, I agree that it’s not bad in and of itself. It’s good campy fun. The problem is that the campy elements clash with the more dour elements because the movie can’t seem to keep a consistent tone in-between scenes. Like, right after the Peter does that dance sequence we have the scene that ends with him hitting MJ and than we cut to the church where he has to remove the Symbiote and it’s all dark and serious. Third, I want to talk about the biggest plot hole in this movie: the fact that Harry’s Butler not only knew Norman impaled himself with his glider the whole time but for some reason never bothered to tell Harry until he’d injected himself with an experimental super soldier serum that causes mental psychosis and blown half his face off. I read somewhere that The Butler was supposed of Harry’s subconscious telling himself that Peter didn’t kill Norman but that makes even less sense. We clearly see Harry interact with Imaginary Butler around MJ and she didn’t even bat an eye at Harry talking to himself. Hell, IIRC, Imaginary Butler was in at least of the other movies. And, if Imaginary Butler wasn’t real, Harry somehow knew Norman killed himself but somehow gaslit himself into blaming Peter?Finally, on my last point: The climax of this movie a lot of similarities to the climax of Darkman. It takes place on a construction site for a skyscraper, the villain’s holding the love interest hostage, and at some point she’s dangling off the edge. I can’t tell if this was supposed to be an homage or Rami just gave up and decided to just decided to copy/paste a fight scene he already did.
While he’s always gone back to the classic outfit, Marvel’s always loved bringing the black suit back when possible. It’s such a fantastic design and it stands out.In the comics he famously continued to wear a cloth version of the black suit for about three or four years, finally abandoning it in issue 300 after the first Venom storyline (though McFarlane brought it back during his final issues of Spider-Man and many others have done so since too).I’ve always loved that issue of Transformers, though the cover promises so much more than the issue actually delivers. There’s no Optimus Prime/Spider-Man team up to be had alas.
Thank you for fleshing all of that out, learned some new things I didn’t know. Just wanted to add some of my wind to the discussion:Yes, the most confounding part of the movie is the butler stuff, as you described. And the stuff with Peter turning into a goofy asshole was fine but for me the point where it just goes overboard and off the rails is the jazzclub scene. Its been a loooong while since I read the comics, and correct me if I’m wrong but I do have some memory of Peter getting gradually cockier and jerkier where someone, either MJ or Aunt May or Black Cat calls him out on it. He doesn’t become a totally different person like in the movie, but the suit caters to and reinforces Parker’s “ambitious” side like an allegory for drug addiction, maybe steroid addiction. Again, I could totally be misremembering.
And didn’t the comics have a lot more nuance and layers to the psychologies and relationships of Parker, Brock, and the suit? Eddie Brock’s rise and fall was a bit more of a slow burn, and in the movie it happens in like half an act with not enough time for someone like that to really wallow in depression, destitution, and confusion. His meeting with the rejected alien suit felt more organic in the comic and not as coincidental like in the movie. A shame the movies didn’t extend into a fourth one for the Venom reveal so that it could’ve explored that psychological stuff more in depth. It would’ve also allowed some space to include Black Cat which would’ve added more depth to Parker’s relationship issues. Again, my memory is hazy, but doesn’t Parker say something like “why did the suit turn out black? Maybe I was subconsciously thinking about Black Cat’s cool suit”, or something like? Hell, with a fourth movie they could’ve even included a Fantastic 4 crossover!Oh! and Darkman is the shit! I think Rami used the same endings not so much out of laziness but more because it was tried and true and a good fit.
He indicates he may have been influenced by the new Spider Woman’s suite at the time, not the Black Cat. She had first appeared earlier in Secret Wars wearing that same design.
Yeah, Black Cat gave him a cloth version of the black suit that he wore for a while but he ditched it after Venom showed up. He’d briefly wear it again the Back in Black arc where Peter goes after Wilson Fisk for mortally wounding Aunt May.
He also wears it for that one arc in McFarlane’s adjectiveless Spider-Man when he needs to be stealthy before realizing he should have minimized the giant white spider image on it.
That’s right! I forgot there was a Spider Woman. Ugh, my memory I swear …
It was Spider-Woman II’s cool black suit he was thinking about.
Oh god. I forgot all about the butler scene.
Dumbest exposition scene in history?
About the church scene, while it is overall a too-drastic change of tone, I do think there’s an element of black comedy in the fact that while Peter Parker is engaging in this hugely dramatic battle over his soul with an alien being possessing him, Eddie Brock is in the church underneath loudly begging God Himself to whack Peter Parker for him. Like, lot of brass stones on you there, Brock.
I think they could have done something interesting with Brock’s implied Christianity there. Have him go to church, but instead of being angry and asking God to kill someone (which, uh, is not something He’s generally down to do these days), have him be humbled and asking for a sign for what to do next. Then when he gets hit by the symbiote, he can tell himself it’s God’s will, and that justifies any of the actions the symbiote pressures him into.
I mean, they could have just done what they did in the comics where he was legitimately praying to God for guidance because his life was a wreck. Yeah he blamed Peter for a lot of it, but Brock had been raised by a hardcore, old-school Catholic and his “Catholic Guilt” was tearing him apart. He was actually suicidal, and because of his traditional “Catholic Guilt” he was feeling even worse because he’d been told these feelings themselves were a sin. Venom tapping in to the darkest parts of him was believable because it latched on to him when he was at an incredible low in his life.
The movie didn’t need to go THAT far, because lets be honest it wouldn’t have had any impact unless we’d known Brock for all three movies. But they still could have just made him a guy who’d been shown to be raised really religious, screwed up his life, and felt like he had nowhere else to turn other than God. The whole “Please God kill Peter Parker” is just beyond ludicrous. Though…I guess it is pretty Raimi.
Thanks, as always. I was reading comics (including Secret Wars) at the time, but I always remembered Peter’s tenure in the black suit lasting more than just the single month…I read that the butler knowing the details of Norman’s death was a late change. Originally, MJ was supposed to be the one to talk Harry into joining the fight on Spider-Man’s side, while Gwen Stacy was supposed to be Venom and Sandman’s hostage. The reveal from the butler became necessary when the powers-that-be decided MJ had to be kidnapped for a third straight movie. The change is sloppy, but the explanation would probably be that after Harry discovered his dad was the Goblin (at the end of Spider-Man 2) and had access to all the Goblin’s gear, it would’ve been pretty easy for him to figure out how his father died (he had two stab wounds spaced at the same distance as the blades on the front of the glider Harry now owns), and then suppress the idea because he’d been obsessed with revenge since the end of the first movie, only allowing “Bernard” to reveal it to him when MJ was in danger (again…).
It lasted about a year or so. Web of Spiderman #1, the issue in which Peter gets rid of the alien symbiote suit, came out the same month that Secret Wars #12, the last issue of that mini-series, which lasted a year all told, came out.
Thanks, as always. I was reading comics (including Secret Wars) at the time, but I always remembered Peter’s tenure in the black suit lasting more than just the single month…To clarify Laserface’s post, Secret Wars was a 12 issue year long series. Every Marvel title spent an issue or so showing what happened when the heroes disappeared when Secret Wars 1 came out, but then the following month the heroes returned with the changes they would undergo from Secret Wars. Spider-Man wearing his black costume, Thing had quit F4, etc. You had to keep reading Secret Wars to find out how these changes occurred, but in the meantime you were reading comics that represented those changes. So you had a year of Peter wearing the symbiote suit, before Secret Wars 12 came out where he got the suit and Web of Spider-Man 1 came out where he got rid of it, which both came out the same month. Not to mention that even after he got rid of the symbiote, he still wore a cloth version of the black suit for a few years.
Thanks. So what I forgot (/vaguely remembered) was the suit appearing in the regular comics, which were technically set post-Secret Wars, even though they were running concurrently with the ongoing Secret Wars mini-series.
I’m kinda glad that Marvel UK reprints of Secret Wars and then stuff from AS-M & PPS-M were done sequentially. We basically got the ‘Alien Black Costume’ storyline in a logical manner, which also meant we could saviour the change more (though this weekly/fortnightly during ‘85).Also that Spidey guest appearance in Transformers was my gateway drug into collecting the series full time. That lead to the problem whereby Marvel UK didn’t have enough reprints for Transformers and had to fill in with original stories. Target 2006 being one of my favourites, also the weird guest appearance by millionaire Richard Branson was another notable highlight (changed to some random Mister Johnson when Marvel were doing reprints os the series).
The butler scene makes so little sense. How does this guy have the knowledge to look at a pair of stab wounds and know for certain they came from the Goblin Glider? How did he know so much about the Glider’s specs? And even if he does know this, it doesn’t prove that Norman caused his own death; Peter could have picked up the Glider and stabbed him with it for all the butler knows.
Yeah, it’s a clunker of a scene. The logic and the line delivery left me dumbfounded.
I read ASM #258 so many times when I was a kid, I know the conversations between Reed, Johnny and Peter pretty much word for word 36 years later.
Gotta love Bombastic Bag-Man!
With the kick-me sign on his back, hahaha
The alternate cut that’s available on Blu-ray ditches the butler for a scene where Harry just looks at a photo of Pete and MJ and decides for himself to stop being a weird asshole. It works a little better.
That works significantly better! We didn’t need an Imaginary Butler for Harry’s redemption.
Ya know, there’s no reason why not that the Transformers can’t exist in the marvel universe. Disney should get to work in shoving that into the MCU
IIRC, it’s largely because the roster is so expansive and Hasbro pretty much owned every character created in the book that it wouldn’t have benefited Marvel to integrate them.
So you’re saying they should alter the continuity so that an alien race has been operating on Earth in disguise for years and nobody noticed. What would they call it, like Secret Invasion?
And yes, for a brief period of time, Transformers was canon with the Marvel Universe.
I… may love this idea. So many hilariously dumb possibilities.
Re: the alien costume never altering his behavior. This is correct. However, the original introduction of Venom is a mess. Eddie Brock is retconned clumsily into the death of Jean DeWolff. People forget that was a retcon and a bad one. The alien costume itself was executed well in the comics, Venom was not. The Venom origin that was done correctly, enough to be what would be deferred to by future comics, TV shows, and movies like Spider-Man 3, was the 1990s animated Spider-Man TV series’ version of those events.
Wasn’t there some aspect of his behavior being affected? I mean, the symbiote sometimes took him over while he was sleeping, and I remember something about it intensifying his emotions, and making him irritable (although that might have been sleep deprivation from the symbiote using him like a meat puppet when he was trying to rest).
No. What it is is during that same period he was essentially jinxed by the Black Cat’s bad luck powers, which she got clandestinely from an experiment funded by Kingpin so she could protect herself when she was with Spider-Man (after getting really beat up by Dr Octopus earlier), this contributed to making Spider-Man’s life go downhill and eventually breaking them up. The effects of the bad luck powers got folded into the Symbiote story in the animated series and they’ve been there ever since. Actually, a really funny part about this is that when Black Cat got her powers, Kingpin decided he was deeply invested in keeping her and Spider-Man together so that her bad luck powers would fuck everything up. Which leads to the immortal panel where Wilson Fisk rants about how he’s shipping Spider-Man and Black Cat. I’m gonna post the panel here because it’s really funny
Thank you for posting that. I forget how crazy things sometimes were back then 🙂
Wasn’t it the 1990s animated series that first made the suit evil?
