Review: Spider-Man 3

 

WEB SIGHTS

There are eye-popping villains, but too many of them. There’s heart-rending drama, but too much of it. And yet, the third Spider-Man film is a worthy addition to the franchise, almost inviting comparison to the greatest blockbuster trilogy of them all.

MAY 13, 2007 – “YOU’LL BELIEVE a man can fly,â€? went the ads for the late-seventies Superman, as if to convince audiences that technology could indeed add wonderful things to their moviegoing experience. Today, though, we’ve gotten so used to the idea that almost everything on screen is a special effect that the day may not be far off when a no-frills, back-to-the-basics indie advertises itself thus: “You’ll believe a man can walk.â€? Before a film opens, we’re meticulously educated about blue-screen this and green-screen that, and all of this has completely robbed the magic from the movies. I can honestly say that the only action sequence that genuinely thrilled me in the recent past was the parkour-styled chase through the construction site in Casino Royale. Otherwise these stunts usually pass by in a there-yet-not-there CGI blur – for special effects may have found bigger and better ways to amuse our eyes, but they rarely affect our hearts. But Spider-Man 3 manages at least one instance of what could only be called a poignant special effect, when the criminal named Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) – while on the run from the police – stumbles onto the sandy test site of a particle physics facility. It’s very dark – then suddenly, the lights come on, and we see that he’s trapped in the midst of what look like the blades of a giant, inverted mixer-blender. The blades start to rotate – faster and faster – and by the end of it all, Marko has vanished. Until, that is, we see that the sand is shifting, forming inchoate shapes in the manner of the vat of molten metal towards the close of Terminator 2: Judgment Day – and after a series of pathetic false starts, a fully-formed man rises from the sand, made of sand. Not surprisingly, he’s called Sandman.

In one extraordinary stretch of computer-aided technology, we’ve seen an identity being rubbed out – Marko’s old self dies, becoming (quite literally) dust to dust – and an identity being reconstituted. It’s nothing new, a villain taking shape before our eyes. In the last Harry Potter movie, for instance, we witnessed Ralph Fiennes’ Voldemort assuming a physical form. But every second of that otherworldly sequence screamed out to us that what we were seeing was a collection of bits and bytes, zeros and ones – while not for an instant do we feel (though we may know this at the back of our minds) that Sandman is a digital creation. He feels elemental – perhaps because of the way he is formed. Much like how a steady wind constantly reshapes the surface of a desert, we see the sand aggregating into a hint of a thigh here, an expanse of forearm there – and the resulting character feels like someone we know from our dreams, the man who used to make us go to sleep, when we were younger, by sprinkling sand in our eyes. It’s saying something that this villain looks far more rounded than the hero, Spider-Man, who still resembles nothing so much as a little, elastic toy-figure bouncing through the city’s skyscapes – so what a tragedy it is that Sandman isn’t utilised better. He’s not just a cackling monster like the Green Goblin from Spider-Man; he has the dignified gravity of Doctor Octopus from Spider-Man 2 (Church lets his haunted eyes do most of the acting) – and had he been the solo bad guy of Spider-Man 3, we may have had ourselves that rarest of things: a movie trilogy where Part 3 actually doesn’t suck.

Spider-Man 3 doesn’t suck, exactly – but it leaves you with visions of how much better it could have been without its extra villains. (This isn’t a case of this installment being bad so much as the earlier ones being so marvellous that it takes a while to recalibrate our expectations from great to merely good.) Along with Sandman, Spidey has to take on Venom (Topher Grace) and the New Goblin (James Franco) – and besides these baddies from without, there’s the one from within, as Peter Parker discovers his dark side and goes from Boy Scout to Bad Boy. (This aspect, though, is played mainly for laughs. Tobey Maguire is such a vision of wide-eyed goofiness, his attempts at channelling John Travolta’s cool from Saturday Night Fever come off more like Jim Carrey’s zero-to-hero transformation in The Mask, though without the manic energy. Peter Parker had a far darker moment in Spider-Man 2 when, having decided to give up being a superhero, he stops at the site of a mugging, then walks on without doing anything.) The problem isn’t that there are so many villains; it’s that (director) Sam Raimi and his writers can’t manage an effective juggling act – and the character that suffers the most is Venom. Grace is very funny as photographer Eddie Brock, but his transformation to Venom happens all too quickly, almost as quickly as his teaming up with Sandman. (They meet, they agree that Spider-Man is a thorn in their collective flesh, and… that’s it. The whole thing takes about five seconds.)

YOU’D THINK that the time saved with all this telescoping would be devoted to the action set pieces – and there are a few of them, including one that is staged like a reprise of the jaw-dropping sequence in King Kong where Naomi Watts is trapped in the vines, with raptors and T-rexes nipping at her heels. (Here, Mary Jane – played by Kirsten Dunst – is hemmed in by a giant web as Sandman and Venom hold her hostage.) But almost as much time is devoted to the angst. Sandman has a daughter that his wife won’t allow him to see because he’s an escaped convict. Brock is the kind of loser who thinks he’s dating Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) while she barely seems aware of his existence, and things only get worse with his humiliation at the hands of Peter Parker. Franco’s Harry Osborn, of course, is still seething from the image of Spider-Man walking away from his dead father, so he concentrates his energies on splitting up Peter Parker and Mary Jane. Speaking of the latter, her Broadway career is cut short as she’s fired from a musical, and her self-esteem dips even lower when her boyfriend is given the key to the city after a daring rescue. (In general, things are much better for Spider-Man here than in the previous installment, where he was humiliated endlessly. One of the first things Peter Parker says – when he sees his pictures on the covers of top national magazines – is, “People really like me.â€? Maybe it’s the fact that he’s gotten his girl, maybe it’s because he’s chosen to accept who he’s meant to be – he appears more comfortable in his skin than he ever was.)