I think so.
And how. The director must have said “more evil” like 50 times to the voice actor to get to the performance they got.
I think Transformers #3 was my first issue. I know Death’s Head made the transition fromTransformers to regular continuity, but was there ever a definitive moment when Transformers ceased to be Marvel canon?What about G.I. Joe?
I have that comic (or at least one with Spider-man and the Transformers), and it is fun to see Spidey try to handle giant robot civil war. Should have called the Avengers or at least the Fantastic Four Petey.
I own that Amazing Spider-Man! I bought it when it the day it came out. I was 10th grade. Yes, I’m an old man.
Of all the movies where the studio decided they wanted to crank out a trilogy and film them back to back, I think the Pirates of the Caribbean movies might have been shafted the most as the second and third movies lack any of the charm of the original. The third one is such a mess it’s obvious they started filming far too early.
A lot of people consider this practically sacrilege to say, but the same goes for the Back to the Future movies. Sure, the second one has its moments but the story is really convoluted (even if it did predict the rise of Donald Trump.) The third one is completely forgettable.
I think I said this last article but the thing I hated about the second and third Pirates film was how absolutely fucking joyless they are to watch. They’re convoluted to the point of incoherence and have so many double-crosses it descends into a virtual parody of itself during the same movie.
If you thought two was convoluted then boy your gonna looooooooove the 4th film.
What, do they become assholes or something?
*thinks it over a moment*No. Will and Elizabeth turn out fine, but it’s their kids. Something’s gotta be done about their kids, savvy?
Kinda. It’s truly a mess that doesn’t make a lick of sense while acting like it does.
“Become”?
No no just kidding!
The first movie is such a breezy joy to watch, but for the second two Disney clearly wanted their own Lord of the Rings-style saga. The scene where Keira Knightley is giving some epic speech to a bunch of boat guys always makes me laugh because it’s such a direct ripoff of Viggo Mortensen at the end of Return of the King.
They also manage the impressive trick of making (uh spoilers I guess) Naomi Harris as an all-powerful sea goddess… really boring and uninteresting?
What kills me about the joylessness is how some individual scenes are so good in each of the 2nd and 3rd Pirates films.Like in the second film, the Jack/Will/Norrington swordfight is absolutely a joy to watch (and probably in the running for one of the best modern swordfights ever, imo). And in the third film, almost everything about the Pirate Conclave is golden, and trading Jack for Will on the beach, etc. — but everything else, including the Calypso bits just drag it down.
The mid-fight marriage ceremony is pretty fun.
This is so true and it’s why both end up being better rainy Saturday afternoon films than they have any right to be
Yeah, for me it was all the double crosses that just made no sense, it felt like some long SNL joke that got out of control
Back to the Future may be diminishing returns overall, but those returns are still pretty fun. Two might be convoluted, but it’s a fun kind of convoluted, and Three might be ultimately forgettable, but it at least works overall as a pretty fun throwback western with some time travel stuff slapped onto it. (Plus, full disclosure, it was one of the first movies I saw at the cinema so I have a lot of fondness towards it which may not be entirely deserved). They might not live up to the heights of the original, but they’re bright, cheerful and non-too-long; you can at least have a good time watching them.The three blockbuster franchises here, though… I mean, the Shrek series drowns in mean-spirited “irony”-infused smugness, the Pirates films become increasingly bloated, dour and self-satisfied, and Spider-Man III is written by a committee designing a horse and directed by someone who’s lost all enthusiasm for their job. They’re definitely not great, but even worse they’re not particularly enjoyable either. Forgettable or not, I’d watch Back to the Future III over any of them any day.
I enjoy bttf 3 quite a bit. It’s fun!
BTTF3 was my dad’s favorite of the trilogy, and his enthusiasm really shaped my perception of that film. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized a lot of people think negatively of it.
I had zero idea “people” were down on it til recently. Always enjoyed it, it was a good and fun movie that came out 30 years ago. Sometimes I watch it!I will continue not caring what the “online perception” is haha.
Well… there is the scene where Michael J Fox plays Marty’s Marty’s great grandfather Seamus Mc Irish Stereotype. There are very few actors that can play off the whole “I’m so funny I play multiple roles in my movies” thing, and that’s not quite in Fox’s wheelhouse. So I think people didn’t like how the third movie leaned into some of the silliness, but personally I don’t care. It’s a hell of a lot of fun and I love it.
Do people really have problems following the intricate plot mechanics of Back to the Future II? I’m far from a genius, but I saw it when I was like 10 and no issues. Primer it’s not.
I imagine it’s one of those things that commenters or meme folks have latched onto. I was about the same age. I wasn’t confused.YeahYeah, the chalkboard bit is a momentum stopping bit of exposition. Also, so? I think people NOW care more than anybody did then.
TBF I can see why some viewers might find it a bit convoluted, especially when compared to the more straightforward other two movies; it’s definitely not Primer but it still goes deeper into mind-screwy temporal mechanics than at least 90% of summer popcorn blockbusters ever have or will. Plus, you know, we can’t all be as smart as 10-year-old Doobie.
BttF3 is a perfectly fine movie that’s not as good as the first two, but still a solidly decent if unspectacular film on its own. Going to the beginnings of Hill Valley and the families that make up the trilogy made sense. And as I get older, I view 3 as a coda to the other two movies and I am perfectly fine with that.
I love the third Back to the Future. Yes, tonally they shift. First kind of adventure comedy, third western comedy, then in between this bleak dystopian sci fi. But who would have the balls to make one of the most successful movies of the year, one which offers endless possibilities due to time travel, and then say, you know what, we’re going to make the third one a western. If they remade this trilogy today it’d probably follow the first two’s template and then with the third either go super sci fi or try and create some BTTF universe so they could spin off a TV series.
Yeah, the third one takes the basic plot of the original, switches the Marty and Doc roles, and generally has a good time. I love it.
I will gladly defend BTTF 3. To me its more enjoyable then 2.
So obviously the sequels can’t be compared to the first Back to the Future in terms of quality, but if you compare the 3 to 2, 3 is by far my favorite. The second one makes no goddamned sense to me and really isn’t all that fun. By jumping back 100 years the third one doesn’t get mired down in all the timeline complications; all they need to do is get back to 1985 and everything will be fine. So that frees them up to play around with all the steampunky silliness that Doc Brown cooks up and more cheesy but fun 1885 / 1985 parallels (of course the hard-ass principal’s great grandfather was a hard-ass sheriff!). Sure, they really do run those jokes into the ground in the third movie but when I was a kid I loved the hell out of those jokes and they still get a pass now.
I have nothing but love for BTTF, though I’ll happily concede I’m in a minority of one who thinks it’s the best trilogy series.
Eh, I still like the second & third Pirates movies. Verbinski is a great visual director & the scenes were Jack slowly loses his mind and talks to multiple versions of himself while weird ass crab-rock things try to steal The Black Pearl are some of the most unsettlingly odd sequences I’ve ever seen in a blockbuster movie.
I was thinking about BTTF II (which I love, convoluted plot and all) the other day and it made me realise something I’d not thought about before – though I imagine that the infinite nerds at an infinite number of keyboards nature of the Internet means it’s probably not an original thought. But in the 2015 segment, surely Marty and Doc mess up Marty’s family’s future? The whole of the first film is about making sure everything happens exactly as it should so that it doesn’t wipe Marty and his siblings from the timeline (the couple of tweaks that improve their lives later is a bonus). But in Part II they deliberately change what happens in 2015 just because its a bit shitty (despite Doc’s whole “Don’t fuck with time, you’ll fuck it all up, oh great now Biff’s in charge and we’ve got alternate timelines” message with the almanac) But what about Mary’s grandkids? And his great grandkids? By messing about with Marty Jr. and changing what happens to him and the effects it has on Marty’s other kids, surely they’re creating an alternate timeline? One where, whatever children they would have had, are now wiped out because circumstances are completely different? And their children and their children…Basically the entire future McFly family born after 2015 are wiped out just because Marty didn’t want Marty Jr. to do a bit of jail time. I realise Zemeckis and Gale were somewhat trapped by their ending to BTTF (which was supposed to be a punchline, not a sequel set-up) but it’s funny to think the solution was McFly genocide.
BttF 2 bugs me from the get-go because once Marty and Jen go to the future, they should create an alternate timeline 2015 where Marty and Jen mysteriously vanished in 1985.
Would it have been a big mystery though? Ultimately they were gone for a day, but the two had already made plans to go to the lake that day. It’s strange that they didn’t take Marty’s new truck, but totally acceptable to me that nobody would worry about them being gone.
Upon arrival in 2015, they would have been missing for 30 years. They could not have been married and had kids because, from that new, alternate timeline, they weren’t there. Just like the one minute Einstein wasn’t there when Doc first tested the DeLorean in the first movie.
No, timelines is terminator (and star trek, depending on which time they time travel?). It’s all one magic self healing mobius strip in BTTF.
That’s not how it works in the BTTF movies though. Changes to the timeline take a while to set, which is why it took so long for Marty to disappear from the photo in the first movie. And even then, things can more or less be set back, as evidenced by Marty and his siblings reappearing in the photo. If they had died or something, then it would’ve changed things. But since Marty and Jennifer were gone for less than a day and returned unharmed, it didn’t affect the past in any significant way.
Considering that the first movie should technically have wiped away all three of George and Lorraine’s kids due to the changes Marty makes in the timeline if we want to get too deep into the weeds of temporal mechanics and butterfly effects, I think we just have to go with “they still exist but in a less shitty way”.
Doc tells Marty that the event he plans to alter will ruin his family. He kept jumping farther into the future to see how things play out normally and things only get worse. He had every reason to believe altering events was the correct decision. And when you consider that Marty saved Doc’s life by altering events, how can anyone blame him for trying to return the favor?
I’ll admit, I’d forgotten that detail. I can buy that as good motivation! But then I didn’t think of it as a plot hole (certainly not like the dicks who tweet at Gale demanding he explain why they don’t recognise Calvin Klein in 1985) – I just found it funny that the sequel moved from the original’“everything must be kept as it is” to “fuck the timeline, your kids are assholes” and Marty never calls Doc out on it, even when he tries to improve his future with the almanac and Doc goes straight back to his “everything must be kept as it is!” line.
That’s not what happens: they don’t just change the 2015 future – they erase the entire post-1985 street racing accident timeline once he refuses to be goaded into the drag race. Everything from that point changes. Marty doesn’t spend months in physical therapy. He and his family aren’t sued into bankruptcy by the owner of the luxury vehicle he originally crashes into. He probably still marries Jennifer but their whole timeline is changed. He’s not a bitter, broken has-been worker drone, she’s not a disappointed alcoholic. They probably have kids but not on the same timeline, they likely live in a better neighborhood, better schools, the kids have different friends and experiences, etc.
Huh. Hadn’t even considered that – so they even end up erasing the 2015 reality they improved – and, likely, the kids they tried to save.
It made way too much sense when I found out the first Back to the Future’s ending was simply supposed to be a fun way to send things off and let people imagine future stories, and they had absolutely no intention of actually making a sequel, which then had to be cobbled together from scratch with the added complication of Crispin Glover refusing to come back.
Of all the movies where the studio decided they wanted to crank out a trilogy and film them back to back, I think the Pirates of the Caribbean movies might have been shafted the most as the second and third movies lack any of the charm of the original. The third one is such a mess it’s obvious they started filming far too early.The Matrix has entered the chat.
My wife and I saw the second Pirates movie the summer we started dating. I have said on several occasions that it exists just to get you to the third movie. Mrs. YYZ then asks how this is different from The Two Towers, and I say, “Because that movie doesn’t stink.”
I get what you’re saying on the Back to the Future movies. The first one is one of my favorite movies of all time, but even as a kid I realized the sequels lost a lot of what made the first one special.
The first BTTF movie was about a teenager meeting his own parents when they were his age. All the super-cool time-travel hijinks were in service to that emotional core, which gave it depth and meaning the sequels, for all their charm, can’t match. He learned that his dad had the same insecurities he had, that his mom was far from the “I think the woman was born a nun” that he was led to believe. (There’s also a mountain of subtle background bits showing that downtown Hill Valley is fucked in 1985. Damn near every store in background shots is either out of business, a porn shop, a bail bonds office, or a crappy predatory loan place. Better to highlight the “Hopeful Up-and-Coming 50s” vs the “we’re letting our towns go to shit 80s”.)
It would’ve been cool if the sequels would’ve expanded on that idea, with Marty and Jennifer traveling to the future and realizing they have more in common with their kids at the same age than they do with themselves 30 years older. Bonus points if their kids were played by Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson.
Instead, they went a different direction. Which is jarring, but fun in its own way. Each of the three movies are really entirely different genres. The first is a relatively grounded (for a time travel story) story about family and the similarities between generations, the second is a madcap, broad, twisty time travel adventure where THE FATE OF THE TIME-STREAM is at stake, and the third is, obviously, a Western. (Which was a weird why not? decision. I honestly think Robert Zemeckis just really wanted to make a Western.)
Every director should make a Western at some point in their careers.
Every director should make a Western at some point in their careers.
The second Pirates film has a really weird/abrupt ending. If you didn’t know it was leading right into a third film (or watched the second right when it came out) it would be really confusing. I also really don’t understand the decision to kill the Kraken off screen between movies.
I’m a fan of the Pirates trilogy in the exact same way I’m a fan of the Matrix trilogy. I love the the first movies in both trilogies because they are these pristine artifacts that do exactly what they intend to do perfectly (obviously The Matrix is better, but Pirates is an insanely perfect Hollywood summer blockbuster as well). Just great, refined craft on display there.Then the second and third movies are these bizarre blank checks, where the filmmaker just throws every idea they have about the world into an insane, tonally bizarre mishmash that doesn’t really come together. I don’t think those movies are great in the same way as the first ones are, but I admire them for their messiness and vision. And it both cases, you can tell that the studio is letting the directors do whatever the fuck they want. Again, the Matrix sequels are better than the Pirates sequels (or at least Reloaded is the best movie in the lot — I really, really don’t enjoy watching most of Revolutions, even though there are sequences that are incredibly cool), but they have the exact same problems and strengths. And goddammit, I love a messy, expensive passion project.
I showed my kids the first Matrix and they both loved it (even my younger son who really doesn’t care for movies in general). My older son and I watched the second one, he liked it well enough and asked about watching the third, to which I replied “nope, I’m not going to do that to you. the third one doesn’t make a damn bit of sense anyway so just pretend it ends here” I think he persisted a bit so I broke down and explained that the third one both literally and thematically reboots the entire damn story… which now that I think about it is kinda an impressive bit of nonsense, but I’m still not going to let him watch it.
eh, I don’t think Revolutions is *bad*, it’s just way too long! I kinda like what’s going on in terms of the ideas (honestly I think the Neo stuff still owns). The big problem with that movie for me is that the entire battle section of the movie, where it’s just a big Aliens ripoff…. it’s real bad. It sucks the life out of the movie. The “Neo is literally Jesus” stuff kinda works for me.
Well, the Wachowskis always swing for the fences, which is why even their best stuff usually still has a few moments that don’t work. I really liked Cloud Atlas and Sense8, so I’m excited for the fourth Matrix movie.
Everything the Wachowskis have ever made has some spark that makes it interesting and fun, I really like them a lot in general. Even something like Jupiter Ascending, which I don’t think comes together at all, is admirably bonkers and heart-on-the-sleeve earnest. But Cloud Atlas is one of my favorite movies, and I expect that Lana wouldn’t come back to the Matrix if there wasn’t something cool left on the table.
I remeber the rule as a kid was that sequels are never as good as the first and the third always sucks.
The Empire Strikes Back is the exception that proves the rule.
Don’t forget Godfather pt. 2 & Aliens. Can we name a good part 3 before extended unverses such as marvel? Even then we had our Iron Man. Thor Raganarac was stellar. All the Captain America sequels and Avengers.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) was pretty great, but that was one of the earliest extended universe productions, of course.Goldfinger was terrific, but that’s also an extended universe. Maybe The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)?
How can I forget Goldfinger? I guess the lack of number 3 threw me off.I hate to say it, but I’ve never seen The Good, The Bad. I have had it on dvd for years. It’s so hard to commit to a movie that long. I’’m not sure it counts though? In spirit maybe?
BttF 2 is secretly and easily the best of the films if you watch them back-to-back-to-back. However, it definitely lost some luster when Biff Tannen 1985A got elected President in the real world.
I thought the Back to the Future sequels were good, but I also didn’t need them. I could’ve been fine with the first one being an eternal cliffhanger.
Love it or hate it, and most hate it, it has some memorable scenes. Whether its the birth of Sandman, which is a genuinely really well done scene, or the car crash can’t look away dance, you can’t say its forgettable. Also Kirsten Dunst got paid, I think we can all agree that’s a positive.
Yeah, the birth of Sandman is what stroke me as the best moment in the movie even back when I was watching it in the cinema, and I still remember it fondly. Rewachting the embedded clip, I have to say that it has aged really well — probably one of my all-time favourite scenes in any superhero movie. It just makes one wonder what Saimi could have done with the movie under better circumstances.
Even though the jazz club scene, the “stayin’ alive” sequence, and some of the Sandman sequences are hard to forget (the first two for all the wrong reasons), the movie itself is immensely forgettable. I’ve seen it in the past year (my kids wanted to see it), and the last time it came up in the comments, I had to turn to Wikipedia to remember any of the plot beyond “Peter gets dripped on, becomes a dick, and something something Sandman.”
Kirsten Dunst was such an understated Mary Jane, nothing like the party girl character from the comic. I think it’s been said by others before, but she would have made a better Gwen than MJ (and could have used her natural hair colour).
She’s a really underrated actor in general. She’s terrific, even in those awful, awful made-for-tv movies she spent most of the late 90s making.If anyone feels like a laugh, go and watch 1998’s Fifteen and Pregnant, which is one of the most unintentionally hilarious films of its genre because of astonishingly histrionic it gets. David Andrews is really good in it though.
Oh she is hilarious. She made something like Dick work effortlessly.
Kirsten Dunst is WILDLY unappreciated. She may not be the best at drama (though I’d argue Melancholia is Von Triar’s best movie. Yeah, I said it, and she’s great in it), but she is probably one of the best non-comedian comic actors out there, up with Rose Byrne. Also, her marriage to Jesse Plemons is adorable. Also, I sat at a table next to her and her then boyfriend Garret Hedlund in an italian restaurant in Nolita back in 2011. We shared a cigarette. I swooned.Dick – Extremely underrated movieBring it on – Perfectly rated movie, in that everyone loves itDrop Dead Gorgeous – in conversation for best comedy of the last 25 years. Only recently made available for streaming (it’s on HBO Max) and if you haven’t seen it, be prepared.
I fully agree on literally everything you just said. Mad respect for having dinner with her.
Melancholia is fantastic and Dunst is so, so good in it.
one of the best actresses of this generation, and I feel she seems good in interviews at not looking for too much validation outside of actually just being good at her work.
I always chuckle at naturally-blond Dunst getting cast as redhead MJ, and natural redhead Bryce-Dallas Howard getting cast as blonde Gwen Stacey.
Could have been worse, it could have been Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard like the Help.
Yeah that’s probably true. I know a lot of people dogpile on her acting here but she is doing her best.
MJ in the Raimi films is just a bit dull, that’s not on Kirsten who did the best with the material she was given.
Funnily enough there are folks who thought Emma Stone would have made a better MJ than Gwen. And then there’s Zendaya , who’s MJ but not really. The movie franchise just hasn’t figured this character out.
I am a fan of the MCU Spider-Man movies, but MJ as a downbeat, sarcastic weirdo (and I say that lovingly) is odd to me. I would have preferred they just named her something else, since the MJ I remember from the comics is an upbeat, positive encouraging figure for Spider-Man.
That birth of Sandman scene is such a great combination of beautiful and horrifying, in just the way the realisation that your body has been turned into living sand should be.
I think Franco’s performance deserves more credit than it gets, too.He has to do a lot in this movie, and he nails the over-the-top performance the film demands every time.From his brooding in the box seats at MJ’s theatre, to his brutal fights with Peter, to the goofy naivete of his post-amnesia self, to the goofy (yet authentic, to my mind) omelette scene, to the “so good” scene, to his final face turn, he’s pretty close to perfect.
I thought the omelet scene was the most cringe thing in the series, Jazz Club included.
I feel the same way about people who use “cringe” as an adjective.
The knockdown dragout final fight scene between Peter and Harry in their civilian clothes is really good and also weirdly funny.
Whether its the birth of Sandman, which is a genuinely really well done scene,
Its unfortunate that is preceded by a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a low budget 50’s sci-fi movie:
Scientist 1: There’s something wrong
Scientist 2: It’s probably a bird or something it’ll fly away
Yeah that’s a massive problem. A scene being undercut by the previous or upcoming scene. I mean the editor must have fallen asleep during the big stupid dance scene. To follow it up with the beat your girlfriend scene is… I mean a literal car crash causes less whiplash.
Not to mention, didn’t he basically hop over a tiny suburban fence to get into that thing?
Is Kirsten Dunst repected and loved now? I remeber at the time she was disliked. I did just watch her in Fargo though. Aw jeez she’s good in that.
There was this time after I wanna say Marie Antoinette where a lot of people ragged on her acting. By the time she played Peggy in Fargo, everyone was praising her again. I like to think Melincholia and Fargo were the causes of that turnaround.
And she married co-start Jesse Plemons who is just blowing up these days. Replaced DiCaprio in Scorcese’s upcoming movie.
I don’t know if anyone remembers this, but the DVD for Pirates 3 came with an FAQ that explained plot elements that were kind of vague in the movie itself.
To this day, aside from Dune, I can’t think of a major Hollywood blockbuster that came with a fucking glossary when you watched it at home.
They handed out stacks of the Dune glossaries at the theater, not just in the DVD. I remember a friend of mine grabbed a stack of them, and we were delighted to get Christmas presents wrapped in them several years later.
I’ve been rewatching Dune recently and fuck, you forget how insanely impenetrable parts of it are. John Carter of Mars made the same mistake several decades later.