There are actually times that Spider-Man 3 veers off into full-on relationship drama. (To realise how remarkable this is, you only have to remember that we are, after all, talking about a summer special-effects blockbuster in this era of the short attention span.) The one instant-recall image from the first Spider-Man movie is the kiss, the upside-down (or downside-up, depending on your point-of-view) liplock between Spider-Man and Mary Jane, and this third installment of the lucrative franchise – you can imagine the studio crowing, “My spider cents is tingling…â€? – doesn’t mess with tradition. The most telling moments in Spider-Man 3 include a couple of kisses – each one featuring our hero and heroine, but with others. Spider-Man does a reprise of his upside-down number with Gwen Stacy – better late than never; why this character wasn’t in the first movie (where the villain was the Green Goblin, no less) is one of those unsolvable mysteries – while Mary Jane opts to investigate Harry’s tonsils. It’s funny, this, because only in Spider-Man 2, we saw MJ running away from her wedding – in her bridal gown, no less – and into Peter Parker’s shabby hole. She knew who he was, she’d accepted him for who he was, and it looked and felt like true love. And here are these two, barely a few years later, acting like an old, take-one-another-for-granted married couple in the kind of midlife relationship crisis that makes husband and wife seek out others to remember what it was like to have been in love once. There was a time comic-book issues meant nothing more than the serial numbers you used to track the new releases by. Today, these issues are the stuff of a therapist’s couch.

And these issues, I think, are the reason some people have a problem with comic-book movies becoming increasingly less comic (and more serious) – for they leave these films stranded in a curious limbo between the two-dimensionality of a comic-strip and the three-dimensionality of real life. And if you get literal about this, each one of these issues would warrant a couple of hours on its own, not just the couple of minutes between the breathless bouts of CGI eye candy. But try to imagine that what’s flashing before your eyes aren’t frames of film so much as panels of a comic – the thought bubbles become voiceovers, the word bubbles become dialogue, the biffs and the pows become sound effects, and the rest visual effects – and you may see why the Spider-Man films are quite among the best attempts at bringing comics to the cinema. They may not have the graceful, fluid rhythms of a movie movie, but they nail the thing that the comics do best – and that is to concentrate the essence of an occurrence into the most basic burst of visual information. That’s one way to look at why even the most serious of issues take up only, well, the couple of minutes between the breathless bouts of CGI eye candy. Besides, it’s these emotional arcs that make the characters seem interesting long after you think they’ve outlived their usefulness. This is particularly evident in the case of James Franco. In Spider-Man, he appeared no more than a good buddy of Peter Parker (doesn’t this make you imagine an alternate title: My Best Friend’s Webbing?), but by the end of the movie, he’d watched his father die, and by the end of the second movie, he’d discovered who his father really was, and by the end of this movie, he’s almost a second hero. You can’t imagine them making another Spider-Man movie without him.

THAT’S TRUE, actually, of all the characters – even the sweet girl-next-door who, in Spider-Man 2, helped Peter Parker over an emotional slump with that most uplifting of food, milk and cookies. I thought she harboured something of a crush on her neighbour, but now she seems delighted that he’s received a phone call from Mary Jane. She’s another one who’s an innate part of this cosmos – you can’t imagine them making another Spider-Man movie without a trademark little scene featuring her, or the people at the Daily Bugle, or Bruce Campbell. (This time, he’s a maître d’, and his sidesplitting exchange with Peter Parker as the latter reserves a table at a restaurant is alone worth the price of admission.) It’s like the Star Wars films, where the Jawas and the Ewoks are as indispensable as Luke and Leia – and it’s no accident, this reference to the original summer-blockbuster three-parter. Think about it: both franchises revolve around a central trio (Peter-Mary Jane-Harry, Luke-Leia-Han), both have awesome second parts centering on a good human being whose body and mind are taken over by machinery (Doc Ock, Darth Vader), and both have wholesome youths struggling to come to grips with their destinies (Peter, Luke – and neither one is born with superpowers).

I never noticed – perhaps I should say “thought about,â€? for you can’t notice things that may not really be there – any of this in Spider-Man, but what tipped me off was an early scene in Spider-Man 2 where Peter Parker shows up late for work at his pizza place, and his excuse is that there was a “disturbance.â€? That’s his euphemism for the evil he had to deal with along the way, much like how the Jedi had to deal with disturbances in the Force. Then there was that moment where Uncle Ben gave advice to Peter from the great beyond, while bathed in a ghostly backlight. (Do I need to tell you who showed up from the great beyond, silhouetted by a ghostly backlight, to give Luke advice?) And now look at Spider-Man 3, where Peter – someone brought up by his uncle and aunt, like Luke was – is actually tempted by his dark side. That’s why I’d like to look at Spider-Man 3 the same way I looked at the original Part 3 of the Star Wars series. With The Return of the Jedi, the formula was beginning to show wear and tear – especially because it had little of the grand resonance of the great second part that was The Empire Strikes Back. Spider-Man 3 has little of the grand resonance of the great second part that was Spider-Man 2 – whose latter portions crossed over from comic-book land to near-mythology – but your fondness for the earlier films (and for the characters) spills over to this one. Let’s just hope there aren’t a bunch of prequels next in line.

Copyright ©2007 The New Sunday Express

Posted in: Cinema: English