Siskel and Ebert’s Dune review is one of my favorites, especially Gene asking Roger to confirm that five minutes in, he shouted out loud in the theater “I give up!”
Merry Christmas!Irony is, I don’t think a lot of those terms were ever used in the film outside of the single scene in which they’re actually explained, so it’s probably a little more excessive than it has to be.
I need to revisit my dvd copy, because I never made it that far during either of my two rewatches since buying it.
Funny story; I remember in high school I was going to a party because this one girl and I were gonna hook up. Our friend put on Pirates 3, and we both were so burnt out from how long and convoluted that movie was, we ended up just going home. That movie was such a mess it killed our teenage libidos.
The Mulholland Dr. dvd came with 10 Clues to Unlocking the Mystery. But that’s obviously a very different movie. Pirates 3 was such a mess.
I saw Dune in the theater and got one of those glossaries. Man, I wish I’d kept it! I was in the middle of reading the book at the time and fancied I knew just exactly what was going on, so I tossed it.
They essentially do this at the end of the episodes of Game of Thrones towards the end. We needed to know that Dany kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet
I don’t remember whether I saw There Will Be Blood and then No Country for Old Men, or the other way around, but I do remember thinking: I am never going to have such film-going luck again in seeing two films of this calibre in a row. No Country for Old Men hasn’t aged terribly well (it’s too cruel), but There Will Be Blood is better with a bit of age on it, and is the reason 2007 is a high point for me, in the cinema. (There are other reasons. It’s the year I moved to London. A lot happened in 2007!) But my word. The ending of that film. And then Brahms. Stupendous. I’m watching it again this weekend.Spiderman 3? Pretty sure I watched it too – I mean Spiderman 2 had been fun. It’s left no trace in my memory though and I can’t imagine ever wanting to watch it again.
Saaame I watched those two movies so close together, in my mind they are always intertwined. Not that I confuse them, but that when I think of one I always also think of the other.
I’m curious, how does No Country being cruel mean it hasn’t aged well?
To me at least, there’s less to see behind No Country. The monster at the heart of it is basically a demon, he’s not a real human being. Plainview is a monster but he’s also a man, he exists in our world, he has to be dealt with.
I think No Country has aged very well. When it came out, the story’s cruelty and pessimism seemed exaggerated and gratuitous. These days, it seems understated, if anything.
Personally, I found ‘There Will Be Blood’ a much crueler movie than ‘No Country For Old Men’. Plainview’s mockery of Eli’s failures is absolutely terrifying in its brutality.
Both films end with a death – Eli in the bowling alley, and Kelly MacDonald’s character (it’s more than strongly implied). Eli wasn’t just a victim though, and the pact he made – that religion in America made – is highly relevant today. More so now. Kelly MacDonald’s character in the other hand did nothing to deserve to die. She crossed the path of a demon. I find that far more cruel, by the film makers. Every character in Blood has agency, even if they don’t know it.
“Kelly MacDonald’s character in the other hand did nothing to deserve to die. She crossed the path of a demon. I find that far more cruel, by the film makers. Every character in Blood has agency, even if they don’t know it.”I understand what you’re saying, but Kelly MacDonald’s character actually has more agency than most of the other characters in the film — although not necessarily the type of agency you’re specifically referring to. She’s basically the only character who really resists Chigurh’s twisted worldview, even though (SPOILER ALERT) she dies anyway. What’s funny is that the book is even more grim than the film. In the book, Chigurh gets Carla Jean to flip the coin, she loses, and she dies. In the movie, the Coens rewrote it so that she refuses to flip the coin…and then she gets murdered. I always liked that they made that change because it was the ultimate fuck you to Chigurh. Yeah, she died, but she refused to allow her murderer to use blind chance as a means of guiding his actions. Moreover, the speech she gives explaining why she won’t flip the coin is great. Carla Jean is definitely a lesser character compared to Llewelyn and Chigurh, but I don’t think it does her justice to treat her as a mere victim.
I love that scene. So many other characters accept violence and death as an inevitability – and with Chigurh getting hit by a car in the next scene, it seems like they might be right – but Carla Jean rejects that. She knows that violence is a choice people make, and she refuses to let her killer deny that fact.
No Country is much more rewatcheable. I loved There will be blood butI don’t think I’ve ever rewatched it. I thought about it recently though. I probably should.
Eli deserved it. Plainview did him a favor by taking him out of his misery
It’s actually kind of a shame that Paul Dano is up against the legendary Daniel Day-Lewis giving one of his best performances, as otherwise he’d definitely have gotten a ton of attention and probably a much bigger career.
Everyone is really good in the film. Its just Daniel Day Lewis is so good he overwhelms everyone. Its like a blackhole.
Interestingly, Paul Dano was not cast in that role; it was Kel O’Neil. Paul Dano still played the brother but they were not twins. Eventually Kel didn’t work out and they recast Dano to play the Kel part and re-worked the part to indicate that they were twins.
There Will Be Blood is one-half of the perfect cinematic encapsulations of the USA. The other half is It’s A Wonderful Life.
It’s funny I was thinking about this last night. I actually think that TWBB and The Master are neck and neck in terms of encapsulating America. On the one hand, TWBB depicts the brute force of the “robber barons” while The Master is more about the charisma and effect of the sly fraudster which is arguably more topical. Both are equally compelling in my opinion.
I was going for more of a yin and yang sort of thing.
Does the yang side really exist though?
I am not yet so cynical as to believe that it never does.
The whole point of No Country is that it’s too cruel- that’s what the title means! There’s no place for people like Tommy Lee Jones anymore, the world is far too evil. I mean, if that’s not your thing, that’s totally fine! But to say it hasn’t aged well is kinda silly IMO.
So here’s my problem with Spiderman 3; it doesn’t have a consistent tone.
Even the first two Spiderman movies would switch hard between slapstick comedy and extreme melodrama, but it worked because of the commitment to the story.
Spiderman 3 is cobbled together and half-formed from a bunch of conflicting creative voices, so you don’t know what the intent is from scene to scene. No scene exemplifies this better than the jazz dance scene, because as soon as it’s over, Peter gets angry, hits Mary Jane, and feels horrified with his actions. But his self-loathing falls flat considering it follows the stupidest scene ever in a superhero film ever.
Agreed it’s stupid, but is it really worse than the motorcycle race in Batman and Robin? At least the jazz club scene is trying to do something, and moves the story ahead. I hate what it does and where the story goes, but to borrow from the Coens, at least it has an ethos. The motorcycle race is there just for the sake of stupid. It’s a solid 4 minutes of the movie dedicated to nothing.
As a wrestling fan, the dancing scene reminds me of a conundrum we often come across when discussing heel (bad guy) characters: there’s a difference between “heel heat” (when a bad guy is doing bad things to get a reaction) and “go away heat” (when a wrestler [not necessarily just a heel, but it’s harder to discern when it is a heel] is just bad at their job and you’re booing because you aren’t enjoying their work). Some people believe there’s no difference, and some wrestlers skirt the line really well (The Miz, one of my favorite wrestlers, is a master at this).The dancing scene also skirts this line, because it’s obnoxious, people hated it, and yet that was the point. It would be a different story if Peter is supposed to look super cool here and he just comes off like an absolute nimrod (like, for instance, if they had made him look terrible in the wrestling scene in the first movie, the first time he’s supposed to look agile and impressive), but everybody involved in the scene also thinks that he looks like a jackass. So, it’s a difficult scene to parse, is my point.
Perfect analogy
On one hand, I think Maguire watches Joker, and bitterly mutters to himself, “Sure, when this guy does it he gets a damn Oscar…”On the other hand, the problem isn’t the dance, it’s the rest of the movie. Heel heat is fun because we know the people Stone Cold (not a heel with one or two exceptions, I know, but stay with me here) hits with a stunner aren’t actually suffering permanent spinal damage, even if their feet jerk around as if they were. If the face’s wife was actually going to the hospital when the heel hits her with a folding chair, it would be less fun to watch the heel prance and brag. Spider Man 3 tries to set up a progression where Symbiote Peter is a Superman III fun sort of evil (close-talking every female character, strutting and dancing, negotiating a living wage from Jameson) and then it stops being fun and games because he hits Mary Jane, which makes him give up the symbiote. But the tonal shift going from one to the other is too dramatic, it doesn’t work.
I am honestly surprised the motorcycle race is that SHORT. It felt like an eternity. Batman Forever is the first movie that ever disappointed me as a kid, so I had no intention of watching Batman & Robin. Then my dad rented it and insisted we watch it. I told him it was gonna be bad, but I don’t think he ever saw Forever so he just remembered that I loved Batman, and that he had a decent time watching the first one and Returns. He did not apologize or admit he was wrong after it was over, but I could tell from the look on his face he knew he should have listened to me.
Oceans 13 is fucking terrific and I demand an apology.
Another trilogy of films I watched in lockdown last year. Thirteen is really fun and well worth a watch. Twelve is actually better than I remembered it being. It’s still got problems but I liked it a lot more this time than the previous two occasions.
Ocean’s 13 is good, apparent from the crappy way it treats Ellen Barkin’s character. At least it wasn’t as smug as I found Ocean’s 12.
Woof, yeah her character is definitely the turd in the punchbowl (no respect to Barkin, who did what she could with the material and was still a stone fox in 2007).
‘Apart’ not ‘apparent’.
Damn my typos!
It’s definitely a great “on the background while folding laundry” movie. It seemed like they decided to actually try and make this more than a glorified hangout like they did with Twelve.
In general, all the Oceans movies are the ultimate example of a movie you come across flipping channels and stop to watch because you can just ease into them and be pleasantly entertained until they’re done.
It was better then Oceans 12. I mean Julia Roberts as her character AND Julia Roberts? So stupid.
It was better then Oceans 12. I mean Julia Roberts as her character AND Julia Roberts? So stupid.Yeah, I mean I loved everything about the twist in Ocean’s 12 but I just cannot stand the Julia Roberts-as-Julia Roberts bit.
I cannot comprehend what anyone was thinking. Nothing in all three, technically four movies, have anything close to that low point.
This killed it for me because it made the whole thing just too meta. Do Clooney/Pitt/Damon/Cheadle, etc. all exist in this world and the rest of the crew *happen* to resemble these famous actors? When Tess was growing up, did people comment “wow, you look *exactly* like the movie star Julia Roberts?” at literally every stage of her life? I barely remember a thing about 12 other than that plot point and hating it.13 was a return to form and solid. I actually liked Vincent Cassell’s character as the old school thief who, in lieu of complicated schemes is juts incredibly smart and acrobatic.
Under normal circumstances I can understand making a column complaining about Part 3’s before conferring Runner-Up status to another Part 3. But in 2007? Come on, man, Ratatioulle was RIGHT THERE.Anyway, there’s nothing I can say about Spider-Man 3 that this 14 year old parody can’t say better.
Ratatouille is my favorite movie of 2007, my favorite Pixar movie and probably my favorite Disney movie (and I’ve seen like 95% of animated Disney movies). Just an absolute masterclass. Peter O’Toole’s second greatest performance.
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. Unless you watch Ratatouille, because then you’ll find it has almost no flaws to criticize.
I liked the movie, but this was hilarious
Holy shit that was good. I gotta think I saw that sometime back when it came out.
Ratatouille was the #11 highest grossing movie of the year. My weird invented arbitrary rules say that a movie has to be in the top 10 to get considered.
Oops, I see now that I was looking at the global box office list (where Ratatioulle was #6) whereas this column uses the North American box office. My mistake, carry on.
(It’s just as well, since if you had used the global list you’d be stuck trying to figure out how to make Pirates 3 sound interesting for an entire column. Peter Parker’s two minutes of terrible dancing are more entertaining than that entire movie.)
I guess 15/17/20 y/o me that loved all 3 Bourne films was a dad?
(all 3 that I acknowledge anyway)
I love all three of them. I rewatched the whole five film series during lockdown last year and the first three really hold up brilliantly. The latter two, while not bad, aren’t that great.
I liked the bit of cleverness they had in 3, where the closing scene from 2 turns out to be part of the action in the 3rd movie, rather than just some clever throw-away bit. Not sure I watched the other ones, though.
I watched all three last year as well. Good films. I remeber liking the last one and need to rewatch it. I really don’t like Jeremy Renner.
I did a rewatch as well (and first time for Legacy) and really enjoyed my time with them. The further out we get, though, the more obvious it becomes that the first one was pretty easily the best. Legacy was way better than it had any right to be, though.
By Part 3 the “blank slate” charisma and humour free personality of Bourne had been stretched beyond the point when it was still engaging for me, and I never bought into Greengrass’s shakey cam action style; I prefer a nice, clearly shot, staged and composed action scene. Certainly wasn’t bad, but hardly a thrill ride for me.Interesting the trailers for that revival film in 2016 suggested that they were going with a more clean-cut editing style, but when you saw the finished film it became clear it was more of the same.
I like all three, but I think the backstory became increasingly hard to sustain as it went on. Pretty much any time a movie goes to a beleagured good character defiantly going in front of a clueless, nebulous committee full of blowhards, you know the scriptwriters have given up.“I’m out of order? You’re out of order! You knew Dr. Nefario’s Project Omniplex was a madman’s pipe dream from the beginning and now you hide behind this committee?!? Turns out the demons I faced in the Vortex Chamber were actually inside these marble halls all along!”
I used to watch them over and over as a teen with my Dad.
If, like me, Spider-Man 2 is one of your favorite movies, then 3 hurt all the worse. But we’re not talking about a movie content with ruining 2’s continuation. It reached back into the first installment to retcon Uncle Ben’s death.As for Venom, I never wanted the character involved, but always thought they missed out on a more stream-lined way of introducing him: Jameson’s son, the astronaut, unknowingly encounters the symbiote on a mission. He’s still vulnerable from Mary-Jane leaving him at the altar for Parker, so the alien steers him toward revenge.
Confession; at the time I *hated* Spider-Man 2. Had a lousy time watching it at the theatre, was genuinely befuddled when I discovered it was a critical smash when I got home. So at the time I had low expectations for 3 and quite enjoyed it.Revisited them a couple of years ago and, yep, I got these wrong. The common perception that Peter’s Saturday Night Fever homage is the low point is wrong though; at least that uses a cool James Brown deep cut. There’s a scene in this where Dunst and Franco stuff a turkey to the Twist for heaven’s sake!
Jameson’s son would’ve been a better way to introduce the symbiote than it randomly dripping on Peter in the park (what are the odds?). I don’t think he would’ve been a good Venom, though, and I think they were holding out the possibility of him becoming his comic book villain character (Man Wolf?) in Spider-Man 6 or 7…Retconning Uncle Ben’s death was beyond stupid. It added nothing at all to the movie, other than making everything seem contrived. Raimi made a lot of decisions like that in this movie, such as Harry’s amnesia.The biggest problem for me was having Peter hit and abuse MJ. Sure, he was under the suit’s influence, but that’s stuff you can’t step back from. At the end of the movie, you shouldn’t be sad that they stay together.
I could not believe that I was sitting in a theatre in 2007 and watching a movie where someone gets bonked on the head and loses their memory. Why not introduce Peter Parker’s long-lost identical twin brother while you’re at it?
And the twin is evil and also the heir to some monarchy or something.
Spider-Man doesn’t use something silly, like long-lost twins! It uses clones! So, so many clones.
I thought Peter just accidentally hit her though, like turned around and clotheslined her? But the Uncle Ben thing I think I hate more than Venom. It was all an accident by someone Peter hadn’t met yet, totally undermines his whole arc.
IIRC he hits her accidentally (as in he means to hit someone, but not specifically her) when she tries to get him off the bouncer in her piano bar/Jazz club who he’s beating up. Between that and humiliating her with Gwen and the musical number, I think that’s crossing a bunch of lines you can’t come back from (how does she ever look those friends and/or co-workers in the eye again?).But yeah, there’s absolutely no need for Spider-Man to have a “personal” reason to take Sandman down. After all, his storyline with Harry is also a “this time, it’s personal” thing that plays on his symbiote ‘roid rage, and you don’t need Peter to have such similar arcs in the same movie.
Because Spider 2 introduced Jameson’s astronaut son, it seemed obvious that Venom was being set up for the third movie, so the groundwork was perfect, imo. I’m honestly baffled to hear anyone say they didn’t want Venom, when I remember hype being through the roof that he was coming. Frankly, for all the blame executives get for insisting on putting him in there, they were right to do so, because he’s a VASTLY more popular character than Vulture, and there was certainly an element of needing to top Doctor Octopus from last time. You’re not gonna do that with old school cheeseballs like Tooms and Sandman.
I get that this is a matter of “director’s vision” vs “studio mandate,” and we always want to back the artist over the establishment, but I really think Venom being in the movie wasn’t the problem- it was how he was handled. He shouldn’t have been the bloat. He and the Harry should have been the only stories because those were both already set up by Spider-Man 2’s ending. The bloat is actually what Raimi wanted: Sandman- and if we were to remove the black suit narrative, we’re left with a pretty insubstantial villain who needed an unforgivable Uncle Ben retcon just so he could matter.
Why didn’t they just have Harry get possessed by Venom, since he already wanted revenge on Spider-Man? Have his Goblin equipment get damaged in the first battle since he has no idea how to use it, have him get seriously injured, then that makes him open to the Venom. Bringing in a whole new character (to the movies) to fill a role Harry was already filling (vengeance on Spider-Man) was ridiculous.
Or, just have Harry be the Goblin for the whole movie and team up with Sandman to stop the Venomized Peter.
Either way, I think everyone agrees Topher Grace’s character, through no fault of his own, was the worst character in this movie and the easiest to remove without losing much.
Because really, people talk about the three-villain problem, but this movie actually has four if you count Peter’s turn to the dark side with Venom. Even if you got rid of that and saved it for a future movie, there would still be too many villains. So out you go, Topher!
This is an interesting point – how do you keep making the villains related to Spider-Man’s personal struggle? I wonder if Raimi’s plan with Sandman was always to tie him into Uncle Ben’s death.
I haven’t seen Spiderman 3 since it came out when I was 10, yet I still remember the origin of the Sandman, the moment where he can’t hold his wedding ring, and the reveal that he didn’t kill Uncle Ben. They might seem goofy to older audiences, but as a kid, they were genuinely quite affecting and sad moments. Thomas Haden Church is odd casting, but he’s got the sad eyes and weathered look needed to be believable as a lifelong criminal.
One of the big problems with the whole trilogy is that, in a reversal from the comics, they made Mary-Jane the wet blanket lame love interest, but then when Gwen Stacey is introduced she’s equally underwhelming, as she’s played by the brittlest actor in the Universe.Emma Stone, in undeniably weaker films, absolutely clowns the pair of them.
Stone is the best thing about the two Garfield Spider-Man’s by about a light-year.
Man oh man was this a great year for movies. Just, y’know, not at the top of the charts.Didn’t The A.V. Club publish an opinion piece that year about the upcoming death of the summer blockbuster? I’m not even saying “LOL WRONG” because things were pretty goddamn dire at the time, and who the hell could have seen the MCU coming?!
oh man, i went to look at paul giamatti as rhino and does that movie look terrible! no wonder i did not even bother.
He’s in the film for less than five minutes which is puzzling.Though that doesn’t make the top five most puzzling things about that movie, which is just fucked.
Much to my surprise I really rather liked it.https://tolerabilityindex.freeforums.net/post/419973/thread
I did not think it was possible to waste Paul Giamatti. I was wrong.
Venom was just too big of a character entwined in Spidey lore to be sharing screen time with another villain, especially when it was Sandman. They really should have dropped Sandman, and turned up the Venom arc to allow him to sufficiently haunt Parker’s every move.I know Raimi was hellbent on keeping Sandman in, but that character, while having the potential for some impressive CG effects, just wasn’t interesting enough. He’s not a big screen-worthy cinematic opponent.
To my thinking, they could’ve kept the black suit in, then had Spidey contend with Sandman and Osbourne the whole movie, using the suit to defeat them at the end, then becoming Venom as a cliffhanger into a fourth movie.
Yeah, I guess that could’ve been one way to do it as well. I mean, to think they thought they could condense the origin/acquirement of the symbiote, then the time Parker spent in the suit to then subsequently ditch it in spectacular fashion, then cover the transition to Brock, and then finally get the whole arc rolling between him and Spidey into a 2hr movie? And then squeeze Sandman in there somewhere? They did it, but it wasn’t exactly the prettiest sight to watch unfold the way it did.
For me, Sandman’s issue is also that it stands behind the line of “somewhat physically thinkable” character. It’s a very arbitrary line, but I can more easily suspend disbelief in front of chemical supersoldiers, alien gods and spider hybrids jumping around, firing lasers through their eyes, headbutting locomotives and conjuring thunder with their sparky fingers, than sentient piles of sand or bubblegum stretchy bodies (because, for starters, at least they have insides). It’s the line between “looks okay in a movie” and “needs an animated cartoon”. Between Indiana Jones and The Powerpuff Girls. Between Star Wars and Roger Rabbit.I know that Sam Raimi isn’t aiming at the same thing as Christopher Nolan, but I also think the MCU has struck a nice balance so far between the most grounded and most wacky aspects of comics. Characters like Sandman just go full looney tunes, and shatter the specific universe relatability that live action generates. And of course, the MCU will reach this tipping point soon, with Mister Fantastic. These things define the universe where it takes place. Sandman sets it in a universe further away.
An early X-Files episode involves a Monster of the Week who is a guy who can stretch his body. He also needs to eat people’s livers to survive, then hibernates for 60 years.But it works. On the other hand, the character is the bad guy, is very weird even when not stretching himself, and is only on screen maybe 25% of the episode.
I heard of that episode but didn’t watch it, so I may be wrong, but I assume the stretch isn’t as easy and capricious as Mr Fantastic’s “let’s grab that bulb over there”. And that makes a difference of degree.If you want to entertain people as a magician, you don’t need them to believe you, simply to enjoy the spectacle of you levitating a member of the public, or sawing them in half, and disappearing in a flash. But if you want to scam people for money, and pretend you have genuine powers, make it smaller and make it look harder. Sweat a lot to make a spoon shift from three millimeters, and fall back exhausted in front of the amazed public (bonus points for Stranger Things-like bleeding nostrils).So, for it to match the “degree of realism” of a setting, you have to dial it back accordingly. Or, the other way round, define the “degree of realism” by the magnitude of a magical feat. This is the condition for it to “work”. For all its fantasy, the X-Files are set in a universe more “realistic” than MCU’s Iron Man’s. And the X-Files would probably not feature energy bolts fights à la Dragonball or Wandavision. Likewise, the MCU’s Iron Man doesn’t feature Barbapapas (yet), still farther on the “realism” scale. Nothing doesn’t work in its own universe, but there’s the question of adequacy with a given universe’s tone, assumed physics, normalcy, etc. The wider you open it, the looser the normalcy, the more random (and physically unrelatable, unfelt) events and physics can be. It’s a progressive genre switch. If X-Files had jumped the shark, nothing would be unsettling in it, by lack of physical assumptions to betray.
Yes, the character from The X-Files elongates his body to enter through tight spaces, but doesn’t stretch his arm out a doorway, down the hall, and around a corner the way comic-book Reed Richards does.I’ve never seen any of the Fantastic 4 movies (except for a brief bit of one of them, and as soon as I heard Dr. Doom speak, I was out, because Doom’s voice should be Darth Vader-esque, and not whatever the hell Julian McMahon’s voice sounds like), so I have no idea what the Mr. Fantastic visuals looked like.
So, Ant-Man’s shrinking/growing is at the very edge of acceptability, but stretching goes too far?EDIT: Looking at it again, this reads as me being really dickish, but I didn’t mean it that way! I was honestly curious about the line at which your suspension of disbelief is broken.
Yes, I’d say the line would run between these two. Add the fact that Ant-Man doesn’t shrink by the pure willpower, but uses a suit. It’s pretty limited. And it implies (even though there’s a lot of inconsistencies on that) some mass conservation.In fact, the “shrinking human” is more frequent in semi-realistic scifi than random shapeshifters. From Fantastic Voyage to Innerspace. The Incredible Shrinking Man. A Bob Morane novel (“L’ennemi invisible”) that insists quite a bit on mass and weight conservation. A scifi comic book series, “Les petits hommes” about a society of accidentally shrunk humans. It’s just a faithful homothety of a hing that works. In contrast, being all elastic presents weird leaps in material creation, structure, durability, anatomy (what’s the heart and lungs like when stretching to a cord, how’s the arm’s strength when expanded, how wobbly or fragile the bones, what muscle expands it, etc), it’s not about overthinking it, it’s about a weird gut feeling.And it’s not directly, exactly, about “suspension of disbelief” either, but more about matching a universe’s physics. No problem with it in The Incredibles, or Popeye, or Laurel and Hardy (where disbelief is suspended). But it makes the rest of physics adjust, and, in a way, hit less hard in a Tex Avery world…
Ha. Your Ant-Men/Atoms are actually where my suspension of disbelief gets pushed the hardest (though it doesn’t bother me that much). Where does the extra mass go when he shrinks? Where does it come from when he grows? How can he breathe or see at subatomic sizes?In contrast, I can see a stretchy guy and go “Oh, his organs and stuff are stretchy too, I guess. That makes sense.”
Hah. That’s fun. As a kid I had the whole pages of Henri Vernes’ “L’ennemi invisible” explaining how the distance between atoms is merely reduced, meaning there’s no gain or loss of force, mass, weight (at some point, the regular-sized hero is pinned down by a full-weight miniature man). Ant-Man tries to explain it that way aswell, but fails to stay coherent with it (don’t try to ride an ant, if you shrink the way they explained it).James Kakalios, the author of “The Physics of Superheroes”, has a lot of fun with Ant-Man. I don’t remember if he writes about Mister Fantasic, though. I should check.
I actually had trouble believing the film was as bad as it was when I saw it. The first two, while having faults of their own, were such entertaining superhero films that it verged on the surreal that the third could be so bad. I tried to convince myself that it had saving graces, but outside of the birth of Sandman scene I honestly don’t think it does.
In certain film-nerd corners, 2007 has a reputation for being a great
movie year, mostly because of the Oscar-night showdown between There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men. You could definitely walk into multiplexes that year and find cool things: Michael Clayton, Zodiac, Superbad, Ratatouille, Knocked Up, The Orphanage, Hot Fuzz, Gone Baby Gone, The Mist, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford.
Good heavens, that’s a hell of a list. Has there ever been a year with a bigger disconnect between commercial and critical success than 2007? I saw pretty much every 2007 movie that was released in the theater, so I had no idea there was such a massive gulf.
Most of those movies did very well, just not ten figures well.
Its pretty stark. Pick the top ten grossing films and you won’t have a good time. If you just peak outside that list, then wow do you have options.
Settling in for what should be a slam dunk of a third film after two great preceding films, then getting that sinking feeling while watching it, “Wait, this sucks? How!?”. Ugh, I’ve had it too many times. And right off the bat, retconning Uncle Ben’s death, you know it’s coming.
“In the comics, Venom is an incoherent character with an impossibly twisty years-long backstory…”I never read any of the Spidey comics involving Venom, but for a good take on the symbiote and its effects on Peter Parker/Spider-Man, look up the Fox animated series from the 1990s if you can. I think Disney+ has it.
This movie is an absolute mess, but I’m glad that people are coming around on the dancing. I always thought Parker dancing through the sidewalk and the jazz club were the two best moments in the film, and they show off Raimi’s unique use of camp and tonal shifts. No superhero film would even attempt that today. Also, I like Harry’s amnesia subplot. It highlights the soap opera elements of superhero comics, something most superhero fans are embarrassed of. And again, you’re not going to see any other director embrace this stuff.
No superhero film would even attempt that today.Guardians of the Galaxy at least comes close. I mean Endgame reframes the intro of that movie to show Peter dancing awkwardly and singing badly to himself while Rhodey and Nebula make fun of him for it.
I love Spider-Man 3 it’s just a big comic book time. And it was made before Universes and the eternal franchise took over superheroes. It just throws all it’s ideas at you and doesn’t give a fuck about leaving anything out for a sequel.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 2007 Post: The Numbers1. Spider-Man 3, Sony/Columbia, $336,530,3032. Shrek The Third, Paramount, $322,719,9443. Transformers, Paramount, $319,246,1934. Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End, Disney, $309,420,4255. Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, Warner Bros., $292,004,7386. The Bourne Ultimatum, Universal, $227,471,0707. 300, Warner Bros., $210,614,9398. Ratatouille, Disney/Pixar, $206,445,6549. I Am Legend, Warner Bros., $206,129,57410. The Simpsons Movie, 20th Century Fox, $183,135,014Wikipedia1. Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End, Disney, $963,420,4252. Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, Warner Bros., $942,885,9293. Spider-Man 3, Sony/Columbia, $890,871,6264. Shrek The Third, Paramount, $813,367,3805. Transformers, Paramount, $709,709,7806. Ratatouille, Disney/Pixar, $620,702,9517. I Am Legend, Warner Bros., $585,349,0108. The Simpsons Movie, 20th Century Fox, $527,071,0229. National Treasure: Book Of Secrets, Disney, $457,364,60010. 300, Warner Bros., $456,068,181
You can tell Spider-Man is evil now in that first black suit sequence because he lane-splits.
I never bothered with SM3 at the time because I heard it sucked. Over a decade later I finally watched it and… I enjoyed myself? The flaws are obvious. Like all pre-MCU super hero sequels the only idea anyone seemed to have was “more” which always lead to an overstuffed movie with too many bad guys. You nailed it on the dance scene: it’s fun and it works! After hearing how that was the “jump the shark” moment for years I was surprised at how incorrect that was. The cast is good and it still has enough of Raimi’s signature moves to stand out from the anonymous feeling direction of many later super hero flicks. If they hadn’t tried to cram the Venom story in there it would have been better (though I liked the casting of Topher Grace [was it sort of a meta joke about how people would get him and Toby Maguire mixed up? I feel like that was a thing at the time]) but overall I think it’s better than its reputation if not great.
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post:The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Saving Private Ryan (1998)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)Jurassic Park (1993)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King (2003)Spider-Man (2002)Toy Story (1995)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Titanic (1997)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Aladdin (1992)Independence Day (1996)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)Spider-Man 3 (2007)Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)Forrest Gump (1994)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)Shrek 2 (2004)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
I had stopped reading your ranks long ago, but Spider-Man 3 worse than The Phantom Menace? Get out of here.
It gets awfully hard to choose. I’d put Forrest Gump a little ahead of both, but I can’t say it’s wrong where it is, either. The only really odd choice for me is The Exorcist. It’s better put together than Billy Jack, but it’s still pretty laughable 70s woo-woo.
I just really liked that lightsaber duel.
I stopped reading when I saw Saving Private Ryan at #5…
Agree wholeheartedly, I never even finished it & I’ve loved Raimi since the first Evil Dead. It was hubris to think he could balance all of these story lines in one film.
I missed The Grinch taking the top spot…..as the worst film.
This is big news. Huge!
My favourite miscalculation going into this is the sad-sackness of Sandman, who has this “I’m not a bad man, I’ve just made some bad mistakes” thing going on. He didn’t mean to shoot your uncle, he was just robbing him with a loaded gun and his finger was on the trigger and pointed and him and oops!
Am I misremembering, or is Sandman on-screen for like 10 minutes tops? I just recall that after his big “creation” scene he’s almost a non-entity until the climax, at which point he just…goes away.
It felt like the plot of John Q gone even more off the rails. Like, you’re still murdering people (or making an oopsy woopsy manslaughter during an armed carjacking, that’ll hold up in court). It’s basically the supervilain equivalent of “he had a bad day”. Also the guy Peter let get away was not acting like a reluctant crook, nor was Sandman through most of the film, they just all gang up on Peter instead of explaining themselves.
Is that Martin Shkreli dancing in the header image?
HA!!!!!!!!!!!
The bit about Raimi having to deal with a release date being announced before he even began gets me wondering how much the economics of the business in 2007 meant quality didn’t affect box office.My sense is that movies recently have had longer legs than in 2007, and repeat business matters more today, so it may be the case that word of mouth matters more for blockbusters than in 2007. Blockbuster still had something like 5,000 stores in 2007, so cutting a deal with them ahead of release would have meant huge amounts of money before anyone sat down in a theater. Cable companies were fatter then too before cord cutting, and potentially could have larded up studios a lot before editing was even done.All of this is just guesswork, though, and to be fair messes like the latest Star Wars installments say maybe things haven’t changed. (Regardless of whether you like them, I don’t think there is any denying that the production process was completely nuts.)Still, I think it would be interesting to know more about how much the quality can seep through a studio exec’s thinking about the bottom line then and now.
People also just had fewer entertainment options back then–especially if you were wanting watch a superhero movie. Everyone has a streaming service now and there are about 600 superhero-related shows and movies to choose from, so quality matters more. Back then comic book nerds would eat up anything.
Well, almost anything. LXG, Catwoman and Elecktra were all lines they drew.
This was another one of those movies where my enduring memory was the audience cracking up at a moment the film was playing seriously — in this case, Harry’s tearful reconciliation with Peter.
I always thought Bryce Dallas Howard was terrible in this movie. She just kinda pops up as competition for MJ and never really does anything. Kirsten Dunst at least had the benefit of being around for two previous movies
Everybody in this movie just kind of pops up and never really does anything.Howard looks great in that blonde bob wig, though.
I was always a Gwen guy, and my heart practically stopped when I saw Bryce. She looked amazing!
For all it’s faults, the moment in the 2007 Transformers where Optimus Prime makes his entrance and announces who he is made me deliriously happy.
“I am Optimus Prime.”Perfect.
I thought overall the first Transformers was fine. It’s a franchise made by a toy company, to sell toys. It was never that deep. Of course it was going to be a Michael Bay explosionfest
The movie has tons of problems. But that one moment? That one made me very happy when I saw it in the theater for the first time. Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime in live action. Transforming and declaring that he IS Optimus Prime.
Yeah, I remember being fairly shocked and overjoyed they kept the OG voice. I expected it to be some sort of celebrity casting for such a role
I only saw movie one the one time in the theater. I liked the beginning bit where he fights with Osborn as the New Goblin. That was surprising to me as I was expecting that to be nonsense, and Franco had proven to be terrible in the other two movies. But after that fight the movie just got too big, and too dumb. The Uncle Ben/Sandman retcon took away a lot if not all the goodwill of the film. What a terrible decision.
Didn’t like this movie at all but god if I don’t re-watch Birth of the Sandman maybe once a year. That’s a scene that’s not showing you how to make a villain – it’s showing you how to make a CHARACTER.THC (heh) gets maligned but, honestly, I think he can probably hold his own in his film if he’s given more scenes to flesh himself out (…heh?) and interact with Peter more. Maybe keep Harry around so the face-turn is believable and just keep Venom for the fourth movie. I dunno.
I always thought Henry Rollins would make an excellent Venom. Instead they gave the role to a pipsqueak who looks like he can’t bench press worth a damn.
It’s pretty clear they went with Grace (similar build and manner to Maguire’s Peter) over someone like Rollins to stress the thin line that divides someone like Peter and someone like Brock. Brock is a Peter who, without the guiding light of someone like Uncle Ben, let his envy and insecurity curdle into hate and rage.
I honestly totally get why they had Topher as Eddie, he just plays the smarmy anti-Peter so perfectly. It just didn’t work when he becomes Venom. They could’ve totally recast or buffed up Venom via CGI (in an imaginary 4th film) and I would’ve been ok with it.
I remember rewatching Spider-Man 3 with my son a couple years back and kept waiting for it to get terrible. And it just didn’t. It wasn’t as good as Spider-Man 2 but it wasn’t remotely bad. Until the “fourth act”. The first chunk of the movie all worked really well, with the “death” of the Sandman and the climax being the Harry vs Peter fight. But the superfluous last half hour just killed the entire film.If you cut out Venom, shuffled a few scenes, and ended the film with Peter rejecting the suit, it would be a decent movie. Maybe even a good comic book movie. A worthy follow-up to Spider-man 1 and 2.
“Zodiac” is my favorite of the 2007 lineup. I watch the director’s cut several times a year. I just watched it the other day, as a matter of fact. It’s a 3 hour movie full of talking heads that never gets boring. I frigging love it.
Yup. It was a go-to for me when it was on Netflix. Absolutely absorbing.
Zodiac is at the top of my DO NOT WATCH ALONE AT NIGHT list. If I watch it all by myself when it’s dark, I get paranoid as shit that someone’s coming to kill me.
David Fincher’s best film, easily.
This is a better movie than it’s often given credit for. But more to the point, contrary to the general narrative that it was the studio demands that derailed this, I think Venom is actually one of the stronger villain aspects, while the weaker points are coming from Raimi — see, everything to do with the Sandman, including the pointless retconning of Uncle Ben’s death and its morally confused verdict on how responsible he is, and the fact that Raimi kept falling back on putting Mary Jane in danger in the climax, something that was played out by the end of the first film.At World’s End kicks ass, and I won’t hear differently.
I remember liking Spiderman 3 when it came out, but the reaction was so hostile towards that I told myself over the years that I must have only liked it cause I was younger. I’ve watched it a couple of times since, and especially within the context of the MCU and other Spiderman films, I unabashedly love this movie. A lot of it is because of its memetic qualities, but I just straight found it inspiring that Parker gets the symbiote, and the worst he becomes is an incel who points finger guns at other women—because of course he does.
Also found the fight scenes still hold up after all this time, especially the opening fight with Harry and Parker. Really great stuff.
Oh I love that opening fight, on the glider, without the costume. The action in this movie is fantastic. People don’t bring this up enough, but the newer Spider-Man movies have not come close to matching the action in Raimi’s trilogy. So much more memorable.
The part in Far From Home when Mysterio unleashes a holographic nightmare on Spider-Man is the only one that holds up to the fights in Raimi’s movies.
Whoa, disagree. I think the fights Spider-man has in Homecoming with the Vulture are fucking rugged. Like, bone-crunching and pretty scary.
Really? None of those fights really stood out to me.
It hits in a way that the other Spiderman movies simply don’t. Yeah, the visuals are pretty dated, but it’s still impressive watching Harry and Parker fly around New York City shooting web and bombs at each other.
“incel who points finger guns at other women”Haven’t seen the movie in so long…but I just remember him been a straight up asshole when he has the symbiote. Doesn’t he hit Mary Jane(inadvertently) during the club scene and basically laugh in her face? Also thinks he tries to murder Sandman. As for the fights just remember thinking Sandman looked great, Mary Jane falling like always, and Peter slapping the pipes at the end.Think the Doc Ock train fight is by far the best action sequence of the trilogy.
“Have you ever fired your gun up in the air and gone, ‘AAAAARRRGGGH!’?”
“No, I have not ever fired my gun up in the air and gone, ‘Aaah.’”
“Have you ever fired two guns whilst jumping through the air?”
“Oh, murder, murder, murder! Change the fuckin’ record! …thank you, Andy.”
“Is it true that there is a point on a man’s head where, if you shoot it, it will blow up?”
In 2007 alone, he produced Spider-Man 3, Ghost Rider, Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver SurferWhen this slate of films took shape I was over the moon. My three favorite characters all in movies in the same year?!!! My heart leapt when I saw Howard as Gwen. And the day the first Silver Surfer trailer was released, I saw it at work and was literally overwhelmed. I had to go in the bathroom so no one would see me.The worst part of the disappointments was how avoidable they were. Spidey3 could have been a good movie had they saved Venom for 4. FF needed script polishing and a better ending – they couldn’t have brought in a real comic writer? GR gets a lot of grief for no reason. It’s not terrible. It’s not the best movie, but it’s fine. (GR2 was boring as hell.)I have high hopes for the MCU FF reboot. I just hope they don’t go the Fox Dark Phoenix route and try telling the Surfer story again. It’s been done, poorly. Bring Surfer in on a future Guardians, Captain Marvel, or Eternals movie. Or have him face Thor just to recreate the greatest comic book cover ever, and long-time fans can die happy.
…the wooden James Franco…
I’ve gotta take issue with this; Franco was certainly kind of dull in the first two installments but he is maybe the only person having fun in this movie. He clearly knows they’re making a turkey and leans into it, hamming it up at every turn and just chewing the scenery like so much pie (“…so good.”)Topher Grace’s performance, meanwhile, just makes me wish he had been cast as Peter Parker to begin with. It’s obvious that Raimi was going for a “mirror image” thing with Eddie Brock/Venom in this movie. It doesn’t totally work on a conceptual level, and Grace definitely can’t pull off the menace the role requires once the symbiote takes control of him, but for the first half of the movie his wiry kind of verve and that sitcom energy that makes the smarmy, quippy performance pop. Yeah, this guy’s a jerk, but at least he sounds natural spouting off one-liners; Maguire’s delivery of Spider-Man’s zingers often came across as flat, like he’s bored by his own wit.
Exactly. This is the Spider-Man movie where Franco comes alive
“sends him on his journey into becoming a jazz-dancing asshole.”
This is not a sequence of words I expected to hear when I got up this morning.
rewatched it recently and the biggest problem with this movie is it’s just too much too often. the first hour has a truly insane pace, the middle when it slows down for a second is actually quite fun and has moments, but then it’s gotta rush rush rush to the ending.also the retconning of uncle ben’s death is pretty pointless, as is letting sandman go and just be a sand man for the rest of his life.
It’s basically 2 movies smashed together. They should have saved the Venom stuff for another movie.
In fairness it’s a model of restraint compared to The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which is like five movies smashed together, only two of which have an ending (and not good ones).
My hot take goeth thusly: Venom was the failure of Sam Raimi, more than it was a failure of the studio. The ads aren’t about Sandman. The posters, the trailers, the merch…. When the marketing is focused entirely on the black suit and the tease that Venom is coming, and it all leads to the most successful opening weekend in history at the time, then it’s clear the studio made the right call on what people wanted to see. It’s Raimi’s dislike of the character that undoes everything once we sit down and watch it. The villain people came to see, they don’t get until the last act of the film. That’s not the studio’s fault. Casting Topher Grace in a complete misunderstanding of Eddie Brock is not the studio’s fault. When the space origin is sitting right in Sam’s lap and he changes the continuity anyway, it’s clear he didn’t know what he was doing with the character. That’s not the studio’s fault. It’s hypocritical that we can rake Zack Snyder over the coals when he gets it wrong, but Raimi is weirdly blameless for the same kinds of screw ups.
This movie should have been Sandman and Harry teaming up to take down Spider-Man, Peter finding the symbiote but being afraid to use it only to relent when it becomes clear he needs it to fight them. Then, do a 4th movie with Venom.
Eh…wholly disagree. Raimi directed two very successful films and the third movie had tons of hype behind it because of how good those first two installments were. Spider-Man 3 was going to do gangbusters with or without Venom. Especially since Sandman was done really well and looked terrific on the big screen.Raimi was a large reason the franchise was so beloved, he had a vision for the third movie and it got fucked up by someone who has a track record of fucking up superhero movies changing his vision (Arad). The reason it isn’t Raimi’s fault is because he shouldn’t have had to adapt to some jabroni’s edits to include a character he didn’t know well and wasn’t passionate about after delivering two very successful movies.
At best I can say it wasn’t fair. Sam shouldn’t have been forced to use a character he doesn’t care for. But in the end, I treat these excuses the same as I do for Josh Trank’s Fant4stic… The director is still responsible for what we saw. I think his first two movies being great shouldn’t give Raimi a pass when he lays an egg. Same as how Patty Jenkins’ good work on Wonder Woman doesn’t exonerate her from WW84 any more than Bryan Singer’s X2 does for X-Men Apocalypse.
Your original point was the studio was right to ask for Venom because Spider-Man 3 was the most successful movie financially. My counter to that is that Spider-Man 3 was always destined to be the most successful movie of the trilogy because the first two movies were well-received and the third was going to be highly anticipated no matter who the villain(s) were. Just want to make that clear as I’m not saying give Raimi a pass because the first two movies were great. I’m saying don’t give the studio full credit for the third movie being financially successful because that was likely happening anyways.And with that context, I don’t think the studio was right to demand Venom be included. They messed with a successful formula and put their director in a position to fail by saddling him with a character he didn’t plan to include. You can blame Raimi for not adapting well and I agree that is fair to some degree, but I put the ultimate blame on the studio personally.
Ah, ok. Yea, there’s no doubt Spider-Man 3 was always going to be a juggernaut based on the success of the first two, regardless of who the villains were- But that doesn’t mean the excitement over the villains didn’t help. I still feel like the “Venom Factor” if you will, added a little something extra to the hype that pushed their box office even further
I can give you it added a bit of extra hype. I just think had Arad let Raimi do his own thing, we’d likely have ended up with a more cohesive movie that had a higher chance of being liked by audiences and critics. And that in turn may have led to Spider-Man 4 being made instead of TASM.I think that is supported to some degree by public comments by Raimi and Arad (first comment is Raimi, second Arad):I tried to make it work, but I didn’t really believe in all the characters, so that couldn’t be hidden from people who loved Spider-Man. If the director doesn’t love something, it’s wrong of them to make it when so many other people love it. In all fairness, I’ll take the guilt because of what Sam Raimi used to say in all of these interviews feeling guilty that I forced him into it. And you know what I learned? Don’t force anybody into anything. Therefore, [Sam] wasn’t interested in the inside to make how is Venom like us? How do we deal with the Venom, and Marvel is all metaphors.We’re talking about a creative process here – to me, it doesn’t make sense to force someone in creative to work on something they aren’t passionate about and then be surprised when it doesn’t turn out great. A producer should know better.
An interesting point. I don’t think it ever looks particularly good when a director throws their hands up in the air and says “it was all the studio’s fault!”, especially on a mass-franchise project like this, and I don’t think Rami has or would. Maybe he actually gave Venom the best shot he could and simply doesn’t see or “get” the character in the way that makes the character appealing to comic book fans and the average ticket buyer in 2007?
The terrible casting had so much to do with why this movie sucked. When I heard Topher Grace was going to be Venom, I thought it was an April Fool’s Day joke. Eddie Brock was fucking jacked in the comics; he had a physique like The Rock. (Even Tom Hardy isn’t physically big enough in my opinion, although he’s got enough screen presence to make it work.) I get that you don’t have to be slavishly faithful to the source material in every detail, but I don’t think they could have picked a worse actor for the role. And it was made all the worse by comparison with the dead-on casting of the first two movies’ villains.
Sandman was perfectly cast too. It really was just Venom.
Something that would make a pretty interesting article is how movie studios’ approach to sequels has changed over the years.
Way back when, sequels were almost universally crap. It was a given. It was a way to wring some more cash out of a popular movie, regardless of how much sense it made and with zero thought towards quality. The list of stone-cold classic films with atrocious cash-in sequels is long.
Over the course of the 80s and 90s sequels as a whole started improving. And in many cases, better (or at least more lucrative) than the first movie in the series. The studios noticed, and started expecting more out of their sequels than just a low-cost cash grab. The budgets (and expectations) started getting bigger. If the first movies does well, two or three sequels immediately had release dates (whether or not there was a script or even an idea.) With increased expectations, came increased studio meddling, which, coupled with short turn-around times, lead to the “third film burnout” that seemed to happen so often with the second sequel.
Then, sometime in the early 10s, (largely due to the success of the MCU) the studios skipped the step of waiting for the first movie to be a success and STARTED with the plan for a years long, multi-movie franchise, which ended up making the first film so beholden to setting up future films that it inevitably failed as a standalone movie.
I watched Spiderman 3 a few years ago as my 7 year old daughter loves the character. It got me thinking that if you just eliminated Venom/the black suit along with Gwen they could have had a decent movie. Make Peter start to become cocky because he is a celebrity, make Brock just a jealous co-worker who hates him and spiderman and make Elizabeth Banks’s Betty character (who was already in the first 2 movies) the girl they are fighting over. Or at least make Peter start paying attention to her which makes Brock more jealous.
I remember a Matt Daman interview and he answered the will there be another Bourne film saying ” we’re working on something, well call it the Bourne Redundancy. “
I remember losing hope for the fifth film (hey, Greengrass and Damon were back! I had hopes at first!) when the title was revealed to be… Jason Bourne. They couldn’t even think of a good The Bourne (Blank) title.
Wouldn’t have even had to think of it; there’s about a dozen continuation novels they could have pilfered the title from.
[Googles]
“The Bourne Objective”. There. Done.
I need a collected book of these works of film historiography (on violence, heroes, and blockbusters) you are writing, please, and thank you. Whenever you’re ready. It really is a remarkable corpus of texts.
Yeah, Spider-Man 3 is a mess. Very little about it works. And I don’t particularly agree about the dancing thing being a good point. I guess it conveys what it’s meant to convey, but I just find it cringe-inducing and it’s not like the rest of the movie is very pleasant.
In certain film-nerd corners, 2007 has a reputation for being a great movie year…We didn’t know it at the time, but it was sort of a last hurrah. A Hollywood apologist could point to all those films cited in the paragraph that follows that quote and say, “Sure, Hollywood puts out a ton of formulaic, CGI heavy, popcorn and soda sales promotions masquerading as actual movies, but look at all these other interesting, thought provoking movies that are out there too.”But, within a couple of years sites like this would be lamenting the almost complete disappearance of the mid-budget, dialog driven, dramatic feature from multiplex screens. In 2007 Netflix was still that service that mailed you DVDs of your favorite movies. However, over on AMC, Mad Men would premiere in July. That show didn’t exactly start the era of “prestige TV” or talk of a “second golden age” (of course credit for that goes to The Sopranos and The Wire). But it did, along with Breaking Bad (which would premiere on the same channel the following January), start a lot of people talking about whether the paradigm had flipped.
Essentially, for a long time the conventional wisdom was that movies (or “cinema”) were “high brow” and television was “low brow.” Obviously that was an overstatement – there have always been lots of bad, stupid, exploitative, appeal to the lowest common denominator types of films. There’s also always been things on TV like Masterpiece Theater. Still, at the turn of the 21st century calling TV the “boob tube,” saying it “rots your brain,” and boasting that you didn’t own one was still seen as sort of an intellectual position to take. Films, for whatever reason, got a free pass. Now, suddenly, TV was smart and movies were dumb.
I rewatched all the spiderman movies a couple of months ago. I found this one to still be mostly enjoyable to watch. Its not great, but is entertaining. They definitely tried to do too much. If they had stuck with the black suit/venom storyline, and ignored the rest, it could have been much better.
Topher Grace was a weird casting choice, but the rest were fine.
In the comics, Venom is an incoherent character with an impossibly twisty years-long backstoryYou could have just said “Venom is a comic book character.”Carol Danvers had a ridiculous origin (exploding Psycho-Magnetron!) and almost 50 years of regrettable costumes and arcs (happy alien forced pregnancy mama!) The MCU sensibly ignored most of it and adapted the broad strokes to go straight to the modern Captain Marvel.Venom’s “true” origin was vintage Marvel writing at its most hamfisted. Thor and Hulk tell Peter they found a “wondrous device” that reads minds and makes clothing. Peter sticks his head into an alien machine and grabs the black blob that comes out. We already have a movie of that called Prometheus.
Wow, this movie is terrible. I remember being so excited for it and sinking further and further in my seat as it went on. I desperately hung on, expecting it to get better, but when that shot of Spidey running in front of the flag came up, I just gave up.There are so many things wrong with this movie, starting with Tobey Maguire himself. I’ve never thought of him as a good actor, and he was visibly too old to be playing the part by that point. And then there’s Emo Peter. In the comics, the black suit controlled Parker, made him violent and unpredictable; here, it just turns him into a dancing douchebag wearing My Chemical Romance eyeliner. There’s the pointless and stupid Uncle Ben retcon, which is only there to give Sandman something to do (if it weren’t for that bit, he’d barely have anything to do with the actual plot). There’s the dumbass “Harry has amnesia” subplot, straight out of a bad soap opera and conveniently solved by a pep talk from the Magical Butler.And Venom. Wow, what they did to Venom is a slap in the face. Take one of Spider-Man’s strongest foes and just shove him in during the last 15 minutes without doing anything remotely interesting. Venom is supposed to be a jacked, hulking, slobbering monstrosity with a Gene Simmons tongue; here, he’s basically the same slim Spidey with rotten teeth (say what you will about the Tom Hardy movie, but at least they got the look right). They pretty much waste a good character.
And don’t even get me started on Raimi putting his kids in a corny cameo that’s right up there with Anakin yelling “yippee” on the Annoying Scale.Is there anything to salvage from this overstuffed mess? Well, J.K. Simmons is always fun to watch, Bryce Dallas Howard looked gorgeous as a blonde, and the Sandman Birth scene is one amazing moment in a movie which really needed them; the character itself deserved a better screenplay, nothing wrong with THC’s casting. And I guess the effects are alright. But yeah, this movie’s pretty bad.
I recently found out that there’s an entire library of Youtube videos where people have edited “Bully Maguire” into a ton of other movies. No matter how many times I see him spinning into a scene and talking about putting dirt in someone’s eye, it always cracks me up.
Spider-Man 3 I could take or leave, but this GenX dad really loved the Bourne series! I read all the novels back in the day, and I own the boxed set now. I guess I was in the target market.
Enduring props to Avi Arad and the Sony partners (e.g., Amy Pascal) for finally getting the ball rolling on Marvel’s flagship character in a film series. But as time wore on, with Mr. Arad’s influence in particular, things went off the rails. Raimi was mainly a traditionalist when it comes to the villains. The folks showcased in the 1960s. Arad wanted the then red-hot Venom as a bad guy, with the intent to spin him off into his own anti-hero film. (the comics had an atrociously justified face-turn with Venom going from murderous villain to “good-ish guy” in the early 90s, but that’s a rant for another day). Also, you had the subplot of Harry Osborn becoming the Neo-Goblin, which added another layer of plot. Finally Sandman, even though Mr. Church was a good actor, the character did not have a good story. Making him the real murderer of Uncle Ben was the type of retcon that goes too far in altering Peter’s original motivation to be Spider-Man. In the original comics, Flint Marko the Sandman was a career blue-collar crook with no obvious family ties. This film gave him a suffering ex-wife and a sickly school-aged daughter. Money for hospital bills = Instant sympathy! I didn’t appreciate that angle at all. Juggling three villains plus the competition with Gwen and Mary Jane made this a wobbly mess, creatively. The Russian neighbor girl Ursula played by Mageina Tovah was nice.As far as the Andrew Garfield films, I actually enjoyed the first one, which, with one villain, was more subdued than SM3. But then ASM2 pushed things off the rails even quicker than a third movie— Electro, plus Harry fast-tracked into a Goblin (Norman is dying already? Okay…), plus average-joe-sized Paul Giamatti hamming it up as a generic Russian gangster who conveniently gets to don a Power Rangers-villain style suit of armor as that movie’s “Rhino” at the end? Oh, and new Gwen gets to be bumped off? Good gravy. That spectacle with “previews” of the Sinister Six villains was unforgivable, to me. The intent to produce content to promote toys couldn’t be more egregious to me with that film.
The fuck is this dad-centric bullshit?